Chris Dodd: Henley Royal Regatta 1976

Thames Tradesmen leading Leander in the final of the Grand. Photo: Rowing August 1976.

As HTBS readers know by now, YouTube is a real treasure trove when it comes to film clips on rowing. HTBS’s Tim Koch found two wonderful films from the 1976 Henley Royal Regatta on YouTube. HTBS asked rowing historian Christopher Dodd to write a commentary about Henley for that year. As many of you are aware of, Dodd is an authority on British rowing and he paid special attention to the country’s rowing progress during the 1970s in his book Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians (2012).

Christopher Dodd writes:

Henley Regatta took place on 1-4 July 1976 at the end of a heat wave. The temperature reached over 90° Fahrenheit*, humidity was at its wettest, the river low and the stream minimal. There was a new hazard to Henley, clearly visible in the YouTube video clips – swimmers on the booms and on the course. See the following film:



The open events were devoid of national crews, including the entire British team, who were in Canada preparing for the Montreal Olympics. Britain’s best hopes for medals that summer were the men’s eight, hand-picked three years before by Bob Janousek, the national coach, and the double scullers Chris Baillieu and Mike Hart. The eight’s last pre-Olympic regatta was Lucerne, held before Henley that year, and there was no opportunity to thrill the home crowd at Henley.

So the open events were short of class if not of competition. Janousek’s eight was a blend of Leander Club and Thames Tradesmen, and it was these two clubs who finished up contesting the Grand. Both contained men who had missed Olympic selection. 

Leander reached the final by beating the University of British Columbia (three quarter length) followed by London University (half length). Tradesmen arrived there by beating London RC by a third of a length. London were effectively the national lightweight eight (no Olympic lightweight events in 1976). London University were coxed by John Boultbee, who later became the first Australian to be elected a Henley Steward.

As the clip shows, Tradesmen won a close final by two thirds of a length. This was the second attempt after a re-row was ordered by the umpire after Leander stopped at the top of the Island during the first attempt when their rudder hit a submerged object.

The race was re-scheduled for 4.15 p.m. (three and a quarter hours after the first start), and Tradesmen went out to three quarters of a length at Fawley and saw off Leander’s attempts to get even.

The crews in the Grand final were:

Thames Tradesmen: Mallin, K. Cusack, Burch, Wilson, Bayles, Roberts, Milligan, Brown, cox Sherman.

Leander: D. and G. Innes, Tatton, Hardingham, King, Woodward-Fisher, Gregory, Rankine, cox Lee.

The commentaries on these clips are by Jim Railton, the rowing correspondent of The Times, who had been the ARA’s trainer in the late 1960s and who, a sprinter by sport, had blooded himself in rowing as a volunteer coach at Tradesmen.

Railton has a comfortable, warm voice with a trace of his Liverpudlian origin, and he doesn’t make mistakes. But his performance highlights the problems of commentating on rowing and filming on the Henley course. He is caught between the producers’ paranoia of silence breaking out even when the viewer can see what is happening, and the commentator’s paucity of information. Although he had coached some of these men – producing a famous ‘Beatle’ four of Mason, Clark, Robertson and Smallbone who morphed into Janousek’s Olympic squad – Railton doesn’t furnish us with their record, past performance or personal history. Added to which, he’s talking to a monitor in a trailer somewhere. It’s unfair to throw all the blame for lack lustre at him. The same challenges face the Stewards today as they seriously consider getting the tv cameras in.

The Thames Cup in 1976 was electric because the local club, Henley RC, were on the brink of winning their first Henley medal. They beat Saxon, Vesta, Rollins College and the selected University of Pennsylvania to reach a final against Harvard. Their race with Penn was hairy because Henley lost an oar from a rowlock on the 18th stroke, but recovered to take the lead.

A year before, Harvard had lost the first round of the Thames to Garda Siochana, the Irish police, who went on to win the cup. It was the first time Harvard had lost in the Thames, and in 1976 they were keen to recover their record. They were selected and reached the final by way of wins over Molesey, Imperial College, Hansa Dortmund and Christiania of Norway.

The final was a cracker. Henley had a canvas at the quarter mile signal and kept it to the Barrier and stretched it to a third of a length at Fawley, over-rating Harvard. Then Harvard drew level at the three quarter signal. Henley rose to 41 and Harvard to 43 to bring the latter home first by a canvas.

The crews in the Thames Cup final were:

Harvard: McGee, Templeton, Wood, Moore, Wiley, Perkins, Porter, Gardiner, cox You.

Henley RC: Maffre, Bushnell, Smith, Allen, Marsden, Pankhurst, Glenn, Richardson, cox Woodford.

After Hansa Dortmund withdrew, the Stewards’ was a straight final between University of British Columbia and Thames Tradesmen. Both crews had also rowed in the Grand, with Tradesmen having covered extra mileage that day because of the Grand re-row. The Canadians took the lead off the start and had a length and a half at the mile. Tradesmen then reduced the gap and pulled a desperate splurge out of their hat to finish a third of a length down.

The crews in the Stewards final were:

UBC and Vancouver RC: Rea, Bodnar, Moran, Allester.

Thames Tradesmen: Mallin, Roberts, Milligan, Cusack.

The Princess Elizabeth for schools was marred by the exam timetable again, complained the Henley recorder. Why these people who arrange A levels cannot conduct their affairs to avoid the Henley timetable, he couldn’t imagine. There were two selected crews – Holy Spirit High School (U.S.) and Emanuel School from Wandsworth, and they duly met in the final. Holy Spirit beat Hampton and Tabor Academy to get there, and Emanuel disposed of Abingdon and Eton.

In the final Holy Spirit led to the Barrier, where Emanuel drew level. Not for long, however. The Americans had half a length at the three quarters signal and drew away at the end to win by two thirds of a length.

The crews in the Princess Elizabeth final were:

Holy Spirit HS: McDevitt, Millar, Bibik, Foerster, Guenther, Welsh, White, Brown, cox Maguire.

Emanuel School: Tollitt, Ridgley, Lemmens, G. Roberts, Field, Downie, N. Roberts, C. Roberts, cox Upton.



The other half of the Tradesmen Grand eight won the Prince Philip for coxed fours by a row-over. Leander, the other finalists, withdrew because they were also rowing in the re-scheduled Grand and refused to contest the Philip before it. So the Philip was a damp squib – not the only one on the Sunday afternoon. With a fork of lightning and a clap of thunder, the weather broke, and all thoughts turned to Montreal.

Christopher Dodd’s Pieces of Eight is available from the River & Rowing Museum here and Richard Way Bookseller, 54 Friday Street, Henley-on-Thames or give them a call at INT+44+(0)1491-576663.

*Editor's Note: In an unsigned article about the 1976 Henley Regatta in the magazine Rowing, August 1976 issue, it was stated about the warm weather:

On two days in the nineties the rule about jackets was relaxed in the Stewards’ Enclosure, although ties were still required and shirts had to stay on in the public enclosure. On the banks it was bikini tops which came off, making paddling up to the start more interesting than usual.

The Story of the Martini Achter

Last Sunday, World Cup III ended in Lucerne, Switzerland. Following is the story of a special boat that was used by a U.S. crew to take the 1974 World Championships at Rotsee in Lucerne.

When visitors to Mystic Seaport – the Museum of America and the Sea, located in the village of Mystic, Connecticut, walk through the doors of the Visitors Reception Center at the Main Gate, the first thing they see, if they look up, is a magnificent racing shell hanging from the ceiling. This eight, the Martini Achter, is not only an indicator that the NRF’s National Rowing Hall of Fame is housed at Mystic Seaport, it is also on display because it has a remarkable place in the history of American rowing.

In 1973, after having raced at the European Championships in Moscow, a U.S. crew went to compete at the Heidelberg International Regatta in what was then West Germany. At Heidelberg, the Americans were short of one man in the eight race, the “Martini Achter Race”, where first prize was a brand new wooden eight which was built by the famous German boat builder Empacher in Eberbach. Joining the American oarsmen, Larry Gluckman, Calvin Coffey, Mike Vespoli, Hugh Stevenson, Terry Adams, Tim Mickelson, Ken Brown and Paul Hoffman, was the British rower Hugh Matheson (known to HTBS readers from entries about Chris Dodd’s brilliant book Pieces of Eight, published in 2012).

At the 1973 Heidelberg International Regatta, United States was the winner of the Martini Achter: Bow Larry Gluckman, 2 Calvin Coffey, 3 Hugh Matheson(GBR), 4 Mike Vespoli, 5 Hugh Stevenson, 6 Terry Adams, 7 Tim Mickelson, Stroke Ken Brown and Cox Paul Hoffman. Coach Steve Gladstone. From Peter Mallory's The Sport of Rowing.

In Peter Mallory’s splendid book The Sport of Rowing (2011), Gluckman is quoted saying that ‘Everybody wanted to win this beautiful Empacher wooden boat. It was like a piece of furniture.’ Norway entered a boat, too, and after the Americans had won the race, and the boat, Gluckman continued, ‘the Norwegians said, “Good row, America... and God Bless the Queen” because they knew one of our borrowed rowers, Hugh Matheson, was a Brit.’The Martini Achter stayed in Europe and came to belong to the NRF's fleet.

The following year, 1974, a slightly different U.S. crew went to compete at the World Championships in Lucerne, Switzerland, using the Martini Achter. The crew were: Bow Timothy Mickelson, 2 Kenneth Brown, 3 John Everett, 4 Mike Vespoli, 5 Mark Norelius, 6 Richard Cashin, 7 Hugh Stevenson, Stroke Alan Shealy and Cox David Weinberg, and Coach was Allen Rosenberg.

Here is a 3-minute film showing the eight practicing in the early summer of 1974 on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut before moving on to another training camp at Princeton, and then to Lucerne.



On the Rotsee, in an extremely tough race, which came to be known as “The Race of the Century,” the U.S. eight competed in the final against the world’s best rowing nations at that time, East Germany, Soviet Union, New Zealand, Great Britain and West Germany. New Zealand was in the lead for the first 1,800 metres, but then the crew in the Martini Achter put on a spurt which gave the Americans a slight lead. They managed to hold on to it and crossed the finish line as the World Champions. Another remarkable crew were the British who took a silver medal, despite having been dead last for most of the race. New Zealand came in third, East Germany forth, the Soviets fifth and West Germany sixth.

The Martini Achter was afterward used by the men’s varsity eight from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, to win the 1976 Ladies’ Challenge Plate at the Henley Royal Regatta, and by the University of Washington men’s varsity eight to take the 1977 Grand Challenge Cup, also at Henley. Later the boat was sold to a club in England.

In an e-mail to HTBS, Mike Vespoli writes, that some English oarsmen

...rowed it over a submerged shopping cart and tore a big hole in it. It sat in rack at the Thames Tradesmen Rowing Club where I found it and bought it for 500 British pounds and brought it back to the U.S. I contacted my boat mates from the ‘74 crew and we all chipped in to get the boat restored so that we could take a row in 1999 at the world champs in St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada to celebrate our 25th anniversary. The restoration cost four times the original sale price!

The Martini Achter was restored by boat builder Graeme King in Putney, Vermont. He spent around 200 hours restoring the shell to its former beauty, he has told HTBS. It took 420 hours to build it originally and then the hull was formed by vacuum with three layers of Spanish cedar veneer over a mold. After that, the framework was fitted in. When restoring the shell, King used 3/32” plywood, then laminated on a sheet of 1/32” African mahogany veneer.

Here is some data of the Martini Achter:
Builder: Empacher boat builder, Eberbach, Germany.
Length: 57 feet
Weight: 250 lbs (boat), 8 oars, total 60 lb.
Top Speed: Over 3 miles, 18 feet/second; in a sprint, 22 feet/second

The last words go to Mike Vespoli:

If Mystic Seaport ever decides to remove the shell from public display then we [the ’74 crew] would take possession of it. It was also agreed that we could use this shell in 2024 to celebrate our 50th!

If this ever happens, HTBS promises to be there taking a picture.

Henley Literary Festival 2012

HTBS’s Greg Denieffe went to this year’s Henley Literary Festival, and here is his report:

The 6th Henley Literary Festival took place last week between 24 and 30 September. In the South Oxfordshire town more famous for is regatta, it was no surprise that there was a couple of rowing related events of interest to HTBS readers.

New for this year was an event held at the town’s Kenton Theatre called Four Voices. Four people shared their entertaining, provocative and stimulating views speaking for 10 minutes on a different subject. It was unscripted with only one aim – to keep the audience amused, entertained and attentive. Monday’s (24th) quartet included Ben Hunt-Davis, Olympic gold medalist in Sydney in 2000; he is now a motivational speaker and runs his own company. In 2011 Ben published his first book Will It Make The Boat Go Faster. His website describes it as ‘providing Olympic-winning strategies to achieve more success in business, sport and everyday life’.

On Saturday (29th) Christopher Dodd at the River and Rowing Museum turned out to be an entertaining double act with Tim Crooks.

Dodd’s new book, Pieces of Eight, tells the story of Bob Janousek, the coach from Prague and his hand-picked crew who restored Britain to the Olympic medal podium in 1976. He shared the peaks and troughs – and the fights along the way – which propelled British rowing from the bottom to the top of international success. HTBS’s Göran Buckhorn reviewed the book on 7 May and I don’t intent to add to that review here.

After a brief introduction Chris treated us to two readings and described how he returned to rowing after an absence of ten years. Having rowed as school, he quickly decided against continuing with the sport in university when the captain of the boat club announced that “training would take place before breakfast”. Thankfully his employer, The Guardian newspaper sent him on an assignment in the early 1970s that resulted in his early involvement with the Bob Janousek coached GB rowing squad and the rest as they say ‘is history’.

In 1969, Janousek, despite then speaking no English, was appointed as British national rowing coach. In the next seven years, he introduced training methods to British rowing that were already widespread elsewhere in Europe and formed the first British national rowing squad. Janousek stepped down as coach after the 1976 Olympic Games, at which Britain gained silver medals in the double sculls and in the eights, but stayed in Britain to form a boat-building business, Janousek Racing Boats.

It would be fair to say that a direct line can be drawn between Janousek and the current success of the GB rowing squad. Chris certainly thinks so and Jon Henderson in his article in The Observer on 26 August 2007 appears to agree with this despite his final sentence crediting Baillieu and Hart as having started the evolution.

Having read the book it was clear that Janousek was more than the national rowing coach. Tim Crooks, an integral part of the GB rowing squad in the 1970s summed up his coach’s contribution when he said that Bob ‘carried us on his back’. As for Pieces of Eight, it is rightly described as ‘ripping yarn’ and Chris Dodd finished the session off nicely by saying that “writing the book was an absolute joy”.

That is exactly how I would describe the afternoon.

Dodd and Searle Holding Court

On 7 May, 2012, HTBS posted a review about Chris Dodd’s book Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians (March 2012). About this masterpiece HTBS wrote:

'Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians is indeed a must-read, must-have book. If you would like to understand how British rowing has managed to reach its high level of today – when we are only weeks away from the Olympic Games in London where the British yet again will meet glory on the water – this book will tell you how it all started, how one man taught the ‘bloody English’ how to row again.'

Read what HTBS has written earlier about Pieces of Eight here.

Dodd’s book will be featured on three occasions coming up soon:

Saturday 29 September
Dodd will hold court at Henley Literary Festival – River & Rowing Museum, between 3 and 4:15 p.m. (coffee from 2:30 p.m.). For reservations please call: 01491-415600.

Saturday 29 September
An evening with Bob Janousek, Chris Dodd and others who are featured in Pieces of Eight at Leander Club, 7:30 p.m. Tickets £47.50 to include canapés, dinner, wine and coffee, please contact Hannah Jones 01491-415623 or hannah.jones@rrm.co.uk

Monday 8 October
Greg Searle and Chris Dodd debate Great British Rowing at Cheltenham Literary Festival, from 8:45 p.m. to 10 p.m. (code L121). Featuring Searle’s newly published book If Not Now, When? (September 2012) and Pieces of Eight. Tickets via Cheltenham Literary Festival, please go here.

Martin's Words On Mark

Mark Hunter

On 12 May, 2012, HTBS wrote about editor Wendy Kewley’s glorious May issue of Rowing & Regatta, mentioning among other interesting articles, Martin Gough’s interview with Mark Hunter. As we have witnessed before, Martin is a man of many (good) words, but luckily he is running his own sport blog which means that what he cannot fit in his R&R article about Hunter, Martin can post in a blog post. This is exactly what he has done. Read the article’s “out-takes” here.

Chris Dodd

Talking about articles, yesterday the Henley Standard had a long article about Chris Dodd’s book Pieces of Eight. Read that article here.

Cyril Power’s ‘The Eight’

What I did not mention yesterday in my review about Chris Dodd’s entertaining new book, Pieces of Eight, is the ‘book’ itself. What I mean by ‘book’ is not the content – which, again, is brilliant – it is instead how the book looks, its binding, format, cover, and lay-out. As an old book editor/ publisher, I am not only interested in the content of a book, I would like it to look nice, too. The publisher of Pieces of Eight is the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames. It is, if I have counted correctly, the museum’s third published rowing book after Tom Weil’s Beauty and the Boats (2005) and Peter Mallory’s The Sport of Rowing (2011), and it is going to be interesting to see if there are any other books on rowing coming from the museum in the near future.

What I like with Dodd’s book is its format. It is a paperback, but it still has a book cover with flaps. The font is easy to read with a good lay-out. However, while I demand an index in a book like this, the index in Pieces of Eight is almost impossible to read despite my new reading spectacles.

But what I really love is the cover – ‘The Eight’ from 1930 by the British artist Cyril Power (1872-1951). According to material from the auction house Bonhams in London, which rowing historian Tom Weil has forwarded to me, Bonhams writes that “‘The Eight’ shows a racing crew during trials for the Head of the River on the Thames. Power drew it looking down on the boat from Hammersmith Bridge. With its dramatic sense of energy, ‘The Eight’ is one of Power’s most sought after works and the print was in excellent condition.” The ‘print’ mentioned in the text from Bonhams was sold by them last July for £59,520! Read more here. According to Weil only 50 copies were printed of Power’s ‘The Eight’. So, if you have a copy of this print laying about, dust it off and run immediately over to the nearest Bonhams office.

USA cover?

U.K. cover?

Looking at the website of the publishing company Shire Library, it seems that they are also going to use ‘The Eight’ for one of their books which is coming out this summer. Writer, historian, and rower Julie Summers’s book Rowing in Britain has it on its cover. Read more about Summers’s book here, and read her Newsletter about the book here. A little confusing is that Shire Library’s distributor in the USA, Random House, is showing a completely different cover for the book on their site. That looks nice, too, though…*

*Here is an update regarding the cover of Summers's book: it will not be the same as the one on the cover of Dodd's book, however, at this point of time, there are no certainties that it will be the one that Random House has on their site either. (Updated 9 May, 2012)

The Tenth Man

I have admired Chris Dodd’s writing on rowing for three decades. I have followed his writing in The Guardian and later his short stint at The Independent. For years I subscribed to ARA’s magazine Regatta, which was founded by Dodd, giving Great Britain at the time two quality rowing magazines as Rowing already existed, published by the boat building company Aylings – nowadays ARA is called British Rowing and its magazine Rowing & Regatta. And of course, I have read all of Dodd’s brilliant rowing books: Henley Royal Regatta (1981), The Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race (1983), Boating (1983), The Story of World Rowing (1992), Battle of the Blues: The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race from 1829 (ed. with John Marks; 2004), and Water Boiling Aft: London Rowing Club, the First 150 Years 1856-2006 (2006).

Chris Dodd

When Dodd began his career as a rowing correspondent in the beginning of the 1970s, he joined a small group of outstanding rowing journalists, to mention the maybe most famous ones: Dickie Burnell, Desmond Hill, Geoffrey Page, Jim Railton, and John Rooda. Dodd is the only one left of these gentlemen of the rowing press, and today he has to be regarded as the doyen of rowing writers and historians. Nowadays, he is writing for the electronic rowing publication Rowing Voice, which he co-founded, and since 1997 he is the curator and historian at the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, a beautiful institution he also co-founded.

With this background, or should I write, firm base to stand on, Dodd is highly qualified to pen the story about how British rowing rose from pure misery to once again have crews standing on the medal podiums at the World Championships and Olympic Games. His new book is called Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians, which was published in March, and it splendidly tells the tale of a forgotten era of British rowing. It might be hard for rowing people these days to understand how our time’s greatest rowing nation, which ‘invented’ modern rowing in the beginning of the 1800s and which has fed rowing giants like Sir Steven Redgrave and Sir Matthew Pinsent, had a two-decade-long ‘down period’. From after the Olympic Games in 1948 to the beginning of the 1970s (with the exception of an Olympic silver in the coxless four in 1964) British rowing had been without any medals and barely made it to the finals in the World Championships and Olympic regattas.

After the end of the 1960s when British rowing had hit rock bottom, ARA decided to do something drastic: invite a coach from Prague, who had Olympic bronze medals as a member of the Czech eights in Rome in 1960 and Tokyo in 1964, to organise and guide the national teams and to educate the coaches who trained the crews, and to write the first ARA coaching training manual. His name was Bohumil Janoušek and he arrived in London in October 1969. Besides his Olympic rowing medals, he had two more key attributes in his personal baggage “that would serve him well in the hide-bound and divided rowing society that he had parachuted into” Dodd writes, “He had a degree in sports science from Charles University in Prague. And he spoke no English.”

Of course, not everyone liked or approved that help was coming from the outside, especially not some of the coaches from the old system with ‘private navies’. It was difficult for a coach to train a crew which had members from different clubs, which Bob Janousek, the name he took in England, soon discovered when he went to coach the national eight that had oarsmen from Leander and Thames Tradesmen. There was a huge difference in styles and techniques whether the rowers came from Cambridge, Leander or Tradesmen. Nor did the oarsmen understand how to row at a steady rate for 20 minutes; in the beginning they all rowed their hearts out and totally collapsed after 9 minutes. Janousek had brought with him some coaching ideas from Karl Adam of the Ratzeburg Rowing Academy, but it was not easy to apply them to the British scene.

Janousek, cover of Rowing 1975

At first, the Czech coach kept his distance from the national crews, allowing their coaches to train the different boats, but no British crew managed to reach the A-finals at the 1970 World Championships at St Catherines, the 1971 European Championships at Copenhagen, and the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich (exception of a fifth place by a Leander double). As Janousek had decided to stay in Britain with his family and thereby disobeying the Czech rowing government body to come home, he did not go to the 1973 European Championships which were held in Moscow – with the Cold War lingering about, as a ‘defector’ it was not likely that he would be allowed to go back to Britain.

In September 1973, Janousek decided to take a more active role as the National coach and sent out a letter to a selected group of oarsmen inviting them to join the National Squad which was going to be personally coached by him. He ended his letter by writing “I cannot promise you medals, even though this is what we shall try for, but I can promise that it will be worth the effort.” None of them, including Janousek, knew how hard the road was going to be.

At the first international regatta for the newly formed National team of oarsmen from Leander and Tradesmen at Mannheim, Germany, in June 1974, they were rowing in a coxless four and a coxed four, each crew mixed between the clubs and with a nervous rivalry crawling outside their skin. After their repecharge heat the men in the coxless four suddenly started a fist fight within (!) the crew. In the mini bus back to their barracks Janousek tried to cool down his crews. In his broken English he said, which also underlined how bad British rowing was at the time: “It’s very important we don’t start to argue with each other. Keep calm guys, nobody expects you to win – you are bloody English. The English never win anything.”

While Janousek’s oarsmen kept on struggling within the crews, with their foreign coach, and with their different styles, at least with the Czech coach came structure to their training both on the water and on land. Janousek was also constantly present, and without the oarsmen’s knowledge he was molding them into competitive crews. At the 1974 World Championships in Lucerne, the only thing Janousek told his eight, when they went out to row in the final, was: “enjoy yourselves”. Despite a good start, the British eight with L. D. Robertson, W. G. Mason, J. Clark, D. L. Maxwell, H. P. Matheson, T. J. Crooks, J. C. Yallop, stroke F. L. Smallbone, and cox P. J. Sweeney were last at the 500-metre mark, but they passed West Germany at 750 metres. They had a ‘big burn’ at 1,100 metres when they got closer to the rest of the field. Then cox Sweeney began talking the crew through the other crews, moving past the East Germans, the Russians, and close to the finish line, the New Zealanders. The British eight never managed to over-come the U.S. crew, but to everyone’s surprise Janousek’s oarsmen took a silver medal, and it was also a big surprise that the Americans took the gold, both these crews beating the East Germans, Russians, and the mighty crew from New Zealand, who had done so brilliantly the last couple of years.

Next year’s World Championships were held in Nottingham, and the coxed four (R.J. Ayling, Crooks, Matheson, R. C. Lester, and cox Sweeney) took a fourth place as did the coxless four (Mason, Clark, Robertson, and Yallop), while the double sculls (M. J. Hart and C. L. Baillieu) took a bronze medal repeating their position both at the European Championships in 1973 and the World Championships in 1974. The 1975 results were not as good as Janousek and his oarsmen wanted especially on their ‘home waters’, but they quickly had to switch focus on the following year’s upcoming big event, the Olympic Games in Montreal.

Bob's Boys in 1975: Lester, Matheson, Clark, Yallop, Aylings, Sweeney, Crooks, Robertson, Manson, and Janousek.

When the Brits arrived at the Olympic basin at Isle Notre-Dame, Montreal, not only did they have the ‘old’ Empacher eight which had served them well, but also the Carbon Tiger, a much lighter boat made of composite plastic and carbon fibre. The new boat worried a lot of their competitors, but while it was very fast on the water it had issues with the rigging and shoulders, and at the end it was not used. Maybe Clark put it best: “If I win a gold medal I don’t want a bastard telling me it was because of the boat.”

Those of you who know your Olympic rowing history remember that Great Britain did not take a gold medal at the Olympic rowing regatta in Montreal, the championship title went to East Germany, with the British boys coming in as a very good second boat. Or did the British actually win? To this day, some in the crew, which on that day was: Robertson, Smallbone, Clark, Maxwell, Matheson, Crooks, Yallop, Lester, and Sweeney, still think that they were the non-cheating boat, the clean crew, which was not on any drugs. Rumour had it that the East Germans were on ‘something’, pills or got some ‘vitamin’ injections by their coach before a race. At the end of the book, Dodd brings up the question and debates whether it would be possible. Nothing was ever proved, so the question still is unanswered, and will probably never be answered.

In his ‘foreword’ Chris Dodd writes that Pieces of Eight is not a book of rowing history, but a ‘collective memory of a coach, a group of oarsmen, and a reporter who followed them in their day. It is therefore, a memoir, not a history.’ Well, whatever you would like to call it, a memoir, a rowing biography, a history book, it is a well-written, damn good book! And it has an important story to tell, as one man, single handedly torn down the social barrier, which only a foreigner could do who did not understand the English class system. After the 1976 Olympic Games Bob Janousek handed in his resignation as the National team coach. His next job was as a ‘baker’, or that is at least what he called himself when he joined John Vigurs to start their boat building company Carborcraft. When the company failed, Janousek established his own company Janousek Racing, which became world-known. What happened to Janousek’s oarsmen? Many of them continued to be involved in rowing in some way, some active rowers, coaches, or rowing advocates, and today some of them are Henley Stewards. They all think fondly of Janousek, he was, one of them said, “the tenth man in the boat”.

Dodd has used his interviews with everyone who was involved in the revival of British rowing at this time in a most effective way, allowing them to reflect and think back of their glory days as Janousek’s men. While it might not always work to have the objects of your book to move back and forth in time, I do not think there is a problem in Dodd’s book to have the oarsmen to ‘pop in’ in present time to leave comments and arguments if a thing was right or not.

Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians is indeed a must-read, must-have book. If you would like to understand how British rowing has managed to reach its high level of today – when we are only weeks away from the Olympic Games in London where the British yet again will meet glory on the water – this book will tell you how it all started, how one man taught the ‘bloody English’ how to row again.

Order a copy of Chris Dodd’s Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians, here.

Tomorrow on HTBS there will be a short piece about the beautiful artwork “The Eight” by Cyril Power which grace the cover of Dodd’s book.