Rowing to Government

Parliament House in Canberra, Australia.

HTBS’s contributor Louis Petrin in Australia writes,

Last week Australia saw a change of government. Why mention this in HTBS? Well the number of government leaders who had rowed is impressive – of the 28 Prime Ministers of Australia, seven were rowers! That is an amazing 25%.

Can any other country in the world claim their leaders to be rowers?

Here is a list of the rowers:

Edmund Barton – Protectionist Party – rowed in 2 seat for Sydney University at the very first inter-university boat race in Melbourne in December 1870 and won by Melbourne Uni. Barton was also a foundation member of the Sydney Rowing Club and our 1st Prime Minister in 1901.
 

Chris Watson – Labor Party – born in Chile (only Australian Prime Minister to be born outside of Australia, or the British Isles) he was Federal Labor's first leader and the 3rd Prime Minister, had little schooling but rowed in the 1890s like many workers did at the time.

Stanley Bruce – Nationalist Party – Captain Melbourne Grammar School Rowing & First VIII. Bruce also rowed and coached at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. Australia’s 8th Prime Minister.

John Grey Gorton – Liberal Party – schoolboy at Shore (where he shared a dorm with Errol Flynn), then went to Brasenose College, Oxford University in October 1932 where he ‘majored in rowing’. The country’s 19th Prime Minister.

William McMahon – Liberal Party – Sydney Grammar 1st VIII in 1926; the 20th Prime Minister.

Gough Whitlam – Labor Party – St. Paul’s College and won a Blue at Sydney Uni 1938; the 21st Prime Minister.

Tony Abbott – Liberal Party – member of the winning 2nd VIII at the GPS Regattas in 1974 and 1975. Australia’s 28th and the current Prime Minister.

‘The Song Of The Stroke’

There are many testimonies about Harcourt ‘Tarka’ Gold’s accomplishments as an oarsman, coach, Henley Steward, Chairman of the ARA, and sportsman in general. This little piece will celebrate him as a pamphleteer as it is 92 years ago this month his 20-page pamphlet The Common Sense of Coaching was published.

However, Gold was not the sole author of this short publication. He did not write part one, only part two. The first part was actually written by the members of the Oxford University Service Crew which Gold coached for the King’s Cup in the Royal Henley Peace Regatta in 1919. During the crew’s last week of practise before the regatta, Gold writes in the preface, he requested the crew record their attempt “to resuscitate the style and traditions of Oxford rowing after the lapse of five years.”

The only person exempted from taking part in this experiment was the crew’s president, the “pre-war oarsman” Ewart Horsfall, who had rowed for Oxford’s winning boats in 1912 and 1913, and the losing one in 1914. Horsfall also won an Olympic gold medal in the eights at Stockholm (and would take a silver in the eights at the 1920 Amsterdam Games).

The second part, Gold wrote primarily for the coaches of the College Boat Clubs at Oxford as they were believed to have little previous coaching experience. Gold states that it is hard to explain “rhythm” to novice rowers, but writes that “Dr. Warre once gave me the delightful description of rhythm as ‘the song of the stroke’”. Coming from Warre’s Eton and rowing at Oxford meant that Gold’s teaching was based on the orthodox style.

A couple of interesting anecdotal notes are that the Australian crew, which beat Oxford in the King’s Cup final, in an initial stage of their training on the Thames, had their countryman Steve Fairbairn, coach at Thames RC and a renown pamphleteer, to help out. A Cambridge eight, which was also competing for the King’s Cup, had another Australian to assist them, Stanley Bruce of Trinity Hall. (He would later be elected Prime Minister of Australia, and be granted an hereditary peerage, Viscount Bruce of Melbourne.)

After Bruce had coached Cambridge for the Peace Regatta, he dictated some notes which was published first in 1936 as a 24-page pamphlet, Rowing – Notes on Coaching. Both Gold’s and Bruce’s pamphlets are impossible to get hold of today. Time to re-publish them?

HTBS Quiz: Stanley Bruce!

So, dear reader of HTBS, did you come up with the answer to rowing historian Tom Weil’s question which was posed on HTBS yesterday: “Which Prime Minister wrote a pamphlet on rowing technique?”


How many of you said: Viscount Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Prime Minister of Australia between 1923 and 1929? Yes, Bruce was the one! Anyone interested in Stanley Bruce (1883-1967) political career please click here.

The good Tom sends the following information about Bruce’s pamphlet: Rt. Hon. S.M. Bruce: Rowing – Notes On Coaching, London: Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., 1936. 24 pp. 8.75” Printed ivory paper wraps.

Tom has also compiled some more information from different sources about the content of the pamphlet: Bruce’s writes, “These notes were dictated in 1919 [...] immediately after I had coached the Cambridge Crew for the King’s Cup at the Henley Peace Regatta.”

It seems that the pamphleteer, Tom’s message says, also dwells largely on elements of the stroke cycle, but includes thoughts on various challenges (“An Ordinary College Crew for Henley with about three weeks to practise”) and types of rowers (“The job with [a good stroke who is a bad oar] is to prevent [him] from rowing himself stupid instead of stroking his boat”).

Stanley Bruce was admitted to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and won the “Clinker Fours” in 1903 and did so well in the “Hall” boats that year, that he rowed in the winning Light Blue crew in 1904. The following year, he was captain for the boat club, and in 1906, Bruce coached the “Hall” eight that went for the Grand at Henley. He came back to coach in 1911 and, in the words of a contemporary paper, “improved the Trinity Hall crew out of recognition” [quote from A History of the Trinity Hall Boat Club (1930) by Henry Bond].

Tom writes that Bruce wrote Rowing – Notes On Coaching while serving as Her Majesty’s Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Bruce said the three things which pleased him most were his Cambridge Blue, his captaincy of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, and his fellowship of the Royal Society (1944).

The HTBS readers might wonder if I knew the answer to Tom’s question. The honest answer to that is: sort of… The only oarsman that I knew had become a Prime Minister was the “Hall’s” Stanley Bruce, which proved to be a good guess. However, I did not know that Bruce has written a rowing pamphlet. So, now the hunt is on to get hold of a copy of his Rowing – Notes On Coaching...