Equine Aquatics

Sultan (without cap!)

Tim Koch writes,

The wonderful picture of the Cambridge Trial Eights crews for 1896 published on HTBS on 23 November showed the coach, Henry Trevor-Jones, on his horse, Sultan. Another picture of the pair (four years later) is on the boat club website for Christ’s College, Cambridge.

I would imagine that, certainly up to the 1914–1918 War and perhaps up to the 1939–1945 War, coaching from horseback was a common thing. Horses were freely available, required less concentration and effort to manoeuvre than a bicycle and afforded a high vantage point. Even when outboard motors became available and affordable to rowing clubs, they could not be used on narrow rivers like the Cam and the Isis and coaching from the bank was (and is) the only option. The ‘Wikibook’, The Rowers of Vanity Fair, has a couple of nice pictures showing mounted coaches.

Coaching at Cambridge 1866. From The Rowers of Vanity Fair.

Coaching at Oxford, c.1897. From The Rowers of Vanity Fair.

My favourite such picture, however, must be In The Golden Days (1900) by Hugh Riviere which forms part of the War Memorial at Thames Rowing Club.

In The Golden Days.

The ever reliable British Pathe site has a few examples of horses on the tow path at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. A couple of steeds can be seen in this 1939 example from the Cambridge Lent Bumps.

CAMBRIDGE

Mounted coaching may have been indirectly responsible for one of the peculiarities of Henley Royal Regatta. The first official timing point on the course is ‘The Barrier’, a seemingly random 2,089 feet from the start. I have always understood that this was the ‘Horse Barrier’ beyond which coaches were not allowed to ride.

It would be interesting to find out who was the last person to coach from horseback and when. Perhaps someone still does? Does any HTBS reader think they know?

The Rowers Of Vanity Fair

Some reflections by Tim Koch regarding a recent entry:

The charming Vanity Fair (‘Spy’) print of Henry Searle recently reproduced on HTBS (on 8 April, 2001) may have aroused interest in others in the series.

Vanity Fair magazine was published in Britain between 1868 and 1914 and so covered the ‘high water mark’ of the late Victorian/Edwardian age. It was a successful mixture of the serious and the trivial and covered political and economic news but also fashion and gossip plus literary and artistic comment. It is now remembered for the full page colour lithograph of a celebrity or dignity that appeared in each issue. Over two thousand different prints of sportsmen, politicians, actors, royalty, scientists, businessmen, academics, soldiers and clergymen appeared over 46 years. There is a full list of the caricatures here and a list of the various Vanity Fair artists here.

Incidentally, I think that the Searle picture, drawn in full profile, is uncharacteristic of ‘Spy’s’ style and reminds me of the ‘matchstick men’ of the Northern English artist, L. S. Lowry.

The rowing men who were featured in the magazine are brought together on the Wikibooks site, ‘The Rowers of Vanity Fair’.

The author, ‘Wat Bradford’ (Walter Bradford Woodgate), writes not only about the twenty five men who were featured because of their rowing achievements but also of thirty four others who appeared for other reasons but who had competed at Henley Regatta or in the University Boat Race. Bradford also includes an item of rowing history contemporary with each print featured. The pictures and their accompanying text are a delightful snapshot of an era that ended, like Vanity Fair itself, with the 1914–1918 War.

Tim is seen above at Auriol Kensington RC in London, where you can view him as a 'caricature', however, not by 'Spy'.

How SPY Saw Henry Searle

Let us continue with Henry Searle. On 7 September, 1889, Searle was immortalized by the British caricaturist Leslie Ward (1851-1922; on the right), known as ‘SPY’, in Vanity Fair. Ward drew many of his time’s most famous oarsmen, but a few things differentiate Searle from the others. He was not a British rower, nor had he ever rowed at Oxbridge. Instead, Searle became the only professional oarsman featured in Vanity Fair. Some of the men, who was depicted in Vanity Fair because they had distinguished themselves as ‘good oars’, also had a rowing attribute in the picture, an oar, an Oxbridge jacket or scarf, or, in the case of Raymond ‘Ethel’ Etherington-Smith, a Leander sweatshirt and Leander-coloured socks, or actually sat in a boat pulling an oar (Stanley ‘Muttle’ Muttlebury). The only thing that the well-dressed Henry Searle is holding in his hand is a walking-stick. Three months later, on 10 December, 1889, poor Searle died after he contracted typhoid fever. He was 23-years old.