Rowing

by R. C. Lehmann

—

"Just imagine a crew of a hundred or two
Shoved three deep in a kind of a barge,
Like a cargo of kegs, with no room for their legs,
And oars inconveniently large.
Quoth he, 'παντες προσω' and they try to do so.
At the sight the poor coach's brains addle;
So muttering 'οιμοι,' he shouts out 'ἑτοιμοι,'
And whatever the Greek is for 'paddle.'
Now do look alive, number ninety and five,
You're 'sugaring,' work seems to bore you;
You are late, you are late, number twenty and eight,
Keep your eyes on the man that's before you."

So much for the trireme. But neither the Greeks nor any other race thought of adapting their boats merely to purposes of racing until the English, with their inveterate passion for open-air exercise, took the matter in hand. African war-canoes have been known to race, but their primary object is still the destruction of rival canoes together with their dusky freight. In Venice the gondoliers are matched annually against one another, but both the gondola and the sandolo remain what they always have been—mere vessels for the conveyance of passengers and goods. The man who would make war in a racing ship would justly be relegated to Hanwell, and to carry passengers, or even one "passenger," in such a boat is generally looked upon as a certain presage

of defeat. Consider for a moment. The modern racing ship (eight, four, pair, or single) is a frail, elongated, graceful piece of cabinet work, held together by thin stays, small bolts, and copper nails, and separating you from the water in which it floats by an eighth of an inch of Mexican cedar. The whole weight of the sculling-boat, built by Jack Clasper, in which Harding won the Searle Memorial Cup, was only nineteen pounds, i.e. about 112 pounds lighter than the man it carried. Considering the amount of labour and trained skill that go towards the construction of these beautiful machines, the price cannot be said to be heavy. Most builders will turn you out a sculling-boat for from £12 to £15, a pair for about £20, a four for £33, and an eight for £55. But the development of the racing type to its present perfection has taken many years. Little did the undergraduates who, in 1829, drove their ponderous man-of-war's galleys from Hambledon Lock to Henley Bridge, while the stricken hills of the Thames Valley rebounded to the shouts of the spectators—little did they imagine that their successors, rowing on movable seats and with rowlocks projecting far beyond the side

would speed in delicate barques, of arrowy shape and almost arrowy swiftness, from Putney to Mortlake—in barques so light and "crank" that, built as they are without a keel, they would overturn in a moment if the balance of the oars were removed. The improvements were very gradual. In 1846 the University race was rowed for the first time in boats with outriggers. That innovation had, however, been creeping in for some years before that. Mr. Hugh Hammersley, who rowed in the Oriel boat which started head of the river at Oxford in 1843, has told me that in that year the University College boat, stroked by the famous Fletcher Menzies, was fitted with outriggers at stroke and bow; and the bump by which University displaced Oriel was generally ascribed to the new invention.

In 1857 the University race was rowed in boats without a keel, and oars with a round loom were used for the first time by both crews. At the Henley Regatta of the preceding year the Royal Chester Rowing Club had entered a crew rowing in this novel style of keelless boat for the Grand Challenge and the Ladies' Cups. Her length was only fifty-four feet, and her builder was Mat Taylor,

a name celebrated in the annals of boat-building, for it is to him, in the first instance, that our present type of racing-boat owes its existence. "The Chester men," Mr. W. B. Woodgate tells us in his Badminton book on boating, "could not sit their boat in the least; they flopped their blades along the water on the recovery in a manner which few junior crews at minor regattas would now be guilty of; but they rowed well away from their opponents, who were only College crews." They won, as a matter of fact, both the events for which they entered.

One might have thought that with this invention improvements would have ceased. But in course of time the practical experience of rowing men suggested to them that if they slid on their seats, both the length and power of their stroke through the water would be increased. At first they greased their fixed seats, and slid on those. But it was found that the strain caused by this method exhausted a crew. In 1871 a crew of professionals used a seat that slid on the thwarts, and beat a crew that was generally held to be superior, and from that moment slides, as we now know them, came into general use. In 1873 the University

crews rowed on sliding seats for the first time. Since then the length of the slide has been increased from about nine inches to fifteen inches, or even more, a change which has made the task of the boat-builder in providing floating capacity more difficult; but in all essentials the type of boat remains the same. It ought to be added that the Americans, to a large extent, use boats moulded out of papier maché, but this variation has never obtained favour in England, though boats built in this manner by the well-known Waters of Troy (U.S.A.) have been seen on English rivers. The Columbia College crew won the Visitors' Cup at Henley in 1878 in a paper boat, and she was afterwards bought by First Trinity, Cambridge, but she never won a race again.