In 1924 with the new scoring system, the Americans thought they had won the sixth race (which would have given them a winning 4-2 score in the match) but this was subject to four protests by the British. After the first of these went Britain’s way and handed them the race, the others were withdrawn. With the scores now level, there was all to play for in the seventh race which the British won. In accordance with the rules, Britain’s two consecutive match victories ended the series and gave them permanent possession of the trophy.

The second series began in 1928 on the Clyde with a comfortable 3-1 win for the home team, but that was to be the last match victory for the British in the entire Six Metre era. They lost the next two – in 1930 when the American team was supposedly weakened by many of them sailing as afterguard on America’s Cup boats, and back in the Solent in 1932 when the Americans had rejected a proposal to move the event to Torbay or Plymouth – without winning a single race, and the trophy for the second series went to the States permanently.

The rules were changed slightly for the third series – for which the new trophy was a silver model of a Six Metre – which would end when one team had won a total of four matches. However, the only delay in the Americans doing so in as short a time as possible was caused by the Second World War, as they won consecutive contests in 1934, 1936, 1938 and 1949. Having won just one race in the three pre-war matches, at the beginning of the 1949 contest the British might have thought the tide was turning. Firstly, the American boat Star Wagon ended up in Oslo after a dock strike prevented her from being unloaded, and the British chartered Noa to the visitors for one shilling; and the home team then won the first two races off Calshot and Cowes, where the spectators were said to be packed four deep along the Green. However, the Americans came back and won the next four races, the match and the third series.

A new trophy in memory of the late George Nichols, former Seawanhaka Commodore, was presented for the fourth series which began two years later. For some reason it was held in the Solent, even though it was Oyster Bay’s turn, and the teams consisted of just three boats for the only time in the Cup’s history. In the best of seven series, it was looking good for the British team when they went 3-1 up. But they were to be the last Six Metre British-American Cup races they would win: the Americans won the next three and the match, and then went on to keep a clean sheet in 1953 and 1955.

During that time there were fears that the Six Metre class was in decline. However, in September 1953, three separate competitions were held for Sixes in Oyster Bay: the Seawanhaka Cup which was a long-established match racing contest; the New World (USA and Canada) vs Old World (Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium and Italy) series competing for the Alfred Bossom Challenge Cup which had been presented by the House of Commons Yacht Club; and the British-American Cup itself. All were a great success with Yachting World later reporting that “those of us who expected to see the last convulsions of an historic class, have instead seen a display of international vitality such as only this class could produce,” and going on to say that the new contest saved the class as “no country can go on being consistently beaten by the only other one in a series of contests and forever come back for more”. However, this merely postponed the “last convulsions” as by 1956 there were only three Sixes racing in British waters, and only one of those remained the following year. Although the class would experience a wonderful revival in the early 1980s, its involvement with the British-American Cup was over.