Eric Fairbairn - Olympic Oarsman, Soldier In The Great War, Part 2

Two Blue Boats in 1911: (closes to the camera) Cambridge crew studying their opponents rowing by: bow S. E. Swann; 2 P. V. G. Van der Byl; 3 F. E. Hellyer; 4 C. F. Burnand; 5 C. R. le Blanc-Smith; 6 J. B. Rosher; 7 G. E. Fairbairn; stroke R. W. M. Arbuthnot; cox C. A. Skinner. Oxford crew: bow C. E. Tinne; 2 L. G. Wormald; 3 R. E. Burgess; 4 E. J. H. V. Millington-Drake; 5 C. W. B. Littlejohn; 6 A. S. Garton; 7 D. Mackinnon; stroke R. C. Bourne; cox H B Wells. With Bourne as stroke, Oxford would have a four-year winning streak, starting in 1909.

Here continues Stephen Cooper’s article from yesterday about Eric Fairbairn. The article is an abridged extract from Cooper’s book The Final Whistle: The Great War in Fifteen Players, which will be published in September 2012.

The following year, 1909, Eric captained the College Boat Club, but missed a second Blue when he fell ill a week before the Boat Race. Jesus entered the Grand at Henley, but lost the final to those pesky ‘Men of Ghent’. They would have to wait a while for the rematch, but in May 1911 set out on what coxswain Conrad Skinner called the ‘Belgian Expedition’. Later to be the Reverend Skinner, he had no hesitation in likening Jesus to Biblical underdogs in his expeditionary account:

‘The enterprise of taking a crew drawn from a single college to race the Belgians on their own waters was greeted for the most part with the scorn ridicule and cynical indifference which David evoked in his hardy challenge to Goliath of Gath.’

But this crew was not lacking in experience or motivation. It boasted six of the crew beaten in the 1909 Grand Challenge by the Belgians. Coaches were Uncle Steve and Stanley Bruce, who would later become Prime Minister of Australia. Thanks to Mr Bruce they ‘came to the post in the pink of physical fitness… able to turn out 43, 45 and even 47 strokes a minute without the least discomfort’. To their astonished pleasure, they were hailed as superstars:

‘The race became the primary topic in press and popular conversation. English ideals of sport were paramount and my cutting book is an almost unbelievable revelation of Belgian devotion to English sport and representative sportsmen.’

Over 100,000 spectators lined the canal at Terdonck on 25 May to see Jesus win ‘amid an uproar that was little short of deafening’. The acclaim continued off the water. A march composed in their honour was played at the gala dinner; ten thousand people waited four hours outside the banquet hall to catch a glimpse of the Jesus crew; a set of race postcards sold 170,000 copies in one week. Skinner later admitted: ‘No crew was ever feted as we were and many of us took shame at the poverty of England’s welcome to Belgian crews at Henley in past times. Never will any member of the crew forget the amazing generosity of the Gantois, in fact of the Belgians as a nation’.

Jesus College did not forget. Moved by the fate of tiny Belgium as Germany overran it in the first weeks of August 1914, the College started a Belgian relief fund in gratitude for the hospitality they had received at Ghent and raised £800 (or £60,000 today). Eric Fairbairn joined up immediately the recruitment offices opened after August Bank Holiday: his Belgian rivals were now allies in need. He was commissioned into the 10th Durham Light Infantry (DLI).

Eric Fairbairn was also an accomplished sculler.

In all, 150 College members, including fifty from the Boat Club, were to give their lives in the War. The members of the ‘Belgian Expedition’ were hardest hit. Like Eric, they rushed to volunteer for the defence of their gracious hosts, outraged by reports of German atrocities. Hugh Willoughby Shields, who won the Lowe Double Sculls with Eric in 1910, was the first to die in October 1914, tending a wounded guardsman at Ypres; Lt Henry Goldsmith of the Devonshires was killed at Ploegsteert in May 1915; Thomas Crowe, died at Gallipoli in June; and Gerald Hudson was killed in January 1916. All four men vanished without trace; their names are to be found on memorials to those with no known grave.

Eric Fairbairn stood once again on Belgian soil on 12 June in trenches west of Wijtschate. He was a few miles from Ypres, and fifty from Ghent where the reception had been so tumultuous on that far-off day. On the night of 17 June Eric moved into the frontline: there was no attack over the top, just the sapping attrition of nightly shelling and mortar fire, and the ritual ‘stand-to’ at dusk and dawn. The War Diary for 20 June records: ‘All companies returned from trenches early this morning… D. Coy reports 2/Lt Fairburn [sic] dangerously wounded’. Like so many of the New Army’s inexperienced junior officers, Eric’s war did not last long: he was fatally wounded in his first week at the front.

Two silk handkerchiefs are the only personal effects returned to his mother. In February 1919, she also received his ‘Death Penny’ bronze plaque, to place alongside his Olympic silver medal. On the outer edge of the 12 cm disk are the words, ‘He died for freedom and honour’.

One Ghent winner who survived, Conrad Skinner, remembering his friends from that glorious day of innocent sporting battle in 1911, wrote: ‘it is a melancholy coincidence that the whole stern four of the Jesus crew, and also Shields, lost their lives in the Great War. Yet there is a feeling of just pride that this should occur in aiding Belgium in her gallant defence.’

Eric Fairbairn - Olympic Oarsman, Soldier In The Great War, Part 1

The 1908 winning Boat Race crew, Cambridge: bow F. H. Jerwood; 2 G. E. Fairbairn; 3 O. A. Carver; 4 H. E. Kitching; 5 J. S. Burn; 6 E. G. Williams; 7 E. W. Powell; stroke D. C. R. Stuart; cox R. F. R. P. Boyle.

George Eric Fairbairn (1888-1915), Australian and GB Olympic oarsman, is featured in a new book by Stephen Cooper: The Final Whistle: the Great War in Fifteen Players, which will be published in September 2012. Fairbairn occasionally played rugby, but was better known as part of the Fairbairn rowing dynasty. This is an abridged extract from the Cooper’s book.

Eric Fairbairn came from a large Australian family in Melbourne. He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1906, the latest in a line of rowing Fairbairns, and by no means the last. ‘The most frequent name in Boat Race annals is that of Fairbairn, for their name has appeared in the Cambridge lists in no less than seven past contests: Mr A. A. Fairbairn rowed in 1858 and 1860; Mr C. Fairbairn in 1879 and Mr S. Fairbairn in 1882, 1883, 1886 and 1887.’ Eric’s Times obituary commented:

‘His rowing achievements are rather connected with Jesus College, Cambridge, which owes no small part of its fame as a rowing college to that great oarsman of the eighties, Mr Stephen Fairbairn.’

The river, not academic study, was to preoccupy Eric at Cambridge. He spent five years there, won Blues in 1908 and 1911, but did not do enough to earn his degree. However, ‘his rowing career has been one unbroken chain of successes … Like all geniuses, he has his idiosyncrasies. He hates collars, takes no milk in his tea through fear of dead flies, and is a confirmed Peripatetic after bump-suppers.’ (i.e. he was given to wandering about in a drunken state after the Boat Club dinners.)

His annus mirabilis was 1908, although it was not without controversy. Eric stroked the victorious coxless four in Michaelmas term. Jesus rowed over as Head of the River in the Lents and won the Ladies’ Plate at Henley Regatta for the first time in thirty years. Eric Fairbairn also won the Colquhoun Sculls. Greater challenges were to come.

At Putney Bridge on 4 April, at precisely 3.30 p.m. he sat in the two seat of the University eight for the annual Boat Race against Oxford. Cambridge, although hot favourites having won the two previous encounters, did not draw away until after Barnes Bridge to win by two and a half lengths, in 19 min. 20 sec. The Tideway course, rowed against the stream, is one of the most gruelling sporting events in the world. The New York Times reported that ‘the Oxford men who had gamely rowed a losing race were much distressed at the finish’. In his blue blazer at dinner on that triumphant night in 1908, he would have been as peripatetic as a newt.

But the victory was deemed a lacklustre performance from the Eight nominated to represent Great Britain in the London Olympic Games that summer. The selectors, fearful of losing at home, hedged their bets and invited ‘some of the older men to try to get fit with a view to rowing in the Olympic Regatta’. A second crew of veteran Blues, long retired from the river, rowed under the flag of Leander. The Light Blue crew was reshuffled: the only man to lose his seat was Eric, replaced by fellow Jesus man and former Cambridge President, Henry Goldsmith. No explanation is given, and he remained a substitute; was there some prejudice against an Australian in the Blue Riband event of the Olympic regatta? It did not stop him competing for Britain in another boat; Eric would have the last laugh.

The rowing was held at Henley-on-Thames, spiritual home of the sport. The regular course of 1 mile 550 yards was lengthened in the hope that the heavyweight GB/Leander crew might take advantage, which they initially did over the renowned Canadian Argonauts. In the second semi-final, the student Eight faced the mighty Belgians, of the Royal Club Nautique de Gand [Ghent], twice winners of the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley. The Light Blues ‘showed unmistakable signs of staleness…and when the strain came, the crew disintegrated’. This was the only heat in which Britain was defeated by a visiting nation. ‘Team GB/Cambridge’ had to be content with Bronze but Leander saved the Empire’s blushes by pulling through for final Gold over the Belgians.

Watching from the bank, Eric Fairbairn would see the red, yellow and black of Belgium again, and more than once. Meanwhile he teamed up with Jesus colleague Philip Verdon in the coxless pairs. The All-British final saw John Fenning and Gordon Thomson take gold from Verdon and Fairbairn. But Eric had his silver Olympic medal, one up on his erstwhile colleagues in the Eight.

Stephen Cooper’s article about Eric Fairbairn continues tomorrow.