Bill Northam

William Northam
Nickname:	Bill
Nationality:	Australia
Birthday:	September 28, 1905
Place of birth:	Torquay , UK
Date of death:	September 6, 1988
Place of death:	Woollahra
Size:	183 cm
Weight:	81 kg
Society:	Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron
Boat classes:	5.5 meter class
Medal table
Olympic games 1 × 0 × 0 ×
Olympic games gold Tokyo 1964 5.5 m class

Sir William Herbert "Bill" Northam , CBE (born September 28, 1905 in Torquay , United Kingdom , † September 6, 1988 in Woollahra ) was an Australian sailor .

Career

Northam was born in Torquay , England , and had six siblings. When he was five years old, the family emigrated to Australia. At a young age he was initially involved in athletics before he was active as a dirt track car racer and also as a motorcycle racer. However, his focus was on his professional career, in which he was ultimately from 1960 to 1969 CEO of the Australian branch of the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson . He was also President of the Australian branch of the British sporting goods brand Slazenger in the 1960s and 1970s . His first wife Esther, whom he married in 1929, died in a traffic accident in 1946. In 1948 he married his second wife, Alison. Northam was a city councilor in Sydney from 1956 to 1965 and ran unsuccessfully for the office of Lord Mayor in 1962 .

It was not until the age of 46 that Northam began sailing. He won the Sayonara Cup in 1955 and 1956 and sailed with the Caprice of Huon at the Sydney-Hobart Regatta . In 1962 he was a crew member of the Gretel at the America's Cup , which was defeated with Jock Sturrock as skipper of the American yacht Weatherly . A year later, Northam decided to take part in the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 and sought out ship engineer Bill Luders , who designed and built a yacht of the 5.5-meter class for him . Northam named it Barrenjoy , after the lighthouse on Barrenjoey Headland near his home in Sydney. At the Australian Championships in 1964 Northam prevailed together with Peter O'Donnell and James Sargeant as crew members against other skippers such as Jock Sturrock. They also won the qualifying competitions for the Olympic Games. At the games themselves, the three Australians won three of the seven races and secured the gold medal with 5981 points ahead of the Swedish boat led by Lars Thörn and the US boat led by John McNamara . Thanks to this success, Northam became the oldest Olympic champion in Australian history at the age of 59 .

For this success he was first named Australia's Sailor of the Year . On January 1, 1966, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire . Ten years later, on December 31, 1976, he was promoted to Knight Bachelor . He was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1985 and posthumously inducted into the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame in 2017 . Alison Northam died in 1976, and Northam married his third wife, Dulcie May, in May 1977. He had a daughter and two sons from his first marriage and five grandchildren at the time of his death.

Web links

• Bill Northam in the database of World Sailing (English)
• Bill Northam in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Bill Northam at the Australian Olympic Committee (English)
• Bill Northam in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Sir William Northam CBE. In: sahof.org.au. Sport Australia Hall of Fame , accessed July 23, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Sir William (Bill) Northam CBE, Peter (Pod) O'Donnell and James (Dick) Sargeant. In: sailinghalloffame.org.au. Australian Sailing Hall of Fame , accessed July 23, 2020 . 
3. ↑ Mr. William Herbert Northam. In: honors.pmc.gov.au. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, January 1, 1966, accessed July 23, 2020 . 
4. ↑ Mr. William Herbert Northam. In: honors.pmc.gov.au. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, December 31, 1976, accessed July 23, 2020 . 
5. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 47103, HMSO, London, December 30, 1976, p. 35 ( PDF , accessed on August 23, 2020, English).