In the summer of 1921 four American sailing boats crossed the Atlantic as deck cargo on board the steamship Francesca. Their arrival in Britain heralded the beginning of what would later be described as “a series of contests which has no equal for keenness and sustained interest in the history of International yacht racing”.

The previous year, the American yachtsman Paul Hammond had visited Britain – possibly as part of the US Polo team – with a view to re-establishing International yacht racing following the Great War. Among the people he met was Algernon Maudslay, the Rear Commodore of the Royal London Yacht Club who had won two gold medals at the 1900 Olympic Games. The result was an agreement to start a new international team racing competition – thought to be the first ever – which would be called the British-American Cup. The trophy itself was donated by the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club – the only American club which has been involved in the competition throughout its history – while Britain was initially represented by the Royal Yacht Squadron and a number of Yacht Clubs including the Royal Thames, the Royal London, the Royal Victoria and the Royal Albert. The Royal Northern and the Royal Clyde Yacht Clubs joined them later.

At that time, most racing boats in Britain were designed and built to the International Rule which had been introduced in 1907 and revised in 1920, while the Americans had their own Universal Rule. The only boat that either country had produced to the other’s rule was Shamrock IV, built for the America’s Cup in 1914 before the outbreak of war cause its postponement until 1920. And so it was agreed that the new competition would not only alternate between venues on each side of the Atlantic, but that the competing boats would be built to the host nation’s favoured rule – specifically Six Metres when in Britain and the R-Class when in the States.

So the four Six Metres which arrived in 1921 – Sheila and Jeanie designed by Starling Burgess and William Gardner’s Montauk and Grebe – were the very first Metre boats built in America. As it turned out, after the 1921 match, the British requested that subsequent contests should all be in Sixes, and the Americans agreed. By 1955, when the Six Metre era ended, there had been fourteen matches in three complete and one incomplete series.

Over the years the scoring system changed from time to time but, in the eight-boat fleets that competed in all but one of the matches, it was generally based on eight points for a first place and one point for eighth. In each of the first three matches, the winning team was the one which had the most points after six races; and in subsequent contests each race was scored individually, with the winning team the first to reach a certain number – usually four – of race victories. To avoid the possibility of a race tie, an additional quarter of a point was awarded to the winning boat.

The opening series consisted of four matches in consecutive years. The first took place off Ryde and Cowes and from the very beginning it went badly for the Americans when three of their boats lost their masts in the first race, and Britain went on to win the match by 117 points to 88. Up until that time the Six Metre rules stipulated that the maximum number of crew was “four plus a lady, who would not count as a crew member”, which prompted one of the American skippers to ask the organising committee to provide a definition of a lady. They obviously found this to be too difficult as the result was a change in class rules to allow a maximum of five crew members!

Although they had expected to be producing R-Class boats for the 1922 contest, the Americans embraced the change of plan by building a dozen new Sixes giving them a total of sixteen from which to select their team. This obviously paid off as they won the second match in Oyster Bay (where all the American matches have since been held) albeit by just 7 points, having been 20 points up after three races. In the third contest back in the Solent – interrupted for nine days due to the death of US President Warren G Harding – the British had the top three boats and won easily.