Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Olympic silver medalist rower, seven-times Henley Grand Challenge Cup winner, Oxford Blue and President, later coach of Oxford crews.
On the island
Eight records
Grand Challenge Cup Stewards' Enclosure (Henley Regatta)
No transcript supplied for first disc; not identifiable.
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:51When you came down from Oxford, you kept on rowing. Under whose colours?
First of all, Leander. And then my last year at the Thames Rowing Club.
Presenter asks
2:36How old were you when you decided to turn in active rowing?
It was Crane [a question of being a scull crane after that age]. I don't think it was pressure of work. I used to take my holiday as rowing. I never took time out of the firm, and veins started coming up on my forehead and that sort of thing, and I'd rather lost my will to win, so I thought it was time to pack it in.
Presenter asks
3:20Is rowing a growing sport?
Getting much, much more popular and it has been increasing very much since the war. We are getting, thank goodness, a tremendous lot of help from the provinces, and they are coming down sending real good crews and I have no doubt that they will have a tremendous salutary effect on the whole of English rowing.
Presenter asks
The University's boat race. What is the appeal of this race? ... Why is it [that it attracts attention all over the world]?
I think it's rarely because people always prefer to see a race that is side by side and one which looks like a procession, but which is in fact a time race. Of course, there's the tradition of the Burgesses. I think there is a tremendous tradition and because their fathers did it, their grandfathers did it. It's been going on for so long, one must see the boat race. It must be one of the toughest races in the world.
Presenter asks
5:01There are occasions when this kind of experiment [with a new shape of boat or blade] can be disastrous. There's the story about you redesigning the boat in which you rode in the Pairs event for the Goblets at Henley, coming unstuck, or rather the boat coming unstuck.
Yes, my dear old partner, Lucas, always used to sort of start shaving bits here, and filing bits here, and sawing bits here. As it happened, he had nothing to do with this particular accident. The stretcher gave way and went through the side of the boat and green water started coming on. I'd lost my stretcher, which was rather difficult to steer and row, and we just didn't finish the course. We sank in the most spectacular fashion, just short of the winning post.
“I caught the bug, I suppose. That's really what it comes to, but he never suggested it at all. He was a very interfering man, normally.”
“We had a crew that seemed to really fall together under the leadership of a man called Horsfall, who had rowed for Oxford before the war.”
“I always think that perhaps if they had kept it as a college crew, it might have just made up that four-fifths of a second that we might have won. It'd have been the only time a college crew would ever, ever have won the Olympics, I think.”
“I tried to get people to lug me over so that I could say that I'd been in a winning Steward 4. Everyone who'd tried had been completely unsuccessful. But on this occasion, my last race at Henley, we got home by two foot.”