Henley Literary Festival 2014

Greg Denieffe writes:

The 8th Henley Literary Festival beginning 29 September and running to 5 October is now open for bookings. The exciting news for rowing enthusiasts is that there are three opportunities to catch up with the authors of recent publications on the subject. Dodd, Carlson and Mowbray may sound like the name of a dodgy firm of solicitors but the only thing dodgy about their contribution to the world of rowing literature is that Chris Dodd touches on some dodgy dealings in his book Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers.

Dodd will be the first of the trio to grace the festival when on Monday 29 September he literally takes to the water on board Hibernia to discuss Geordie Rowers.

A canny good read!

From the festival programme (FP):

As fitting an author to appear at Henley (and on the Hibernia) as you can imagine. Christopher joins us from the River & Rowing Museum to recall the rowing culture that thrived in the north east of England through the 19th and early 20th century. Rowing was a professional sport inspiring innovative design of racing boats, while the music hall roared with songs to honour the oarsmen’s prowess.

You can read HTBS editor Göran Buckhorn’s review of the book here, order a copy here and read a review of Chris’ 2012 appearance at the festival here.

Also on Monday 29 on the Hibernia immediately after Chris, Jack Carlson will tell the story of his book Rowing Blazers.

Rowing Blazers, British edition

Rowing Blazers, American edition

Cambridge University’s Lady Margaret Boat Club has the honour of wearing the first blazers, so called as they were (and still are) bright red. But the jacket has gone on to become a worldwide rowing uniform and one that brightens the Thames banks during our Royal Regatta in July. So join Jack, winner of last year’s Regatta, aboard the Hibernia with his stunning book on the history and development of the rowing blazer, featuring designs from around the globe. He is wonderfully qualified as an oarsman who has represented the USA at the World Rowing Championships and rowed [sic] for Oxford in the University Boat Race. So that is two blazers he is entitled to wear! (FP).

Tim Koch recently reviewed the book for HTBS. He also features within its pages. Read his review here and watch a video that tells the story of the authentic striped, piped, trimmed and badged rowing blazer, through the oarsmen and women who wear them here.

Whilst these two events follow each other on board the Hobbs & Sons Hibernia, separate bookings which can be made here are required for each.

If these two rowing events can be said to top the festival, you will have to wait until the final day (Sunday 5 October) for the tail. It is an event that I am particularly looking forward to as I have already received a ‘pass out’ for the day and my ticket is booked!

Recipe book?

Alison Mowbray won a silver medal in the women’s quadruple scull at the Athens Olympics in 2004. Her autobiography Gold Medal Flapjack, Silver Medal Life was the first rowing book published in 2014, with a publication date of 2 January.

From the official press release:

“Alison Mowbray wasn’t a sporty kid and thought that being good at sport was a pre-requisite for going to the Olympics. She thought she might be a doctor, a teacher, a Blue Peter presenter or maybe the first ever female naval submariner.

Then at 18 I discovered rowing. From that point on, for the next 15 years, I didn’t have a choice anymore. She made the British team at 27, by which time she had already lived a whole other life.

I never planned to be inspiring so really this is just the story of how I did the things I love, the very best I could do them, and how very far it took me. You don’t choose to go to the Olympics. You lay out everything you have and let the Olympics take it no deals, no bargains, no questions asked, no hope of return. Maybe it will be enough and the Olympics will choose you, and maybe it won’t.

That’s what you do. That is this story. This is a Silver medal life of achievement, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia and Alzheimer’s. But a Gold medal story of passion and perseverance, and not letting anything or anybody get between yourself and your dream. And of what happens next perhaps the most Olympian journey of all after the blaze of glory with the medal held high. Because what do you do when you’ve achieved everything you ever wanted to achieve? Where do you go from there?

This started out as a recipe book with a few stories from my life, and then the story took over. It also became really important to me to write this as a history of British women’s rowing because I don’t think many people on the outside really understand how incredibly self-motivated and tough us women have had to be pull ourselves up, often in defiance of the first fledgling attempts at some sort of system”.

Alison will once again take to the water on the beautiful river Thames on the final day of the festival as the Hibernia is also the setting for her talk. Martin Cross, aka The Blogging Oarsman gives his take on the book in a short video which you can watch here.

Looking Smart in a Rowing Blazer!

Yes, yes, HTBS has already written a lot about Jack Carlson's beautiful book Rowing Blazers, which just came out in England (it will be out in September in the U.S.). Tim Koch, for example, wrote a glorious review of the Rowing Blazers before this summer's Henley Royal Regatta. However, we cannot help to push for the book a little bit more by posting a short promotion video for the publication, especially as HTBS's own T.K. is briefly shown for two seconds in the film (at 1:52-1:54). Enjoy it here below:

Trying ‘Rowing Blazers’ For Size: A Review by Tim Koch

The title leaf of Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson (Thames and Hudson, 2014). It shows Ellie Piggott and Brianna Stubbs of Wallingford Rowing Club. They won Gold in the lightweight doubles at the World Under-23 Championships in 2010. © Carlson Media Inc.

Tim Koch writes:

Today, 2 July, is the first day of Henley Royal Regatta and it is also most people’s first chance to see the exciting new book that HTBS has been talking about for some time, Rowing Blazers.

The term ‘coffee table book’ is often used pejoratively – and for good reason. Large format, lavishly illustrated publications, frequently with minimal text, can sometimes be ‘hack jobs’ produced by those who don’t know and don’t care in order to make a quick profit from those who happily accept superficiality over substance*. It is presumably for this reason that some publishers prefer to use the rather less satisfying term ‘adult illustrated non-fiction’ for such productions. Labels notwithstanding, Jack Carlson’s Rowing Blazers, is one of the superior works in the illustrated book category. It is clearly a ‘labour of love’ by someone who knows and cares about the subject and who has spent an inordinate amount of time and trouble producing not only the pictures but also the text. The publisher tells us that the book:

….. looks at the authentic striped, piped, trimmed, and badged blazers that are still worn by oarsmen and women around the world today, and at the elaborate rituals, elite athletes, prestigious clubs, and legendary races associated with them… The stunning original photographs, many by “prep” guru F.E. Castleberry, are taken in situ at the historic boathouses, campuses, and team rooms of clubs in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and beyond. These enchanting portraits are… accompanied by histories, anecdotes, and captivating descriptions of the esoteric traditions behind each blazer.

Geoff Roth, who rowed for Cambridge University Boat Club in 2010, wearing his ‘Blue’ blazer in the Captain’s Room of CUBC’s Goldie Boathouse, The jacket’s stains are unexplained but by tradition a CUBC blazer is never cleaned. © Carlson Media Inc.

Jack is well qualified to produce such a book. His rowing career began as a cox at Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Massachusetts, a role that gave him his first trip to Henley and with it his introduction to rowing blazers. In his journey from school to the rowing crews of Georgetown and of Oxford Universities, via the U.S. National Team and recently a Henley medal, he found himself ‘ideally placed to investigate the bizarre vestments in depth’.  I would suggest that ‘investigate’ is too mild a word as, after recruiting a number of ‘celebrated photographers’, he began an intermittent three-year worldwide journey, a guest of the international rowing fraternity:

The rowing world is a small one..... members of the rowing community are always willing to help one another and assist in any effort that promotes the sport. So – thanks to the fraternal spirit and enthusiasm of hundreds of rowers and coxswains – I was able to arrange photo shoots at clubs around the world and with some of the most prominent oarsmen and women at these clubs… We jumped over burning boats in Oxford, slept on strangers’ couches in Wisconsin, and witnessed beer-soaked blazer rituals in the Netherlands…

Like many from the American New England states, Jack has a foot in the Old World as well as in the New. He gives an outsider’s affectionate view on this quintessentially British garment which, like many other things (particularly in sport) Britain gave to the world and the world took it, adapted it to local culture, customs and conditions and sent it back to the Old Country. Writing about the early nineteenth century ‘boating jackets’ Jack says:

The chosen colours and details comprised a code that revealed the college, club and particular crew with which a rower was affiliated. The British, after all, have always had a hyper-awareness of subtle social distinctions and a flair for uniforms and pageantry.  

The understated Oxford University Boat Club blazer, here worn by Colin Smith (OUBC 2004, 06, 09). While a dark blue jacket with dark blue trim and no badge may not be the boldest of garments, it is can still be very effective. Jack quotes the Livingstone brothers (who rowed against each other in the 2003 Boat Race) in their book, Blood Over Water (2009): ‘It is astonishing what the sight of a Blues blazer can do to many a sensible, well-adjusted girl’. Where can I buy one?  © Carlson Media Inc.

I have to make two declarations before reviewing this book. Firstly, I liked it before I even saw it and this not a very professional approach for a reviewer. Rowing Blazers is very much a ‘Hear The Boat Sing’ sort of thing as it shows how a forward looking, innovative and modern sport such as rowing can still produce and parade these very clear acknowledgements of its origins, history and heritage. Secondly, perhaps as proof that rowing ability or good looks are not a requirement to be included, I am pictured in my Auriol Kensington regatta blazer, trying to look as though I have the right to be alongside Murray and Bond, Steve Redgrave, the Winklevoss brothers et al.

Chris Bartley, now a member of the British lightweight four, a winner at the 2010 World Championships and a silver medallist at London 2012 in his King’s School Chester Boat Club blazer. The ‘HR’ cypher on the badge stands for Henry VIII who founded the school in 1541. © Carlson Media Inc.

It is unusual to take much note of the words in any book that is predominantly about the pictures but Rowing Blazers’s is an exception.  If the photographs were removed, the text alone would still be an absorbing read. Jack’s writing is both pithy and informed and more space is allocated to the printed word than is often the case with such publications. His researches reveal many delightful and/or obscure facts and stories and also challenges several myths (though he does perpetuate the defamation of John Phelps and his role the 1877 ‘Dead Heat’ Boat Race)!

In the case of the entry on Lady Margaret, the boat club of St John’s College, Cambridge, several ‘tall stories’ are examined. The tale begins when a St John’s crew allegedly mounted a sword on their bow during a race and accidentally killed the cox of the crew in front. When St John’s Boat Club was banned ‘forever’ as a result of this, the story goes that they reappeared as ‘Lady Margaret Boat Club’ and wore bloody red jackets to mark the incident. All this is ‘pure fantasy’ but the very real red jackets worn by LMBC are significant. Jack holds that as rowing developed as a sport at Oxford and Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, colourful flannel ‘rowing jackets’ or ‘boating coats’ appeared as practical garments to be worn on the water, both to identify the crews and to keep them warm. Soon, however, they were adopted as part of a young gentleman’s informal dress après-rowing. The first recorded use of the term ‘blazer’ (in inverted commas) to refer to one of these garments was in the Cambridge University General Almanac and Register for 1852 – but solely to describe the ‘blazing red’ boating coats of Lady Margaret Boat Club. It was only eighteen years later, in the 1870 edition of the Almanac, that all boat clubs’ jackets were called ‘blazers’ and the term soon spread. Jack holds that it is a myth that it was the coats worn by the crew of the Royal Navy ship, HMS Blazer in the mid-nineteenth century that gave rise to the name, calling it ‘a classic case of false etymology’.

One of the book’s more informal pictures shows Andy Triggs-Hodge MBE in the unofficial but popular version of the Molesey Boat Club blazer. Andy won Gold in the British Coxless Four in Beijing and in London. He also stroked the winning Oxford crew in the 2005 Boat Race and so presumably has an OUBC blazer and a couple of British Olympic Team ones as well. © Carlson Media Inc.

So much for the prose, what of the pictures? Some photographs are pure ‘prep’ and would not be out of place in a Ralph Lauren catalogue. Others have more of a journalistic, Sunday newspaper ‘colour supplement’ feel and a few owe something to reportage photography – but all are a delight. The fact that the blazers are all modelled by ‘real’ rowers could have produced problems. At the risk of perpetuating outdated stereotypes, I think that when amateur models pose to be photographed in a professional context, many men worry about appearing effeminate (and so tend to adopt a ‘manly scowl’) and many women fear that they will either be portrayed in some sort of sensual way or that some imagined physical defect will be highlighted (and so appear slightly uncomfortable). Remarkably the photographers for Rowing Blazers seem to have (almost entirely) overcome these problems with the 250 plus ‘real people’ that they pictured. However, perhaps the models are secondary and the real stars of the book are both the blazers and the settings in which they are pictured.

Sir Steve Redgrave CBE, the ‘local boy made good’ in the colours of his home club, Marlow. Famously he won Gold at five consecutive Olympics. Though only 52, he could be described as ‘the grand old man of British rowing’ especially as it seems likely that he will become the Chairman of Henley Royal Regatta later this year. © Carlson Media Inc.

My favourite photographs are of the near rags worn by some Dutch student clubs (which, at Henley, are also a nice counterpoint to the pristine jackets especially purchased for the occasion by many American crews). The British sometimes like to think that they have to monopoly on eccentric customs and traditions but many universities in the Netherlands score higher on the ‘madness meter’. Exact customs vary from boat club to boat club but the basic idea is that the same blazers are passed down from one generation of students to the next. They suffer particularly as they are worn in the post regatta ‘fights’ in which oarsmen attempt to wrestle each other to the ground by their lapels – but repairing and cleaning is only allowed in very exceptional circumstances, if at all. A familiar and distinctive sight at Henley, the inherited blazers of clubs such as DSRV ‘Laga’, ASR ‘Nereus’, and KSRV ‘Njord’ seem to come in two sizes – ‘too big’ and ‘too small’ – and in two conditions – ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’. Whatever their crimes against tailoring, they are worn with enormous and justifiable pride.

On the Rowing Blazers website, Jack writes:

I hope that this book serves as an introduction for the uninitiated into an otherwise arcane world and brings the rowing community in touch with our sport’s colorful heritage. And I hope readers have as much fun perusing the book as we did making it.

I am sure that all three of these hopes will be realized. After a short time spent in the pages of this book, you will feel as if you were Jack’s companion on his aquatic and sartorial road trip, sharing with him the ‘fraternal spirit and enthusiasm’ of the rowing community on his journey into the ridiculous but delightful world of rowing blazers.

A picture not from the book but from the HTBS archive, showing Jack Carlson (far right) celebrating his Henley Medal for coxing Taurus to victory in the Britannia Challenge Cup, Henley 2013.

Rowing Blazers is published by Thames & Hudson in Europe and was officially released on 26 June. The book is available from Rock the Boat, New Wave, Leander Club and the Henley Royal Regatta Shop. Of course, you are also able to buy a copy in Henley at Richard Way Bookseller, 54 Friday Street, or give them a call at  INT+44+(0)1491-576663.The book will be published by Vendome in North America, and will be released there in September. U.S. residents can pre-order signed copies here.

*The best example of a rowing book like this is Regatta: A Celebration of Rowing by Benjamin Ivry (Simon and Schuster, 1988). Thankfully, now out of print.

The American Whaleboat of 2014

In 1978, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc., published The Whaleboat: A Study of Design, Construction and Use from 1850 to 1970 by Willits ‘Will’ D. Ansel, a shipwright and boat builder at the Museum’s Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard. Ansel had been asked by Mystic Seaport to do research about the whaleboat, as by the beginning of the 1970s it was almost extinct. For many years this book was the ultimate source for anyone interested in the history of the American-built whaleboat. (To clarify one thing, the double-ended ‘whaleboat’ was the vessel lowered down from a whaleship and the watercraft from which the whale was hunted and killed. The whaleboat, with assistance from other whaleboats, would then sail or row back the dead whale to the whaleship where the whale was ‘refined’: cut to pieces, the blubber boiled in the tryworks and the oil kept in barrels. The oil was later used to light up the street lamps in all major cities in the country; whaling was a large and important industry in America during the 1800s.)

The best description of the content of this book is to name the different chapters: “Development of the Whaleboat to 1870”; “Performance and Use”; “Lines of the Whaleboat”; “Hull Structure”; “Fittings and Equipment”; “Sailing Rigs”; “Whaleboat Production”; “Building Methods”; “Painting, Repairs, and Maintenance of Whaleboats”; “The Whaleboats and Related Types”; and two appendixes: “Sail Plans and Rigs” and “Examples of Ten Whaleboats”.

Will Ansel’s The Whaleboat is a well-written, richly illustrated book – and some of the black & white photographs are taken by the author and many of the drawings are by him as well. Ansel has dug deep in old archives and sources, and this is truly a book for all wooden boat enthusiasts. A 2nd edition was published in 1983, but the book has been out of print for many years.

In 2008, while Mystic Seaport started restoring its flagship, the 1841 Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world, the Museum soon realised that it had neither the manpower nor the funds to build the whaleboats that were needed for the whaleship’s 38th Voyage – between 1841 and 1921, the Morgan made 37 whaling voyages across the globe – and it would truly not be a total restoration of the whaleship if the whaleboats were not aboard for her last voyage. The question went out to the maritime community if there was an interest in building whaleboats for the Morgan’s 38th Voyage. When she left Mystic Seaport to embark on her voyage, on 17 May this spring, nine companies along the east coast, in a project called the National Whaleboat Project, had built ten brand new whaleboats.

The same day, the Morgan left the Museum, the institution published the 3rd edition of The Whaleboat, now with a slightly different title, The Whaleboat: A Study of Design, Construction and Use from 1850 to 2014. Added to Will Ansel’s chapters were now two new chapters by Will’s son, Walter Ansel, and Walter’s daughter, Evelyn Ansel, who thereby is the third generation Ansel to be involved in narrating the history of the American whaleboat. Walter is a senior shipwright at Mystic Seaport and has worked on the Morgan’s restoration and a lot of other vessel restoration projects at the Museum. After finishing up her college studies at Brown University, Evelyn has also worked on the Morgan, as an apprentice. This year, however, she has been a Fullbright scholar at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.

Walter’s chapter is about a whaleboat programme from 2002, when Will came back to Mystic Seaport to teach Walter and a few other shipwrights how to build a whaleboat. Evelyn’s contribution is about the National Whaleboat Project, a well-penned article, which also includes her photographs. Earlier she has published articles with some wonderful drawings of hers.

So, here we have three shipwrights who write very well, two of which also take marvellous photographs and draw and depict brilliant pictures – a very talented family, the Ansels.

Order your copy of The Whaleboat here ($24.95 plus postage).

At a book signing for The Whaleboat in the Mystic Seaport Bookstore during the 2014 WoodenBoat Show, Walter Ansel, Will Ansel and Evelyn Ansel.

Go To Blazers

Tim Koch writes:

For over six months, HTBS has been dropping hints about a lavish book on rowing blazers that was in production. Even before some examples showing the quality of the photography and text crept out, the project already had great credibility as the person behind it, Jack Carlson, is a man steeped in rowing. This was not going to be something thrown together by a publisher out for a quick profit using stock pictures and hack text culled from the internet. I wrote about Jack very recently in my pieces on the Oxford Summer Eights (where he coached the crew that went Head of the River) and HTBS’s Greg Denieffe interviewed him last year and wrote this:

Jack Carlson has certainly had an annus mirabilis in 2013. A winner at this year’s Henley Royal Regatta and Canadian Henley Regatta, he was instrumental in bringing together a ‘Super 8’ made up of some of the world’s fastest women scullers to compete at last week’s Head of the Charles Regatta racing as Cambridge Boat Club in the Women’s Championship Eights, they started behind the USA national crew and rowed a remarkably well passed race to snatch victory by 1.2 seconds.

Previously he coxed at Buckingham Browne and Nichols School, was Captain of Rowing at Georgetown and was the co-creator of the iErg. In his spare time he is writing a PhD thesis at Oriel College, Oxford.

Clearly, Jack is someone who gets things done and done well. It was with great excitement therefore that I received the above invitation, my chance to see the book before its official publication date. I can tell you now that I was not disappointed. A full review will follow, it would be wrong to rush something when so much time (four years) and care had obviously been put into producing Rowing Blazers. The official website tells the story of how the book came about, shows some of the wonderful images and allows pre-ordering of copies. For now, here are some pictures of the London launch party. There are other launch events planned for Henley in July and New York and Boston in September-October.

Not the first dummy to wear a rowing blazer.

Jack and a fan.

Selfie 1

Selfie 2

This could be one of those books where an unsigned copy is worth more than a signed one.

The Ralph Lauren event was covered by many others, most not usually present at rowing events, including the ‘society magazine’, Tatler, The Times, and other blogs including boymeetsfashion, andrewcusack and preposity. Air kisses to you all, darlings.

New Rowing Book: Port Jackson Pullers

HTBS has just received a press release from the Australian publisher Bluedawe Books saying that author Stephen Gard has written a new rowing book, Port Jackson Pullers, about some early professional watermen. The press release reads:

The earliest champions were watermen. A waterman’s trade was working small boats, and a waterman’s sport was racing them. In the many splendid bays and coves of Port Jackson, and along reaches of the Parramatta River, ‘pullers’ won their rowing laurels and (sometimes) made their fortune. Australia’s first six champion oarsmen are the stars of Port Jackson Pullers. These men led the way to the nation’s future dominance of the World Sculling Championship. Until now, any history of Australian sculling began in the year 1876, when Edward Trickett won the Championship of the Thames. But Trickett emerged from a well-organised aquatic sport which was flourishing on the waters of Port Jackson decades before he first stepped into a boat. John Brennan, George Mulhall, Thomas McGrath, Richard Green, William Hickey and James Punch: six names that deserve honour in the world of rowing. Champions all, and all of humble origin, they fathered and furthered Australian professional sculling. Richard Green took it furthest of all, to the River Thames where, in 1863, he raced Britain’s best for the Championship of the World. Professional rowing was not established in Port Jackson without colour or controversy. In rough-and-tumble colonial times, good sportsmanship was an optional extra. Port Jackson Pullers revives and explores this vigorous, and occasionally villainous scene.

Scott Bennett has written the Foreword.

Port Jackson Pullers is available in a signed, numbered, limited edition of 100 copies. $AUD60.00 plus postage Airmail to the USA: $AU29.70 or Seamail to the USA: $AU19.90.
Hardback, 270 pages, illustrated throughout, with a Glossary, Index and detailed Chapter Notes. ISBN 9780992475109. Book size 240mm x 170mm.

Payment via PayPal, or download a printable order form and pay by cheque, money order, or Direct Bank Deposit.

Get your copy from Bluedawe Books website, here.

Book Review: Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers

Two years ago, Christopher Dodd, rowing writer and historian at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, published his Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians about the coach from Prague who ‘saved’ British rowing, which had hit rock bottom at the end of the 1960s. While Pieces of Eight is a 224-page book about amateur oarsmen going to the World Championships and the Olympic Games, Dodd’s most recently published book, Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers, is a thin 97-page book about, as the sub-title reads, ‘The Heroes, Seers and Songsters of the Tyne’. So not only has the author swapped rivers, so to say, instead of amateur rowers, in his new book, he is telling stories about England’s professional oarsmen and the boat builders of the Tyne during the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s – indeed, a far cry from any Olympic Games in modern time.

By now, there is a fairly good amount of published books about the most famous professionals who started to ply their oars and sculls on the Tyne before they travelled the world for world titles and high wages, especially the latter. Of course, Harry Clasper and James Renforth are mentioned in the book, but in the first chapter Dodd writes about Jack Hopper of Hexham, a nowadays forgotten professional sculler (unless you remember Dodd’s article about him in the Regatta magazine of December 1987; which, as a matter of fact, I do).

Hopper, alias Smith of Scotswood, entered as a 20-year-old in the 1922 Newcastle Christmas Handicap with his eyes on the £100 prize money, quite a nice sum for a working lad at this time. He entered under both his real and false names to confuse the organisers and the other contenders. Though, this would be his first Christmas Handicap, Hopper was the fastest mover in any of the bookmakers’ books. He reached the semi-final, but there he was found guilty of a foul. He was also unlucky in the other Christmas Handicap races he entered, in 1923, 1924, 1927 and 1933. He never won any of these races, though he did reach the final in 1933 when he raced against Bert Barry of Putney, who, earlier in December that year, had beaten the Australian Major Goodsell for the world title. Hopper got a 15 second handicap, which would be impossible even for Barry to catch up. However, Hopper ran into the Redheugh Bridge – it seems his ‘flagger’ had lost him in the fog – so the world champion finished the race alone and claimed the prize money. Soon thereafter the handicap ‘fizzled out’.

Jack Hopper left an epitaph in 1983, Dodd writes. Hopper said: ‘As regards professional racing, there’s nothing honest about it, nothing at all.’

In the second chapter, before Christopher Dodd (on the right) embarks on telling the story of the famous boat builders on the Tyne, most of whom had been, or still were, professional rowers when they were crafting their boats and shells, he beautifully writes about the Tyne, Newcastle, its industries and the bridges in the city in a short account. When he gets to the boat builders, it is Matthew Taylor who starts the list. Taylor, a ship carpenter, who was hired by Royal Chester Rowing Club for £2:5s a week as a trainer in 1854, built an outrigger fixed-seat four, the Victoria, which had a smooth bottom, a boat with which the club took Stewards’ Challenge Cup at Henley in 1855. Taylor is credited for introducing the keel-less boat (that is with the keel inboard).

However, it is not certain that Taylor was the first one to build a keel-less boat, Dodd writes. J. B. Littledale, Royal Chester’s captain, stroke and benefactor, has also been claimed for the design, and so has Harry Clasper, whose son, Jake Clasper (a boat builder in his on right), once wrote that he coxed his father and his crew in a smooth-bottom boat at the Thames Regatta in 1849. Boat builder Robert Jewitt had a dispute with Clasper in a newspaper saying that he was the one, who in 1843, built a boat with the keel inboard. It is clear that we will never know who the first keel-less boat builder was. The Victoria – now at the River & Rowing Museum – is not the only boat mentioned in this chapter. Other famous ones, St Agne’s, The Five Brothers and Lord Ravensworth, to mention a few, are also to be found in this chapter. Another boat building company that is brought up is Swaddle and Winship, which built some famous eights for Oxford and Cambridge in the 1870s.

In “Pulling clivor on the coaly river”, the third and last chapter in Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers, we meet songwriters and singers whose songs were sung in pubs and music halls to celebrate the local professional sports heroes who by the 1860s were almost all oarsmen. As much as the writers praised the Tynesiders, they ridiculed the oarsmen from the Thames. Dodd writes: ‘They sold their latest works as pamphlets, and they did for Tynesiders what newspaper columnists, bloggers and chat shows do today.’

James Renforth

As the songwriters rejoiced in the local oarsmen’s victories, they dismayed in their defeat. When James Renforth, a former iron worker, who became world champion in the single sculler by beating the ‘southerner’ Harry Kelley on the Thames in November 1868, died at the oar during a world championship race in the four in Canada in 1871, the cable that reached the people by the Tyne was first not understood. The songwriter Joe Wilson, a friend of Renforth’s, wrote:

Ye cruel Atlantic cable,
Whay’s myed ye bring such fearful news?
When Tynesdie’s hardly yeble
Such sudden grief to bide.
Hoo me heart it beats iv’rybody greets,
As the whisper run throo dowley streets
We’ve lost poor Jimmy Renforth,
The Champein O’Tyneside!

It is always such a delight to pick up a book by Christopher Dodd, who is a master of telling stories. No one can spin a yarn of a rowing tale as well as he can. Not only is this little book incredibly well-written, some passages are even beautifully written. Congratulations and well done, Chris!

Do yourself a favour now, drop what you have in your hands, and order a copy of this book immediately – unless, you can wait till you are in Henley-on-Thames next time, which better be soon.

Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers is published by AuthorHouse: eBook: ISBN 9781491895535. Softback: ISBN 9781491895528.

eBook or Softback available from www.bonnierowers.com ; www.bookstore-authorhouse.com and all good book stores on the web.

Softback copies are also available from these shops in Henley: River & Rowing Museum, Richard Way Book Shop, Bell Bookshop, Leander Club, and Henley Royal Regatta, and all other good book shops.

Signed copies can be ordered direct from the author – send mail address and cheque for £9.95 plus postage (UK £1.17; EUR £3.70; Rest of World £4.75) to:

Christopher Dodd, River & Rowing Museum, Mill Meadows, Henley-on-Thames, RG9 1BF, UK

For more about Dodd’s books please visit www.doddsworld.org

This review was updated on 21 May, at 4:30 p.m., as I, in the first version, wrongly made Major Goodsell an American. He was an Australian, of course, which was kindly pointed out by Tom Weil ~ thanks.

Interview with Ron Irwin, Author of Flat Water Tuesday

Ron Irwin

After yesterday's review, HTBS caught up with Ron Irwin, author of the well-received novel Flat Water Tuesday, which was published in June last year. Today, on 6 May, the book will come out in paperback in the U.S., so HTBS decided to ask Ron some questions:

HTBS: First, congratulations, Ron, on a marvellous first novel.

Thank you very much! It is a real pleasure to do this interview for your excellent website.

HTBS: You went to Kent School in Connecticut, known for its rowing programme, and you rowed there, after having started your rowing career in high school in Buffalo, New York. After Kent, you went on to Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut), where you also rowed. Is your novel’s fictional Fenton School, also in Connecticut, based on Kent School? Would some of your old school mates/rowers or teachers/coaches recognise themselves and some events that took place during your time at Kent and/or Trinity?

The novel is very much based upon my experience at Kent. In fact, my literary agent was also my roommate and a fellow rower! The film rights to the novel are held by another rower from Kent named Lars Winther. When the novel was first released in hardcover format in June of 2013, I did a book signing at the school. I happened to be back because it marked my twenty-fifth reunion. It was a wonderful time for me and a means of reconnecting with people I had not seen in a very long time. Much of the dramatic material in the novel, however, came from my experience as a rower at Trinity College. All in all, I rowed for about eight years of my life and it was an extremely rewarding experience.

HTBS: Any particular parts of the novel that you have experienced yourself in real life? Friends committing suicide? Struggling love affairs? Fighting at hotels? etc.

I always answer that question by saying that 90% of what happened in Flat Water Tuesday actually did happen, and the other 10% could have happened! As a writer, I found myself rearranging and dramatizing many of the real-life episodes that I describe in the novel. There are, of course, a few stand out elements that hang over the dramatic structure of Flat Water Tuesday. Firstly, a rowing friend of mine did indeed commit suicide, but he did not go to boarding school with me; he was a rower on the Trinity team. I actually did not know him very well, but he seemed to be one of those kids who had it all: he was good-looking, he was popular, and he was an excellent athlete. His death hit us all. I got the call about a year or two after I graduated that he had quite unexpectedly killed himself and he had not left a note or spoken to anyone about any issues that were plaguing him. A lot of the guys I used to row with got in touch with each other just to say we were there for one another and to remind ourselves that we were part of a larger, supportive community.

The love affair between Carolyn and Rob is also very real to me, as is the loft where it all happens. Their loft in New York is a very real place, I remember visiting it years ago when two of my friends stayed there and thinking it would make a wonderful setting for a novel. The guy who stayed there, Enrico Brosio, was another rower from Trinity who was a very good friend of mine and who now lives in London. He and I not only rowed together, we skied all around the world together.

Carolyn is also a very real person. There are women in this world who make a profound impression on the people they meet and she is one of them. Rob and Carolyn’s story is sadly very universal: how do two people love each other hold on after one of them makes a tragic mistake? How do you put down the defenses and say to somebody that they are the one? Rowing is all about toughness and discipline and pushing through pain. This is sometimes not the best approach to a romantic relationship where at times one must be vulnerable and, more importantly, protect another person’s vulnerability. Carolyn is certainly a person who exists in real life. She is a difficult person, but a passionate person and a beautiful person and someone whom the main character is deeply in love with. Flat Water Tuesday is partly about just how far you go to hold onto that love, even when you know it might end tragically.

HTBS: When you had made up your mind to write your début novel were you clear from the start that rowing would be an important element in the book?

Oh yes, certainly. In fact, the first draft of the novel was just about rowing. It did not have the adult love story at all. Even when I was rowing in high school I knew I would write about it one day. Rowing is just an incredibly dramatic sport, and it is an incredibly beautiful sport. The tensions and the excitement around putting together a top boat seem, at least to me, perfect for novel. I’ve always been passionate about rowing, ever since I first stepped into a shell. Twenty years ago, I was amazed that there were so few books about the sport. It is just so exciting, and so very poetic. Unfortunately, the first draft of my novel was turned down because the dramatic structure really wasn't going to work over three hundred pages. I also had to live a little bit more outside of the boat before I could write the novel that is now in the bookstores.

I realized one day that what I really wanted to look at was how all this rowing affected the characters later in life. Did they grow up to be better people? Did it really help them succeed? I found that rowing certainly helped me handle difficult times in my life and to focus on long-term projects that were sometimes fraught with failure, but on the other hand rowing teaches you to be incredibly distant in regard to the suffering of other people. Rob Carey is a character who finds empathizing with others to be extremely difficult, partly because he pushes himself so hard. This has tragic consequences for him.

HTBS: You are also a documentary filmmaker just like the grown-up Rob Carrey, the main character in your book. As a fiction debutante, did you feel more safe to write about two subjects that you knew well, rowing and filmmaking?

I am not sure if it was a matter of “feeling safe” so much as feeling as if these experiences had wonderful potential for a novel. I enjoyed my experience making documentary films and it was certainly an exciting life. It seemed as if those experiences would work well in the context of a longer narrative. The interesting thing about making documentary films is that you suddenly are exposed to all of these other stories. You get intimately involved in other people’s lives.

But on the other hand it is a business after all and there are certain technical things you have to learn. I found that the people I met in the documentary film world were incredibly hard-nosed and yet at the same time incredibly optimistic about life and the human condition. Making documentary films is also an immensely physical job. You are traveling around the world and carrying lots of equipment to pretty inaccessible places. So I always thought while I was doing it that I would only be able to handle it for so long and then I would put it into the pages of the novel. Mission accomplished!

HTBS: Did you do a lot of research for the rowing parts of the novel? Did you ever run into problems writing about the technical parts in rowing? The coaching? The land and the winter training? Or did you write these parts from memory from rowing at Kent and Trinity?

I would say that about 80% of the novel was written directly from memory. But the real problem was educating a reader who knows nothing about rowing about the intricacies of the sport. I had to slowly define the basic parts of the boat, where people sat, what the stroke was, the various complexities of competition, and the importance of training while at the same time moving the narrative forward. I showed the book to many people who had no experience of rowing at all to make sure they understood what was going on. This is not an uncommon problem for novelists. Anyone who has written a techno-thriller – where the lay reader has to understand how a submarine works for example – understands this problem. I kept thinking back to the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian. He introduces lots of seafaring terminology into his work that the reader has to quickly absorb. So, I kind of thought of the members of The God Four as people out at sea. I made sure to simply drop in the various terminology that every single rower knows about, and make it part of the action so people would organically understand what was going on. Rowing is complex, but it is not as complex as writing about what it must be like to be an astronaut or a brain surgeon or a spy.

HTBS: As other coming-of-age novels, your book has been compared to John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, and personally, I found some resemblance between the novels. If you agree, was it a deliberate choice you made or did it just happen?

Many people have compared the novel to A Separate Peace, but the reality is that I never have read that novel! I remember reading Catcher in the Rye and enjoying the first-person narration immensely. The challenge that lies in writing about a teenage hero is that teenagers are so incredibly self-absorbed. They really do not have the best sense of irony. There's not a lot of self-deprecation going on at that age. And, moreover, I was reaching back into that time what I wrote Flat Water  Tuesday. I decided to have two different voices. The adult voice, which is essentially my voice, and the teenage voice. The teenage voice is a voice I have lost touch with. It was good to get to know that person again, but I doubt I will have anything to do with him for the rest of my life.

HTBS: If I understand it right, it took you a long time to write Flat Water Tuesday. Was it because you got rejected by different publishers, or was it because you were not pleased with the result/s? Did you have to do a lot of re-writing before you felt the manuscript was ready to be sent off to your literary agent?

I wrote the first draft of Flat Water Tuesday back in 1995. The book was picked up by a literary agent and shown to about two dozen New York publishers. The problem with the novel was that it was simply about a young man trying to make a very competitive rowing team. There was no suicide, there was no romance, there was no adult story. So editors back then wondered how they could sell a story there was essentially about teenagers to adults. I had a wonderful agent who was very supportive and thought that the novel was indeed universal. Many novels had come out about teenagers at prep school that garnered an adult audience but mine was not so much about “coming-of-age” so much as about survival. So the kind of feel-good aspect was not there: it really was a technical story about making a rowing team as an eighteen-year-old. I rewrote the novel and resubmitted it in 1997, but still the adult section was not there. It was again rejected by about two dozen publishers, including, amusingly, St. Martin’s Press, who ultimately took on the manuscript. I gave the story a rest and took the time to get married and build a house and have children and do a great deal of nonfiction writing.

But Flat Water Tuesday was always with me, and I decided after the death of a very respected colleague here at the University of Cape Town, where I work, that I would get it published. I opened up the now very old manuscript in 2010 and began the process of rewriting it because what I had was incredibly dated and, truth be told, a bit immature. I wound up rewriting about 90% of the original manuscript. I also added in the love story. Basically, I had experienced a great deal in my life since I put Flat Water Tuesday aside. I poured those experiences into the novel.

And then, fate seemed to lend a hand. My former rowing coach, Hart Perry – a legend in the world of rowing – died in 2011. My former teammates called me from Connecticut, where a memorial had been held for him. They had heard that I was writing a novel about our experiences on the water and urged me to finish the manuscript I had already begun working on. This seemed like some kind of cosmic command. I redoubled my efforts and got back into contact with Tris Coburn, a fine rower and my former roommate. He was now working as a literary agent and he assured me that if I were to finish the manuscript he would show it around New York. My original agent had retired by this time. So I redoubled my efforts. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by one of the fiction editors from St. Martin’s Press. She was visiting Cape Town, where I live, and wanted to have lunch with me. By the time that lunch was over, I had told her about the novel and she asked me to send it to her via e-mail. The rest is, as they say, history. 

HTBS: Is there a specific ‘scene’ that you are especially fond of in your novel? Any person you feel close to? If so, why? Is there a ‘scene’ that you feel sorry that you cut out that is not in the novel?

To me, the heart of the novel is what I call the “crooked room” scene. This is the scene where Carolyn brings Rob up to her loft in New York and tells him that she calls it the “crooked room”. That is a scene I wrote many times and to me it encapsulates the passion of the novel. I've said it many times: Flat Water Tuesday is not really a rowing novel. It is a love story. The novel was written for Carolyn.

HTBS: Yes, your novel is a love story, but maybe not only between the grown-up Rob and Carolyn, but is there not also a latent love, or at least a fling, between the young Rob and The God Four coxswain, Ruth. Would you also say that the young rowers in your novel have “a love affair” with rowing?

I think that is very accurate. At that age, you are so desperate to be part of a group. Rowing offers a kind of instant elitism. There is no question that the closeness that I felt on the water with many of my teammates was impossible to replicate later in life. I am now taking up the sport again and while I enjoy it, I could not imagine spending so much time with the men I row with. But, as we all know, rowing is a sport that is easy to fall in love with. I am glad I went through that very intense experience when I was a kid and when I was in college. Rowing has made me many friends whom I am still in touch with.

The biggest discovery I have made about rowing is how serious people are about it as adults! I row with guys in their sixties who are very committed to the sport and can really make a boat go. I just had lunch with a yoga instructor who told me that many men in their fifties are only fractionally weaker than what they were as teenagers. I would agree. I am amazed how hard I am rowing now, and how much more I enjoy just being out on the water than I did back then, when I was always obsessed with winning. That said, I would hate for anyone to read the novel and think I was saying anything negative about the sport or indeed about Kent. Yes, tragic things happen to the main characters, but the main characters are very intense people and I put them in an incredibly intense situation. I remember well just how much I wanted to win certain races, and the novel takes this to a logical but catastrophic conclusion. Nonetheless, I am a major supporter of the sport of rowing and indeed The Kent School. I would definitely do it all over again, and start even earlier as an oarsman.

HTBS: The large chain store Target in the USA has picked Flat Water Tuesday paperback as a Book Club Pick for the month of May. Target has ordered 30,000 copies. Of those books you have signed 5,000 – how long did it take you to sign them all, and how did your hand feel afterwards? How many copies of the paperback are being printed in the first run?

It took me a week to sign all of the Target copies! My former mentor at UCT, Prof. J.M. Coetzee, who is no stranger to book signings as he has won the Nobel Prize, wrote from Australia to tell me I was lucky I had such a short name. It would have been even rougher if I was named Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, for example! Copies of the paperback are now in bookstores as well as in Target. I am not sure what the total print run is, I assume it is pretty substantial.

Ron Irwin busy signing 5,000 copies of the paperback edition of Flat Water Tuesday for Target.

HTBS: When you were writing the novel, did you ever imagine that it would be this successful?

I always tell my students that being a “successful” writer means, really, getting good reviews and the respect of your peers while at the same time not actually losing money for your publisher. It is very difficult to predict what will be a bestselling novel. Flat Water Tuesday has had its share of success, but I am just pleased that the novel has been received so well and that so many people have taken the time to write me emails saying that I have captured what it is like to row in a very fast boat. Even more important, I enjoy getting notes from people who have been through the kind of loss that Carolyn and Rob face.

HTBS: Rather early on, when your hardcover edition had come out, a film company bought the rights to make a movie based on your book. Please tell us more about it. Have you seen a script? Any idea which actors are going to play the members of The God Four or Coach Channing, for example?

I have indeed seen the script. It was written by Todd Komarnicki, the person who, among other things, produced the movie Elf starring Will Farrell. He has of course done a great deal of other adaptation work. He and I spent the weekend together at Kent shortly after the publication of Flat Water Tuesday. He met many of the people who I used to row with, and took the time to actually learn how to row before he began work. The film rights are held by Lars and Peter Winther, and Lars knows the sport extremely well, having rowed on the team that is the inspiration for The God Four. We have some ideas about who should act in the film but it is still early days yet. I can say that the script is excellent.

HTBS: do you see a trend in that three of the most written and talked about rowing books during the last years - I am here thinking about Dan Boyne’s Kelly: A Father, a Son, an American Quest (2008; pb 2011), Daniel James Brown’ s The Boys in the Boat (2013; pb 2014) and your Flat Water Tuesday (2013; pb 2014) – all have had film companies buying the rights to make movies based of these books? Is rowing on its way to become a new favorite Hollywood sport?

I think that rowing is certainly going to find its place in Hollywood. There have been some pretty good movies in the past. Think about the popularity of Oxford Blues, for instance, which stars Rob Lowe. There is also an old Nick Cage movie called The Boy in Blue and a recent BBC film called Bert and Dickie about two men in the 1948 Olympics, which is based on a true story. Two years ago the movie Backwards came out, about a girls’ rowing team.  

But you may find it amusing to learn that my editor at St. Martin’s told me that their interest in the novel came partly from the movie The Social Network! This film features two very famous Harvard rowers – Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss – who become the enemies of Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently the rowing sequences in The Social Network led to a great deal of interest in the sport on the part of the folks at St. Martin’s and in turn in my novel. Maybe in a weird way I owe Mark Zuckerberg something for getting on the bad side of such fearsome rowers!

Until recent years, rowing has always been very difficult to film. It is hard to film a boat from another boat and still keep a level camera. Recent Steadicam technology as well as other digital advances have meant that you can get right into the boat with the rowers without sacrificing film quality. Right now, for instance, you can go to YouTube and see some really cool GoPro footage of rowing put together by total amateurs. It used to be really hard to get that kind of footage. The trick is, in my opinion, to show how difficult the sport is while at the same time showing how beautiful it is. I remember when I was in high school in Buffalo how the kids who played hockey felt rowing was a “sissy sport” because, to them, it looked so easy. I would imagine that it's sort of like filming ballet. Ballet looks beautiful and graceful, but the body of every single ballet dancer I know has taken a severe physical beating because dance is just so rigorous. When you film ballet or rowing, you want to show the blood and sweat as well as the beauty. The technology is now there to make this happen.

HTBS: Which is your favorite rowing movie/film?

I would have to say that my favorite film is the 1970s documentary Symphony of Motion, probably because I know some of the people who were filmed in it and there are simply so many classic faces it. I also really enjoyed the film True Blue about the Oxford Boat Race “mutiny”, based on the book by Dan Topolski. I think this is an excellent introduction to the sport and looks at some of the nuances that would be very difficult to explain to outsiders.

HTBS: Which is your favorite rowing book?

The best book ever written about the sport of rowing is easily David Halberstam’s The Amateurs. This is a nonfiction book about four young men trying to make the 1984 Olympics. I am sure that most of your readers know about it.

HTBS: Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?

I think that the work of Cormac McCarthy, as well as the work of Richard Ford and Michael Cunningham has had a major effect on me. I also greatly enjoyed the novels by my mentor at UCT J.M. Coetzee. Studying under Prof. Coetzee was on incredible experience not least because here was a person who not only was a kind of living legend, but also who literally risked his life as a novelist. He wrote novels like The Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians during a time when he could have been thrown in jail for the things he implied about the apartheid government. I like to think I am a committed writer. But I am not sure I would risk jail time under the old South African regime for my art. I would certainly not be willing to risk the lives of my family members to publish a novel. Prof. Coetzee did that. He taught me that writing was a serious business. Literally a matter of life and death.

HTBS: You must be thrilled to learn that Flat Water Tuesday has been put on the long list for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in South Africa just the other day. What does this mean for the novel?

It is indeed great news. The Sunday Times Fiction Prize is the most important literary prize in South Africa. Flat Water Tuesday is published here by Pan Macmillan SA and they have been tireless in their support of it. I have met many people who have happened to read the book, and it seems to be doing the rounds at the local private schools where rowing is popular. The short list gets announced at a party during the Franschhoek Literary Festival on 17 May, and a few weeks after that they will announce the winner. Some major names in South African fiction have won the prize: Andre Brink, Zakes Mda, Justin Cartwright among them. Some of the other winners are personal friends and colleagues. I have no idea if I will make the short list, but I am certainly looking forward to going to the Franschhoek Literary Festival, FLF, and having a drink with the other ‘longlisters’ and cheering on whoever gets tapped. The FLF is hugely popular down here and is really the landmark literary event on the South African calendar. Franschhoek is a beautiful town: imagine Edgartown in Martha's Vineyard transplanted into a beautiful wine region and you get the idea. Wine and books are a fine and time honored pairing, in my opinion.

HTBS: We will certainly keep our fingers crossed that Flat Water Tuesday is picked for the short list.

Thanks, Göran.

HTBS: With the great success of Flat Water Tuesday, are you now working on your second novel? And if so, what will it be about?

I think the next novel will take place in Cape Town. I have come across a female character who doesn’t seem to want to go away, so I think I will follow her and see where she takes me.

HTBS: Thank you, Ron, and good luck with Flat Water Tuesday and with your second novel.

Thank you.

You can find out more about the novel Flat Water Tuesday by visiting www.flatwatertuesday.com. Please feel free to “like” its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/fwtnovel
Flat Water Tuesday can be bought at your local book shop, Target and the online bookstores. 

Book Review: Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin

Hard cover edition

The year 2013 was a good year for rowing books. In August, for example, Olympic champion Katharine Grainger came out with her autobiography Dreams do come True. One rowing book, which was published in June, has frequently come up on this website, Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat, which we reviewed on 19 August. Brown’s book was nominated for the prestigious British award the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, which HTBS’s Tim Koch wrote about on 27 November. Tim stated that whether The Boys in the Boat won this award or not ‘it is already the HTBS Book of the Year’ – unfortunately, Brown’s book did not win the William Hill Sports Book award, instead, it went to Doped by Jamie Reid.

Of course, I agree with Tim, but would like to make a small adjustment, or should I say, addition, because while The Boys in the Boat for sure is the best non-fiction rowing book of 2013, the award for the best fiction rowing book of that year would, without question, go to the novel Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Flat Water Tuesday, which also came out in hard cover in June 2013, will be released in a paperback edition in the U.S. High time for a HTBS review of the book.

Flat Water Tuesday is about Rob Carrey, a teenager from a working-class background, who arrives at the posh private school Fenton School in Connecticut, on a rowing scholarship. For many years this elite school has rowed against its rival school, Warwick, in a coxed four race on a Tuesday afternoon. Despite being a champion sculler – and in the beginning of the school year, Rob naively believes that he will continue to scull for Fenton School – he has been picked for a seat in the so called ‘God Four’, as the crew for a couple of years has lost this, the most important, race of the year to Warwick.

But there are tensions within the crew and already from the start there is rivalry, almost enmity, between Rob and the team captain Connor Payne, who comes from a wealthy family, whose high expectations of him can only lead to disaster. Not only do the young men fight (and they very soon actually get themselves into a fist fight) each other in whatever their rowing coach, Canning, is throwing at them – and that is a lot – there is also a rivalry between them for the crew’s female coxswain, Ruth, who is more focused on her job in the cox seat than her actual school work. The closer the crew gets to the Tuesday race against Warwick, the more they display an unhealthy competitive spirit, especially by Connor.

Ron Irwin

Author Ron Irwin rowed at high school in Buffalo, NY, at Kent School, CT, and at Trinity College, CT, and it is a great pleasure to see how he is guiding both the rowing-knowledge and the non-rowing readers through the chapters of the narrative that have the ‘rowing scenes’. Anyone who is interested in the sport of rowing will be glad to read how accurate our beautiful sport is told. While I vividly still remember the horrid tests on the ergs, I had totally repressed the bench pulls – till I read Irwin’s novel. However, while we rowers would happily be content with a novel about the God Four and its struggles before, during, and after their race against Warwick, the readers who do not share our love for rowing might easily have got tired of these parts of Irwin’s story, if they alone formed the entire novel. Well, they do not. Flat Water Tuesday has two ‘levels’, or two time periods, following two threads. Irwin is cleverly telling two parallel stories, one of the young Rob’s rowing at Fenton School, and one fifteen years later, when Rob is in his 30s, being a successful documentary filmmaker who is travelling the world.

It is after a film shoot in Eastern Africa, on his way to his girlfriend’s flat in New York, Rob is reading a letter from one of his teammates in the God Four. Later he is reached by the news that the letter writer has jumped from a bridge and killed himself. He receives a phone call from Ruth pleading with him to attend their class 15-year reunion at Fenton. Rob knows that if he goes, he will have to confront the many demons that grew out of his year at Fenton, and at the same time deal with the looming break-up with his girlfriend Carolyn, who at one time was pregnant with Rob’s child. When she had a miscarriage, Rob was unreachable on a film shoot in Africa, and she still blames him for not contacting her during her pregnancy.

Paperback edition

If, for a short while, I would put myself back in my literary studies at Lund University in Sweden, and remember what my professors back then would ask from us students; to perform a close-reading or dissection of the text and count up the different themes in the novel, I would come up with themes like rich and poor; happiness and tragedy; victory and defeat; youth and maturity; and love and lost love – all the great themes in our lives and in great novels. And Flat Water Tuesday is a marvellous novel, not only for rowers, but also for everyone who enjoys a well-written story. Irwin’s language is beautiful, even poetic in certain parts, and it carries us readers, uneasy at times, to the end that will reveal what happened one tragic evening at Fenton and which forever would change the lives of the young members of the God Four. But at the end there might be hope and reconciliation.

Flat Water Tuesday is an amazing novel.

Flat Water Tuesday can be ordered at Amazon, here, or buy it or order it via your local book shop, wherever you live.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, HTBS will post a long interview with Ron Irwin.

Macmillan Audio has kindly released a free listening sample of the first chapter of Flat Water Tuesday for HTBS readers: