This blog covers all aspects of the rich history of rowing, as a sport, culture phenomena, a life style, and a necessary element to keep your wit and stay sane.
While this is the period of pre-Boat Race fixtures on the Thames when Oxford crews and Cambridge crews race other university crews or club crews, I thought I should throw in an old race that happened 81 years ago, a Light Blue Trial eights heat from 1933, probably rowed in the month of December that year, at Ely. The film is from British Pathe with the title: “Ely. Well Together Already! Light Blues show winning form in trial eights to select crew for 1934’s race.” It was not surprising that the editor of this newsreel would proclaim Cambridge a winner of the 1934 Boat Race. The Light Blues had won every race against the Dark Blues since 1920, but one, in 1923. Although, it is hard to see who is actually in the winning trial eight, I believe I see three of the most important Cambridge crew members during the mid-1930s, the three 'rookies': Ran Laurie, Jack Wilson and cox Noel Duckworth - all three men have been mentioned multiple times on HTBS.
With this trio, the Light Blues won three more Boat Races, in 1934, 1935 and 1936, before the Dark Blues managed to win both in 1937 and 1938.
All four of these men had distinguished rowing careers but arguably the highlight for all of them was winning Gold at the 1948 London Olympics. Wilson and Laurie won the coxless pairs and Bushnell and Burnell won the double sculls. The winners in the five other events at the Olympic Regatta at Henley were Merv Wood of Australia in the single sculls, Denmark in the coxed pairs, Italy in the coxless fours, and the United States in the coxed fours and the eight. While I was aware that Britain also came second in the eights, I had no knowledge of any other entries from the host country – until recently. A young women who is learning to row at my club casually mentioned that she thought her grandfather had ‘won something rowing in the 1948 Olympics’. I quickly established that he was not Bert or Dickie, or Ran or Jack. It turned out that he was in the third of the two man boats that Britain had entered: the coxed pair. Sadly, it did not win and in fact came eighth out of nine boats.
The British entry for the coxed pairs at the London Games in 1948, Walker, Scott and James.
‘Granddad’ turned out to be bowman Howard (Bakie) James, aged 24. Stroke was Mark Bodley Scott, aged 25, and the cox was 16-year-old David Walker. All were from Thames Rowing Club. In round one, they were the second of three but in the repechage they lost to the eventual winners, Denmark. There is an nice interview filmed in 2012 with stroke Scott on YouTube. In it he says that they were given ‘a little bit of coaching by a fairly elderly gentleman’ and the impression is that they were very much an afterthought following Laurie and Wilson, two of the finest rowers of the pre war period, and Bushnell and Burnell, both of whom showed promise (Dickie had won the Wingfield Sculls in 1946 and Bushnell in 1947) and who had the great Jack Beresford as their coach.
The coxed pair is the heaviest of all racing boat classes with only two rowers to carry the weight of the cox. It needs two big and strong people to make it move fast but, like the coxless pair, it is vital that they row in the same way. Two otherwise good rowers who have different styles are unlikely to make it work. This need for total teamwork means that the cox is often redundant as a steersman. There is a story that when Steve Redgrave and Andy Holmes were training for the coxed pair in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, cox Pat Sweeney was sometimes not available so they replaced him in training with a heavy tool box.
The new cox was the quiet type.
In modern times the coxed pair was never a popular boat at club level in Britain – in fact, I cannot remember ever seeing one. At the top level, it was dropped as an Olympic event after the 1992 Barcelona Games – but at least it had a magnificent finale.
The Italian brothers Carmine and Giuseppe Abbagnle were the firm favourites to win the Olympic Coxed Pairs final on Lake Banyoles on 2 August 1992. They were seven times world champions and one of the great crews in rowing history. At 1000 metres they led by four and a half seconds, the Romanians were second and the British Searle brothers, Greg and Jonny with cox Garry Herbert, were third. With two hundred metres to the finish the Searles had moved up to second place but were still more than a length down on the Abbagnles. The BBC commentator said: ‘Surely it’s too far even for the Searles with their finishing power...’ In the next 25 strokes the British pair went from a boat length down to win by half a length. If you could not watch it on YouTube, you would not believe it.
Here on HTBS we have written a lot about British Olympic rowing champions. Lately, our favourites have been Bert Bushnell and Dickie Burnell, who took the gold in the double sculls at the 1948 Olympic Games, and, in the same Olympic regatta at Henley, Ran Laurie and Jack Wilson, who took the gold in the pair. In 2012, there was a brilliant film made about Bert and Dicke, and now it is time to push for a film about 'Jack & Ran'. Not only did this pair have a tremendous exciting rowing career, first at Cambridge, Ran at the 1936 Olympic Games, then both at Henley in 1938, and again at Henley in 1948 (during these ten years they hardly looked at an oar), and finally at the 1948 Olympics, they also had thrilling adventures in Sudan - everything to make it more than just a rowing movie. Is there anyone out there who needs help with the film script?
There is now a short film clip on Youtube how Laurie and Wilson won the Olympic gold medal, watch it here.
Having been in Sudan for ten years, when they came back in 1948, they were called the 'Desert Rats' - not to be confused with the soldiers in Monty's Eight Army in North Africa...
Ran Laurie stroking the 1936 Cambridge crew. Jack Wilson in 7-seat and Noel Duckworth coxing.
After my review of Daniel James Brown’s brilliant book The Boys in the Boat (on HTBS on 19 August), he and I have had some fruitful e-mail exchanges about rowing, a sort of continuing ‘discussion’ that, in a way, started when we first met at one of his book signings in Connecticut in June. One of the things that we have chatted about is the stroke’s ‘narrow-blade-question’. In his book, Brown writes,
In the British boat, Ran Laurie dug furiously at the water. He was still relatively fresh. He wanted to do more. But like many British strokes in those days, he was wielding an oar with a smaller, narrower blade than the rest of his crew – the idea being that the stroke’s job was to set the pace, not to power the boat. With the small blade, he avoided the risk of burning himself out and losing his form. (p. 312)
I have a hard time believing that Ran Laurie, one of the great Cambridge strokes before the Second World War, had a smaller, narrower blade than the rest of his crew in an important race like the Olympic final, which I mentioned in my review on 19 August. I also contacted some of my rowing history colleague, who, like me, had never heard of such a thing (this, of course, does not mean that it did not exist!).
William George Ranald ‘Ran’ Mundell Laurie
Then, the other day I received an e-mail from Brown where he told me that, while he is now preparing the paperback edition of The Boys in the Boat which is coming out next year, he had found the source for Ran Laurie’s ‘narrow blade’: Stanley Pocock’s book “Way Enough!” – Recollections of a Life in Rowing (2000). In his autobiography, George Pocock’s son, Stan, writes,
Speaking of different-sized blades and the effect of wind on the load reminds me of an incident at the Berlin Olympics. In those days, it was not uncommon for a coach to reduce the size of the stroke man’s blade to make sure he didn’t row himself out – the rest of the crew could provide the horsepower; the stroke’s job was to set the pace. In the first heat, the British pushed the Americans to a new Olympic record in a following wind. On the day of the Finals there was a head wind blowing, and the Americans, in winning, left the Brits (who had made it through the repêchage) far behind. Afterward, their stroke [Ran Laurie] told Dad [George Pocock] that he had not been able to pull hard enough to row himself out. The lighter water caused by the head wind had rendered his small blade too small. (p. 77)
So there it is, in black and white – well, I’ll be damned!
But, then again, I am still a little skeptical. Although, if it is correct what Stan Pocock writes, it was probably the coach that decided that the British stroke in the eight should row with a narrow blade, not Laurie himself, but I am incredibly surprised that a coach would tell an oarsman on that level that he should save himself and let the rest of the crew deliver the power in the boat. I believe that I have read most of what there is to read about this exceptional oarsman, and Laurie does not seem to have been a man who was cutting corner in his rowing career. He was a very powerful oarsman. About Ran Laurie, his son Hugh writes:
I remembered rowing a pair with my father. I was a teenager in full-time training, six foot three and fourteen stone, he was GP in his mid-fifties who did a spot of gardening, and I had to go like hell to keep the boat straight. The power, and the will, was almost frightening. He simply never paddled light. He would jump off that stretcher as if he meant to break it.
(p. 79 in Battle of the Blues: The Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race from 1829, ed. Christopher Dodd & John Marks; 2004)
Ran Laurie and Jack Wilson after they crossed the finish line as Olympic champions in the pair in 1948 on the Henley course.
It is said that Ran Laurie always believed that if his great friend and rowing partner, Jack Wilson, whom he had rowed with at Cambridge, had been a member of the 1936 British Olympic eight, Great Britain would have taken the gold medal. Unfortunately, Wilson had already left England for his new job in Sudan Political Service when it was time for the Olympic rowing.
After coming home to England from the Berlin Games, Noel Duckworth, the cox of the British eight, wrote a critical account in The Cambridge Review:
The crew which was chosen was at best a patched-up affair. The crew lacked life, dash and determination because it had spent all its enthusiasm and energies previously at Henley. If only a crew had been chosen a good time before the Games and had used Henley as a canter preliminary to hard racing, England would have won. But as it was, against the quasi-professional continental crews this thin, emaciated, time-worn crew stood no chance.
(From Michael Smyth’s Canon Noel Duckworth: An Extraordinary Life; 2012, p. 23)
Duckworth should know these things. He had coxed three winning Cambridge crews against Oxford in the Boat Race, all three years with Ran Laurie (and Jack Wilson) in the boat, in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Laurie also took the 1934 Grand Challenge Cup at Henley in the colours of Leander (with Duckworth as coxswain) by stroking his crew in a new record time in their first heat, overpowering London Rowing Club at 6 min. 45 sec. Next day, Leander knocked off another second by defeating Thames Rowing Club. In the final, Leander had no problems beating Princeton University, winning in 6 min. 45 sec.
Laurie did not row for Leander at the 1935 Henley Regatta. Instead, he stroked his college, Selwyn College, in their attempt to take the Ladies’ Challenge Cup. In the first round, they beat St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, but lost in the second round to Radley College. He also rowed with Jack Wilson in the Silver Goblets that year. They won their first heat, but withdrew after that. Wilson, however, took a cup at Henley that year, as he was in the Pembroke College crew which took the Grand.
In 1936, Laurie was back in a Leander crew again, when he stroked the Leander eight for the Grand. In the crew was also: bow A.D. Kingsford, 2. F.M.G. Stammens, 3. M.P. Lonnon, 4. T.G. Askwith, 5. J.C. Cheery, 6. J.M. Couchman, 7. D.J. Wilson [this is not Jack Wilson!] and cox D.R. Rose. They lost in the final, on 4 July, 1936, to an excellent crew from Ruder Club, Zürich, Switzerland. Despite the British eight's loss at Henley, the crew was picked to represent Great Britain at the Olympic rowing regatta thirty-nine days later, however, with some changes in the crew. Instead of Stammens and Wilson, Desmond Kingsford and Hugh Mason were picked to row in the Olympic eight. (Mason had rowed in the winning Cambridge boat earlier that spring). Duckworth took the cox place instead of Rose for the Olympics.
Here is a short clip of the Cambridge crew training for the 1936 Boat Race.
Back to the ‘narrow-blade-question’ – was this, then, a 1930s English habit? No, it seems not to have been. According to Brown again, it was also used by Harvard. In an unsigned article that Brown has found, and kindly shared with me, in The Harvard Crimson of 15 June, 1929, the Crimson stroke James Lawrence used a narrow blade, as Brown writes in his e-mail, ‘in order to conserve energy’:
The selection of Lawrence has raised high hopes among many of the Crimson followers since his previous record as stroke of the Junior Varsity crew indicates that at least he will be able to display the endurance necessary to handle the raise of heat at the end of the race. While not pulling as strong an oar as other oarsmen who have been previously tried out this season in the stroke seat, the favor of a narrow oar, such as was employed by John Watts '28 last year, may remedy the situation and allow him the reserve necessary for the final effort.
I do have a better understanding for a narrower stroke blade in this case, simply because the battle between the varsity crews of Harvard and Yale is a four-mile race (6,437 metres), not 1.9812-metre race – according to the official report of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, 6,500 feet was the ‘regulation length’. This has, as we know, been changed to 2,000-metre which is the distance at the Olympic rowing these days.
I do not think that the last thing has been written here on HTBS about the 1920s and 1930s use of narrow-blade for a crew’s stroke. I welcome more information about this practice, so please contact us if you have any ideas or more sources on this ~ thank you.
Thanks to Daniel James Brown for sharing his find about Ran Laurie's narrow blade and the article in The Harvard Crimson.
One of the truly great pre-war Cambridge crews: the Light Blues pratising at Chiswick for the 1936 Boat Race: cox J.N. Duckworth, stroke W.R.M. Laurie, 7 J.H.T. Wilson, 6 D.W. Burnford, 5 M.P. Lonnon, 4 D.G. Kingsford, 3 G.M. Lewis, 2 H.W. Mason and bow T.S. Cree.
Here HTBS’s Tim Koch tells the story about a most remarkable man, Noel Duckworth:
‘Hear The Boat Sing’ has in the past written about rowers with outstanding war records. The sort of personal qualities that are needed to be successful as an oarsman are also those that can produce great soldiers. But what of coxswains, people who need very different qualities to those that pull the oar? Coxes are physically small but need to gain the respect of those who are much more powerful than they are. They have to get the best out of people without alienating themselves from them. They need to remain calm and thoughtful under pressure. I have recently discovered the story a man who used the personal attributes that enabled him to be an exceptional cox to incredible effect in the full horror of war. His biographer, Michael Smyth, says this of him:
[He] was one of those rare men who will always be remembered by everyone who ever met him. He had enormous charisma, great strength of will, but above all dedicated his life to the needs of others.
I hesitate to write about him as I fear that I cannot do justice to such a remarkable man. I am also embarrassed by the fact that I have only recently heard of him. In an age of ‘celebrities’ there is not one of these well-known figures who is fit to be mentioned in the same breath as (John) Noel Duckworth.
Noel Duckworth was born on 25 December 1912, the son of a clergyman. He and two brothers were all later ordained and all three became Canons. In 1931 the 5 ft. 2 in. Duckworth went to Jesus College, Cambridge and was soon involved with the Boat Club. In 1961, he gave a typically self-deprecating interview to the BBC on his time on the Cam:
JND: … I started rowing in Jesus College in ’31 when I went up. When I went out as a freshman I knocked 10 foot off the end of a boat and sank the crew (I won’t tell you what they said). I was charged ten pounds for mending it so I stayed on in the boat club to get my monies worth. Interviewer: How did you progress from sinking boats to coxing winning boats? JND: A loud voice, a certain amount of bluff and always been there when you are wanted and never been put out by various disasters – which many came my way. Interviewer: Are there many small conflicting things in a crew and the men around a crew? JND: Not in the crew itself because it was part of my job to keep them sweet and good tempered by humour and the odd bit of whimsy in one way or another, generally making a fool of oneself and making them look outside themselves and enjoy the misfortunes of others and I always try to be the unfortunate one, a little Charlie Chaplin…
Cambridge in the 1930s was a good place for rowing. Between 1920 and 1936 the Light Blues lost only one University Boat Race. Further, CUBC had such giants of the rowing world as Ran Laurie and Jack Wilson. In 1934, Noel was chosen to cox Cambridge in the Boat Race of that year. Film evidence is here. It was perhaps the best crew of the era and they won easily, beating the course record by 26 seconds with a time of 18 minutes and 3 seconds. At Henley three months later, Noel steered Leander to victory in the Grand Challenge Cup and, on the same day, Jesus to victory in the Ladies’ Plate. A annus mirabilis indeed.
Noel recalled his next two Boat Races in his 1961 BBC interview:
In ’35 Oxford were very heavily tipped to win because there had been a change of coaches, old Peter Haig-Thomas had left Cambridge (I think it was a case of ‘did he fall or was he pushed?’) and went and coached Oxford. So hopes rang very high for Oxford. It was a very stormy day; white horses on the river, and Oxford were tipped to win because they were the heavier crew. But we lead out from the first stroke practically and then we made our distance more and more. I went off under the cover of the Surrey bank… Now this was hailed by the press who know nothing about these things as a masterly move… I have to confess that this was a very unwise thing to do, anyway we got away with it and in ’35 we won by five lengths…
Here is nice film of the ’35 Light Blue:
Now ’36 was interesting… the (Irish Republican Army) had been putting bombs all over the place… and they actually put one on Hammersmith Bridge… Now this is entirely fictitious but it makes a very good story… We thought that if the IRA were going to demonstrate their loyalty by blowing up Hammersmith Bridge then we thought that Oxford should be the recipient of this token of their loyalty and so they went through Hammersmith Bridge ahead of us by half a length but just after Hammersmith we put on a spurt … and we left them in about twenty strokes and won by five lengths, but not in a good time.
Noel was the obvious choice to cox the British eight in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The crew were all Cambridge men save two from ‘the other place’. In the final they were placed fourth behind the USA, Italy and Germany. Writing later in The Cambridge Review, Noel probably unjustly blamed himself for the crew failing to make the first three. He held that his steering in the first heat meant that they had to get to the final via the repechage and were thus unduly tired. The more likely reason was that, as he himself stated, the crew was a ‘patched up affair’ who had trained to peak at Henley rather than the Olympics. There are brief glimpses of Noel in the official film of the race and on the YouTube version he can be seen from 2 minutes 32 seconds and from 3 minutes 38 seconds.
Despite Berlin, it was with good reason that Noel’s obituary in the Times called him ‘…one of the outstanding coxswains in British rowing in the immediate pre-war era.’
Ordained in late 1936, Michael Smyth says that at Noel’s first parish, ‘His energy was immediately apparent, attendance at services grew and various societies were revitalised’.
At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Noel was appointed Chaplain to the 2nd Battalion, Cambridgeshire Regiment and was sent to Malaya in 1941. In January 1942, the 2nd Cambridgeshires and others were defending Batu Pahat on the west coast. They were ordered to withdraw as they were in danger of being cut off by advancing Japanese forces. As a non-combatant, Noel should have been the first to go but he and two doctors chose to stay with those wounded who could not be evacuated. The story is taken up in his own style by Russell Braddon, the Australian author of the million selling The Naked Island (1952), an account of his time as a Far East Prisoner of War:
[Noel] stayed there and when the Japanese… would have slaughtered the wounded, this little man flayed them with such a virulent tongue that they were sufficiently disconcerted to refrain. They beat him up very cruelly for days, because they did care for being verbally flayed… but they did not kill the wounded men he had stayed behind to protect… This little man with the rosy cheeks and the cheerful grin and the mop of hair like a small boy’s eventually brought (the wounded) to the comparative security of (Padu Goal in Kuala Lumpar). His name is Padre Noel Duckworth. It is a name that thousands of Australians, Englishmen and Scots will always remember until the day they die.
Michael Smyth puts forward a fascinating suggestion as to why Noel was not killed:
When Noel was captured with the wounded soldiers one of the doctors who had also stayed behind attested “I firmly believe that Noel’s fame as a rowing man saved all our lives” because a Japanese officer recognised Noel. This story is given some credence by the fact that a Japanese crew from Tokyo University participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, as well as Henley prior to that, so it is likely that Duckworth was known to them. Furthermore, of the Japanese Divisions used for the invasion of Malaya, one ‘the Imperial Guard’ traditionally recruited its officers from Tokyo University!
Noel’s obituary in the Times noted one of his vital skills:
Duckworth was one of those small men with a giant personality. The skill which he acquired in getting the best out of his oarsmen by exhorting, cajoling, and if need be, verbally castigating, he later employed during the bleak years in (prisoner of war camps) both to sustain his fellow prisoners, and to extract those small concessions from the Japanese guards which were so vital to survival.
The Padre perfected the art of selling broken, worthless pens, watches, lighters etc. to the Japanese guards and the money received went straight to local traders for food for the prisoners. The guards would fall for his soft honeyed tones… but in reality his words, although sweet sounding, were calling them all kinds of unflattering names… To men who were very ill, starving and dying, his mixture of courage and comfort, defiance and deliverance, humour and understanding all made up the necessary essence and spirit which the men needed and clung to when at their lowest ebb.
After the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, Noel was moved to Changi Gaol and in 1943 was sent into Thailand and Burma on the construction of the notorious Burma Railway. There he tended hundreds upon hundreds of men dying from disease and starvation. Over 90,000 Asian civilians and 16,000 Allied POWs died in the building of the railway.
On the completion of the railway, Noel again chose to stay behind with those judged too ill to move back to Singapore, his indomitable spirit having the same inspirational effect on the men to that which he had at Padu. He was one of the very few who lived to return to Singapore in April 1944.
A fellow prisoner, the illustrator and cartoonist Ronald Searle said:
Noel Duckworth was a marvellous man who almost killed himself doing good… I loved him for what he did to raise morale and for his lovely sense of humour and for just being himself.
A picture that Searle drew entitled ‘Padre Noel Duckworth selling a Parker pen to a Japanese guard’ is here. It was created as a gift to mark Noel’s appearance on ‘This is Your Life’, and was autographed by all those who appeared with him.
There are hundreds of anecdotes about Noel Duckworth’s work in the Japanese camps. This telling story, from a letter by Rev Dr A.A. Macintosh to the Daily Telegraph in 2007, is my favourite:
His men sought some little solace in cigarettes, which they had to make themselves. Bible pages were ideal for this purpose and the soldiers asked their chaplain for permission to use them. Duckworth assented with the proviso that they read every word on the pages first.
At the end of the war Noel made what was to become a famous BBC broadcast ironically entitled ‘Japanese Holiday’. It was the first detailed account of the horrors of the Far East camps that many people had heard and the talk was subsequently printed and widely circulated. It turned out that Noel was also a natural broadcaster and for three years he joined John Snagge in commentating on the Boat Race. He was the subject of an edition of the ‘This is Your Life’ television programme in 1959 (a picture of Noel and Roland Searle on the show is here) and in 1961 he was invited to appear on the iconic BBC radio programme ‘Desert Island Discs’. More formal recognition of Noel’s wartime achievements came in 1946 when he was twice ‘mentioned in despatches’, retrospective bravery awards for ‘gallant and distinguished service while a prisoner of war’ and ‘in recognition of gallant and distinguished service in Malaya in 1942’.
Surviving nearly four years in a ‘living hell’ did not blunt Noel’s sense of humour or his sense of fun, nor did it diminish his love of life or love of his fellow man. From 1948 until 1957 he lived in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) where he helped to establish the first university in that country (‘a Cambridge of the tropics’). Characteristically, he went beyond his ‘job description’ and worked tirelessly to set up a charity providing free schooling to local children.
In 1961, he joined the newly founded Churchill College, Cambridge as its first Chaplain. He now had the chance to return to his beloved rowing and set about establishing a boat club for the new college. Dr Frank Maine, the first Captain of CCBC, claims that for Churchill College Boat Club, the time markers B.C. and A.D. stand for ‘Before Duckworth’ and ‘After Duckworth’. He is still toasted every year at the Churchill Boat Club dinner and the club always has a boat named ‘The Canon’. The Times obituary again:
Although his health had been severely undermined by his years as a prisoner of war, he seemed indefatigable as a coach of all comers on the towpath of the Cam, seemingly a perpetually enthusiastic adolescent on what passed as a bicycle, yet transformed into a wise counsellor and a friend in his rooms in College.
The CCBC website has a splendid history section with yet more ‘quotable quotes’ about the great man:
J. Hamilton: Rowing was his lasting love and through his enthusiasm, knowledge and encouragement, many men at Churchill experienced… the meaning of physical endeavour and team spirit with the rewards that follow. M. Bomford: He was just as happy coaching the fourth boat as the first and was almost solely responsible for the tremendous progress that Churchill made in the early years… and if a Churchill boat was bumped it was a College tragedy.’ A. Ramsay: He was capable of almost apoplectic excitement and regularly cycled into the river during races’. R. Larkin: The Canon was not the archetypal cleric! His graces at the bumps supper were: ‘Bumps done – Food’s up – Sit down – Amen’.’
Noel died on 24 November 1980. In his 68 years he had seen the worst that man can do to man, but he still retained his faith in humanity, his sense of humour and his love of life. It is impossible for me to do justice to the life of Noel Duckworth in 2,000 words. The best I can hope is that I have done a little to raise awareness of a great man. Fortunately, Michael Smyth (who knew Noel during his time as a student at Churchill College) has written his biography, Canon Noel Duckworth: An Extraordinary Life (ISBN 9780956391766). It will be published in September 2012 and can be ordered from the Development Office at Churchill College. Its 44,000 words should start to give some due honour to a truly remarkable man and a truly remarkable life.
I would like to thank Michael Smyth for the help he has given me in preparing this piece (though the responsibility for it is all mine). Michael would like to hear from anyone who knew or knew of Noel. He says ‘He was such a character that all who ever met him will certainly remember him and indeed I am still turning up stories about him’. Michael’s email is msmyth4468@gmail.com
Olympic champions Jack Wilson (stroke) and Ran Laurie (bow) in the foreground after they have won the Coxless Pairs at the 1948 Olympic Regatta in Henley. In this photograph is also silver medallists Hans Kalt (stroke) and Josef Kalt (bow) of Switzerland. Italy took the bronze.
Although, the Olympic Rowing Regatta at Eton Dorney is over, HTBS is not done with Olympic rowing. Let’s take a look at the 1948 Olympic Rowing Regatta in Henley-on-Thames through some old photographs. Today, 9 August, it is exactly 64 years ago the finals were rowed on the Henley course. One photograph is easily recognized (above), showing Jack Wilson and Ran Laurie after they have just crossed the finish line in the final that gave them the Olympic gold in the Coxless Pairs – or the 'Pairs Without Cox' or 'Coxswainless Pairs' as it was called at that time. The other photographs from this regatta I have never seen published before. Enjoy!
All the equipment from the 1948 Henley Royal Regatta was left untouched to make things easier for the Olympic Regatta in Henley. However, an additional stand to take 4,000 spectators was erected, as was a special Press Box (on the right) which could take 150 members of the media. *Update: This has been proven to be wrong, it's the Royal Canadian Henley, please see more here.
In this photograph from a repechage heat, the British double, with Bert Bushnell and Dickie Burnell, is way ahead of Holland and third-placed Argentina. Burnell writes in his Swing Together (1952): ‘Personally I do not like the repechage system, because I find it demoralizing to know that the first heat has not got to be won’. However, this being said, Bushnell/Burnell deliberately lost their first heat, so they would not meet the Danish double of Ebbe Parsner and Aage Larsen in the semi-final as the Danes were the favourites to win the gold. But take a look at the photograph again: despite the difference in the oarsmen’s heights – Burnell was 6ft. 4in. (193cm) and Bushnell was 5ft. 9in. (175cm) – they are beautifully well together in the water. Burnell wrote about their stroke: ‘Bushnell was inclined to over-reach; I was on the short side in my forward swing. The result was … we reached naturally to about the same place.’ (in Swing Together)
Olympic champion in the Single Sculls Mervyn Wood of Australia is congratulated by silver medallist Eduardo Risso of Uruguay. Romolo Catasta of Italy came third. Wood had won the 1948 Diamond Challenge Sculls by beating Bert Bushnell in the final.
In the final of the Coxed Pairs Finn Pedersen, Tage Henriksen, and Carl-Ebbe Andersen (cox) of Denmark easily won over Italy with Hungary coming in third.
Two weeks ago, HTBS received a question from ‘David’ who writes: ‘I’m doing a bit of research and wondered if you know or could take an educated guess at the heights (and if possible rowing weights) of the following rowers: Jack Wilson, Ran Laurie, Dickie Barney, Bert Bushnell, Hugh ‘Jumbo’ Edwards, Jack Beresford, and Dick Southwood ~ Many thanks, David’
I started to flip through pages in my rowing books, while Tim Koch began looking in The Times archive’s Henley Royal Regatta (HRR) reports. Weights are easy to find in the HRR programmes Tim writes, ‘but heights are more difficult. One way to find out these oarsmen’s heights is to try to find their military records which record such things’.
Here is what Tim found when it comes to the rowers’ weights (in stones and pounds / pounds / kilograms):
D.J. ‘Jack’ Wilson (Henley Royal Regatta 1934): 12.11 / 179 / 81.2
Ran Laurie and Jack Wilson: 1948 Olympic champions in the pair.
To get you – if you are a rower in England that is – in the right mood for the upcoming Olympic rowing this summer, the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames will open a new exhibit on 31 March, “The Perfect Rower – 100 Years of Racing for Glory”, The Guardian reported the other day. The exhibit, which will run until 30 September, 2012, will concentrate on the two previous Olympic rowing regattas held in Henley, in 1908 and 1948.
There will be information and stories about former British rowing heroes, who raced at these two Games. At the 1908 Olympic regatta, all the gold medals went to Great Britain, so for sure there will be artefacts on display about for example Don Burnell and F.S. Kelly who rowed in the Leander crew called the ‘Old Crocks’.
At the 1948 Games, Great Britain took two golds, in the double sculls and the coxless pair. These two masterly Olympic championship crews, who HTBS has written about on several occasions, were Ran Laurie and Jack Wilson (the pair) and Dickie Burnell and Bert Bushnell (the double; picture on the left). Rowing historian Chris Dodd, who has worked on the exhibition, is interviewed in the article in The Guardian. Read it here.
Then, between 26 May and 12 August this year, the River and Rowing Museum will also have an exhibit up and running about rowing artwork, “Oarsome – The Art of Rowing” by Tonia Williams, who HTBS wrote about in January, 2012.
Photograph from John Lewes's book Jock Lewes: The Biography of Jock Lewes, Co-founder of the SAS (2001) published by Pen & Sword Books.
For quite some time now, I have wanted to write something about the old Oxford Blue, John ‘Jock’ Lewes, who was born on 21 December 1913. The other day, the Daily Telegraph had an article about him which gives me a good excuse to bring him up here at HTBS. Of course, for non-rowers, he is mostly famous for being the one who helped David Stirling to found the legendary elite force Special Air Service, SAS, where he invented the so called Lewes bomb. Lewes was killed when a German Messerschmitt fired on the truck in which he was travelling, behind enemy lines in the North African desert in December 1941. Lewes was buried in the desert by his comrades without his grave being marked. With the Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall, Lewes’s nephew, John Lewes, now hopes to search for his uncle’s grave to be able to give him a proper burial. It is believed that his grave is outside the town of Benghazi. Read the article in the Daily Telegraphhere.
THE BOAT RACE 1936
Regarding Jock Lewes's rowing career, he rowed in the second seat for Oxford in the 1936 Boat Race against Cambridge, which of course, was the year when the Light Blues were unbeatable with Ran Laurie at stroke and Jack Wilson in the seventh seat. (Both Wikipedia and SAS’s official site has it that Lewes was President of OUBC that year, but he was not.)
For the next year, 1937, things would be different, however. After the 1936 race, Lewes was elected President of OUBC, and that summer he took an Isis crew abroad to race at several regattas in Germany. He started early to train his trail eights, and had some good coaches signed up to coach his Dark Blues: J.S. Sturrock, J.C. Cherry, P.C. Mallam, ‘Gully’ Nickalls, and W. Rathbone as finishing coach. Despite the advices of his coaches not to do it, Lewes arranged that his crew would race against an eight from London RC already on 13 February - Oxford won.
While things were looking up for Oxford, Cambridge ran into some problems. President Laurie suddenly left when he was given a post in Sudan, where his great friend Wilson was already working. The fellow who took Laurie’s stroke seat, H.W. Mason, broke his leg in a ski accident and was out for the season. Cambridge signed up the well-known oarsman Jack Bersford, Jnr., as coach, but this was his first coaching job for a Blue boat and little was achieved.
“The race was full of thrills, for there was a false start and a couple of slight fouls,” G.C. Drinkwater writes in his The Boat Race (1939). At the start Oxford was not ready, while Cambridge took off. After two strokes the Light Blues were called back. Cambridge lead slightly after the second, clean start. Gordon Ross writes in The Boat Race (1954): “it was ding-dong to Hammersmith bridge and the crews shot the bridge a breast.” The crews were level at Chiswick Eyot but at Barnes Bridge, Oxford was leading by almost a length. This gave the Dark Blues a push and they continued to pull away, crossing the finish line first, three lengths ahead of their opponents. It was a sweet victory. Oxford had waited for many years; last time they had won was in 1923. “Behind this great Oxford win there lies the story of a very fine President”, Ross writes. The great rowing journalist and writer ‘Dickie’ Burnell agrees:
“Lewes did more to win the 1937 Boat Race for Oxford than any other man, in or out of the boat. He was passionately convinced that the need was for men who race, and who would be happy together, and that the technique of rowing style was something to be taught by the coaches.” (The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race; 1954)
At this time, it was still the President, not the coaches, who decided who was going to row in the boat. Lewes greatness was proved when coach Nickalls spotted a weakness on Lewes’s side of the boat. R.R. Stewart moved in to replace D.R.B. Mynors at bow, while Lewes lifted out himself in favour of D.M. de R. Winser. Therewith Lewes joined the small and exclusive club of non-rowing Presidents of the Boat Race. When the winning Oxford boat came into the dock, President Lewes was the first one to congratulate the crew. Ross mentions in his book that crew member R.G. Rowe told him that after the race when they drove back for lunch in a hired Daimler, Jock Lewes was standing on the roof honking his coach horn the whole way to Ranelagh Club. Rowe called Lewes an “inspiring President”.
Let us hope that John Lewes find his famous uncle’s grave, so that Oxford Blue and the brave SAS soldier, Jock Lewes, gets the proper burial that he deserves.
In the book Battle of the Blues (ed. Christopher Dodd & John Marks; 2004) the actor and comedian Hugh Laurie writes about his famous father, Ran Laurie, who rowed in three winning Boat Races for the Light Blues between 1934 and 1936, and took the Grand at Henley for Leander in 1934. Ran Laurie also stroked the British eight that took a fourth place in the eight at the Berlin Olympic Games. After World War II, in 1948, Ran Laurie and his rowing partner, Jack Wilson, both came back to England after a career in the Colonial Service in Sudan. They later that year took an Olympic gold medal in the pair at the Olympic rowing event in Henley-on-Thames.
Hugh Laurie writes in Battle of the Blues (p. 79),
"I have a picture over my desk of my father and Jack Wilson receiving their gold medal on the pontoon at Henley in 1948. Jack is loose-limbed and dashing, my father ramrod straight to attention. I think it describes the two of them very well - or perhaps each is describing a part of the other - for these were two really remarkable men. Tough, modest, generous and, I like to think, without the slightest thought of personal gain throughout their entire lives. A vanished breed, I honestly believe."
Hugh Laurie also talks about his father on the British television-show Parkinson (this was before his "House" days...) how he did not know that his father, who clearly was a very modest man, was an Olympic rowing champion. So when his parents suggested that the three of them were to go on a fishing trip, with his father at the oars, young Laurie very skeptically asked his mother: "Does he know how to row?"
Hugh Laurie, who tried to follow in his father's footsteps - or should I say wake - at the oars, confesses that he is 'not made of the same stuff.' My own father was not an oarsman, though he supported my Swedish rowing club, when I became a member. I came to think of my father earlier today. He and Ran Laurie were of the same generation, and I can only agree with Hugh Laurie, men of that generation were of a certain breed.
Here is a clip with Hugh Laurie on the Parkinson show:
My dear wife told me the other day that she had been looking for something on the archive.org site, and for fun she did a search for rowing in the moving images section. There were some things, and what she thought would interest me most was a film from 1941 called Let’s Go Collegiate. Although, I am not an expert on rowing films, I have seen quite a lot of lists on rowing films, but I have never heard about this film. So, of course I had to have a look. The film is for sale at internet sites selling films and movies. And this is how it is described on one of the sites:
“Rawley University is about to receive a star athlete who could give it the first championship rowing team it's ever had. Unfortunately, he gets drafted into the army before he's able to join the team. Two of the team's members get the bright idea of passing off a burly truck driver as the ‘athlete’.”
Well, do not bother to buy a copy of the film as the rowing scenes are terribly bad, and you can watch it for free on archive.org, click here.
Earlier today I happened to stumble over two interesting old newsreels on Youtube that I find both interesting and thrilling. They are both from The Boat Race in 1935 when Ran Laurie and Jack Wilson rowed in the winning boat for Cambridge (see also my entries on 31 May and 1 June). Laurie and Wilson rowed in three victorious Cambridge crews, 1934, 1935, and 1936. Below you will see the two clips from 1935. In the first one, where Cambridge is training for the race, Laurie is in 6-seat, while on race day he was stroke.
Inspired by the comment made about “the spear attack” on Jack Wilson, this is how the story is told by Hylton Cleaver in his book A History of Rowing (1957; p. 110):
Jack Wilson “had gone trek in the course of his duties, as District Commissioner. He came out of his tent after lunch one day and immediately felt a heavy blow in his back. Turning, he saw an old woman holding a spear. The blow had in fact been a spear thrust so savagely that it had nearly transfixed him. Having withdrawn it, the old woman struck again but missed, and as she made a third attempt Jack grabbed the shaft and disarmed her. The old woman had been put up to this attack on the District Commissioner by a witch doctor to rid herself of some misfortune. A Sudanese medical officer, who was in his party, rushed up, after a brief professional examination, and made a memorable prognosis: ’By God, your Excellency, after this you will be no more good.’ Wilson was carried back to his base on a stretcher, a journey of twenty-four hours. He was rushed to hospital, and somebody who knew Laurie was his closest friend sent him a message. Laurie arrived at the hospital with flowers and fruit expecting Wilson to be at death’s door. On asked with hushed voice how Wilson was, he heard that he was ‘out playing tennis.’ ”
Christopher Dodd tells another story about the “Desert Rats” in his obituary of Ran Laurie (The Independent, 10 October 1998). When Ran Laurie was out on one of his rounds in the Sudan desert, he came upon a car that had broken down. In the car were Maurice von Opel, a member of the German car-making family, and his wife. The third person in the car was von Opel’s driver, Eric Phelps, a member of the famous family of Thames watermen. Eric Phelps, British professional champion, was now and then coaching George von Opel in the single scull. Phelps had also coached Jack Beresford Jr., and Dick Southwood to an Olympic gold medal in the double sculls at the Berlin Games in 1936. “Laurie managed,” writes Dodd, “running repairs and gave the party the address of a refuge in Khartoum, where, of course, Wilson was to be found.”
As I have mentioned in the previous entry about Hugh and Ran Laurie, Jack Wilson and Ran Laurie were great friends. Laurie once wrote a letter to Hylton Cleaver about his friendship with Wilson. Laurie wrote: “It was my privilege to be his second fiddle. He was a genius and had no twin.”
If only a clever fellow could make a movie about the pair “Laurie & Wilson” and their friendship – what a grand film it could be! (And we already know who could play the role as Laurie, don’t we?)
‘Hear the Boat Sing’ (HTBS) was founded in 2009 by Göran R Buckhorn, a Swede living in Connecticut, a magazine editor, culture scribe and a rowing historian. In 1990, Göran co-founded the Swedish rowing magazine, “Svensk Rodd”, for which he is now a contributing editor. He has written numerous articles on rowing, and is one of the Directors of Friends of Rowing History and a member of BARJ, the British Association of Rowing Journalists. Regular contributors to HTBS are: rowing historians Tim Koch and Greg Denieffe, both in England; Hélène Rémond, France; and Philip Kuepper, Connecticut. Besides writing articles on The Boat Race, the Henley Royal Regatta, the Wingfield Sculls, and the Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race, Tim has made some rowing documentaries. He is also a Director of the Friends of Rowing History and a member of BARJ. Greg is an Irishman who specializes on Irish rowing. Some of his finest pieces are on HTBS. Hélène, who wrote her thesis on British rowing, has covered The Boat Race and the Henley Regatta for French papers and HTBS, also shooting beautiful photos for this blog. Philip’s poems on rowing have topics about everything between the daily life and the divine.
