taken place, instituted a very careful inquiry into the health of those who had taken part in the University Boat-race from 1829 to 1869. Their number amounted, if I remember rightly, to 294, of whom 255 were alive at the date of the inquiry. Of these 115 were benefited by rowing, 162 were uninjured, and only in 17 cases was any injury stated to have resulted. And it must be remembered that this inquiry covered a period during which far less care, as a general rule, was exercised both as to the selection and the training of men than is the case at the present day. I may add my own experience. Since I began to row, in 1874, I have rowed and raced with or against hundreds of men in college races and at regattas, and I have watched closely the rowing of very many others in University and in Henley crews. I have kept in touch with rowing men, both my contemporaries and my successors, and amongst them all I could not point to one (putting aside for the moment the three special cases I have just discussed) who has been injured by the exercise, or would state himself to have been injured. On the contrary, I can point to scores and scores of men who have been strengthened in limb and health—I say nothing
here of any moral effect—by their early races and the training they had to undergo for them. I could at this moment pick a crew composed of men all more than thirty years old who are still, or have been till quite recently, in active rowing, and, though some of them are married men, I would back them to render a good account of themselves in Eight or Four or Pair against any selection of men that could be made. Nay more, in any other contests of strength or endurance I believe they would more than hold their own against younger athletes, and would overwhelm any similar number of non-athletes of the same or any other age. As contests I should select a hard day's shooting over dogs, cross-country riding, tug-of-war, boxing, long-distance rowing, or, in fact, any contest in which the special element of racing in light ships has no part. For such contests I could pick, not eight, but eighty men well over thirty years old, and if the limit were extended to twenty-four years of age I could secure an army. Is there any one who doubts that my rowing men would knock the non-athletes into a cocked hat? For it must be remembered that the bulk of rowing men are not exclusively devoted to oarsmanship. A very large proportion of those
that I have known have been good all-round sportsmen.
As to the general effect of rowing on strength and health I may perhaps be pardoned if I cite my own case, not because there is anything specially remarkable in it, but because it bears on some of the questions that have been raised, and I can speak about it with certainty. In early childhood I had a serious illness which considerably retarded my physical development. At school, however, I took my part in all sports, played three years in the Cricket XI. and in the Football XV., and won several prizes at the athletic sports. I went to Cambridge in 1874, when I was three months short of nineteen, and immediately took to rowing. I was certainly not a particularly strong boy then, though I had a fair share of activity. I rowed persistently in Eights, Fours and Pairs, at first with labour and distress, but gradually, as time went on, with ease and pleasure, and I found that the oftener I rowed the greater became my powers of endurance. I ought to add that I never rowed in the University Race, but I have borne my share in thirty-six bumping races, as well as in numerous other races ranging in distance from three-quarters
of a mile to three miles. I believe that the six consecutive races of a May Term call for endurance at least as great as the single race from Putney to Mortlake. My actual muscular strength, too, increased very largely, and has ever since maintained itself unimpaired. I have found that this exercise has, in fact, strengthened and consolidated me all round; and I can think of no other exercise that could have had upon me the same salutary effect that I am justified in attributing mainly to rowing—an effect which has enabled me to endure great exertion, sometimes in extremes of heat or of cold, without the smallest ill result, and has brought me to middle age with sound organs, a strong constitution, active limbs, and a good digestion. There are hundreds of other men who could, I doubt not, give a similar account of themselves.
Out of this main discussion on the health of athletes there sprang a subsidiary one, which proved of even greater interest to rowing men. It was started by Mr. Sandow, the eminent weight-lifter and modern representative of Hercules. Mr. Sandow, stimulated by a disinterested love for his fellow-men in general, and for those of Cambridge University in particular, wrote an article in the
St. James's Gazette in which he put forward his own peculiar views on the proper system for the training of athletes. He ended by declaring that if he were allowed to train a Cambridge crew according to his system (it being understood that rowing instruction was at the same time to be imparted to them by a properly qualified teacher), he would guarantee to turn out a crew the like of which had never before sat in a boat. We were to infer, though this was at first sight not obvious, that this crew would easily defeat an Oxford crew trained on a system which Mr. Sandow evidently considered to be absurd and obsolete.
According to Mr. Sandow's system, as he subsequently developed it, the members of this crew were to have complete license in all things. They were to eat what they liked, drink what they liked, smoke as much as they liked, and, in fact, make their own good pleasure the supreme law of their existence. All that Mr. Sandow stipulated was that for some two hours a day during a period of several months these men were to put themselves in Mr. Sandow's hands for the purpose of muscular development all round according to the methods usually employed by him. Any spare energy that
might then remain to them might be devoted to the work of rowing in the boat.
Now, in the first place, there are certain elementary difficulties which would go far to prevent the adoption of this experiment. The crew is not selected several months before the race; and even if it were, it would be practically impossible for the men composing it to spare the time required by Mr. Sandow. After all, even the most brilliant of us have to get through a certain amount of work for our degrees. There are lectures to be attended, there is private reading, not to speak of the time which has to be devoted to the ordinary social amenities of life at a University. Sport has its proper place in the life of an undergraduate; but it does not, and cannot, absorb the whole of that life. Yet if a man is to spend two hours with Mr. Sandow, and about two hours and a half (I calculate from the moment he leaves his rooms until he returns from the river) on the exercise of rowing, it is not easy to see how he will have sufficient vigour left to him to tackle the work required even for the easiest of pass examinations. I can foresee that not only the man himself, but his tutors and his parents might offer some rather serious objections.