Banner sailboats: one name, two unrelated builders
"Banner" does not identify a single manufacturer. It names two entirely unrelated companies on opposite sides of the Atlantic: I.N. Fiberbåde, a small yard in Haderslev, Denmark, run by boatbuilder Ib Hauge Nielsen, and Cooper Enterprises Ltd. (also known as Cooper Yachts), of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. The Danish yard built the Banner 30 to a design by Niels Jeppesen, then a young sailor who would go on to found X-Yachts in the same town. The Canadian yard built the Banner 32 and Banner 37, both first launched in 1982, to designs by naval architect Stan Huntingford. The two companies never worked together, and neither builder is still in business.
Origins and ownership
The Danish lineage began in 1977, when Niels Jeppesen, then a student who had just entered Haderslev Statsseminarium, met boatbuilder Ib Hauge Nielsen at the harbor and proposed the design that became the Banner 29. Jeppesen was 22 and had no money to build it himself; Nielsen agreed to put the boat into production, and Jeppesen later said he was glad Nielsen had taken it on. It was the first boat Jeppesen ever had built. Nielsen's own production line was too busy to make room for the prototype, so it was instead built in a barn belonging to one of his employees, Birger Hansen. The prototype launched in the spring of 1978 under the name Banner 29 and went on to win the Lillebælt Cup, finishing ahead of a Wasa 55. Nielsen has since said he no longer operates I.N. Fiberbåde and that the yard buildings are no longer in his care.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Cooper Enterprises Ltd. of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, built a significant majority of Stan Huntingford's designs, including the Banner 32 and Banner 37, both first built in 1982. Cooper Enterprises, also referred to as Cooper Yachts, is no longer in business.
The designers
Niels Jeppesen shaped the Banner 30 around his own sailing experience aboard a Farr 727 and his admiration for Ron Holland's Manzanita design, keeping the hull slimmer than it might otherwise have been since it answered to no rating rule. He drew on the light, dinghy-like boats from Farr and Paul Whiting that dominated the Ton classes at the time. Years later, Jeppesen would describe the X-99 — the boat that helped establish X-Yachts, with more than 550 built — as a further development of the core ideas he first worked out on the Banner 30.
Stan Huntingford, the Canadian naval architect behind the Banner 32 and 37, worked from West Vancouver, British Columbia, and originated more than 200 sailboat designs over his career. Public records of his occupation list him variously as a building contractor, chartered accountant, and naval architect; no record of formal naval-architecture training for him has been located.
Construction through the eras
I.N. Fiberbåde built the Banner 30 at Nielsen's own yard from 1979 until 1988, and roughly 100 were built in total, by the builder's own account. The first roughly 30 boats were built with a keelson and a lead ballast keel; a fourfold rise in lead prices within a single year then forced the yard to switch later boats to an iron keel. In 1986 the yard introduced the Banner 30 Mk.2, with a revised superstructure and interior layout, of which about 25 were built. Later boats also received an upgraded 35mm stainless-steel rudder stock. The rig was supplied first by Nordic Mast of Åbenrå and later by John Mast of Greve.
Who Banner is for
A buyer drawn to the Banner name should first work out which builder is actually behind the boat. Someone chasing Niels Jeppesen's early design work, in the years just before he founded X-Yachts, should look to the Danish-built Banner 30, produced across a decade under Ib Hauge Nielsen at I.N. Fiberbåde. Someone drawn instead to Stan Huntingford's North American design work should look to the entirely separate Banner 32 and 37, built by the now-defunct Cooper Enterprises in British Columbia.
