History Gallery-1960

BOATS AND BOATING by Ian Wilson

I mentioned earlier that I eventually became President of the Boat Club but that was for my last two years at Reading. In my first-year I went sailing on the Sonning reach. Past the gasometer and the mouth of the Kennet and Avon canal and a few hundred yards along the towpath was a small isolated cottage sandwiched between the river and the railway line. This was sailing HQ. I remember that the club was very well regulated with a Boatswain, regular fixtures, and boats on depreciation so that they were replaced regularly. The clubhouse was cosy. I was only interested in mucking about and not in racing so I was never more than on the periphery of the club. Then and now I can't stand (or even understand) all the rules which are used by the experts as strategy. In some ways it seems as dirty a sport as Croquet. In recent 'fun' regattas at Tai Mi Duk where I, as part owner of an Enterprise, was persuaded to join the Chinese U team, I seemed to spend all my time being yelled at - starboard!!, you hit the mark!!, water!!, doing 360's and cursing loudly! What would be nice is a no-rules race from A to B.

Back to Reading in the early 60s. One advantage was that we were close to Fairy Marine in Maidenhead who made the Fireflies' used for University competition. They were built like the Mosquito fighter - diagonal crossed ply beautifully strong and light construction but hell to repair. I visited the boat yard once with Chris. On another occasion I, as holder of a driving licence, was sent with the club ex-post office van to collect two masts. These vans were battered but very cheap to buy and with luck were still running. There was almost a nasty happening when I was returning, masts on roof, with a very illegal overhang front and back. For some reason I had not remembered that the van had only three gears and selected top left after stopping at the traffic lights in Broad Street. The van took off smartly in reverse when the lights turned green. I jammed the brakes on and, hardly daring to, looked back. I clearly remember the end of the mast gently vibrating up and down half an inch from the windscreen of the car behind with the driver thrust back in his seat, arms rigid, watching the end of the mast like a petrified rabbit. I found first (bottom left) and moved off smartly.

Now to the serious stuff - rowing in VIIIs (with the occasional coxless pair and four). The boathouses were beautiful wooden structures side by side (the men's slightly larger than the women's) in a sylvan park setting downstream of Caversham Bridge. Reading Rowing Club was a vast rambling structure upstream of the bridge on the opposite bank near the Reading Regatta finish. So vast in fact that I remember remarking, when going there many years later to change as a veteran competitor, that the puddle in the middle of the ground floor was big enough for a sculling outing. None of these boathouses exist now. The university's burnt down in the 80s and Reading RC sold the land to a developer for a handsome price and have built a new boathouse. In fact there was an appeal to University alumni for memorabilia especially photographs to replace those lost in the fire. Some day I will sort out my collection, especially the one with our trophies the year we won the Junior-Senior Division in all 3 Thames "Head of the Rivers" - Reading, Kingston and Tideway (the big one with 400+ crews) .

The most dramatic feature at RUBC was 'Happy' Haslam the boatman yes we had a boatman. I remember from a book on sculling from the turn of the century "the outing starts when the boatman has put your boat in the water" - this caused great amusement at Guildford RC more recently. Happy was a weathered ruddy-faced thickset true son of Berkshire whose hobby was Old-time Dancing and always carried a roll of bank notes in his pocket. A girl friend (Myra perhaps) lost her purse once and Happy whipped out a fiver as a gift, not a loan. His favourite saying, said to the crew as we were boating for a race, 'Get your toes in er garters and your teeth in er tits and go like ell". He liked to remind us, when we were ensconced in the boat tents at Henley Royal, that professionals (those that earned their wages from rowing) were not allowed to appear on the Henley towpath - never mind coach the crew which, in other places, he did, from time to time. This was a distortion of the old idea of gentlemen and players. Those who worked with their hands had an unfair advantage. There used to be professional sculling races long ago, the only one that I remember surviving till the 60's was the Dogget Coat and Badge on the Tideway (the tidal Thames in London). Certainly Henley Royal was rather snobbish. One year the Pimms swiggers were witness to a right old mouthful from our Geordie cox, a miner's son from Morpeth. It was his normal way of encouraging the crew" come-on you f*kk*as, let's see your bl**dy guts". I half expected us to be summarily ejected from the boat tents.

The other permanent personnel at RUBC were our two coaches - Mr. Butters, bursar of St. Patrick's Halt a bachelor with a bushy moustache, a really nice person and one of the old school, who looked after the 2nd VIII and Frank Ortner who was the 1st VIII coach. Butters also coached the Hall VIII in the autumn term, of which I was a member in my final year. A special steak diet for the crew was arranged and a barrel of best bitter was donated when we trounced the beefy 'Agri 'men (farmers) of Wantage Hall, the traditional winners of the event. As the beer was free, and there were eight and a half of us I drank far too fast in order to grab my share only to see it reappear plus my supper all over the staircase of z block. A very rare occurrence for me as I rarely 'honked'.

Frank Ortner was also a nice big old sort who saw his glory days with Kingston Rowing Club and won something at Henley Royal Regatta pre war. He always invited the first eight to his home in the summer for strawberries and cream and treated us to lunch at the Little White Hart during Henley week. He was getting on and towards the end of my time at Reading had difficulty in following us on his bike on the towpath so the club had a launch made using an old rowing 'tub' (clinker two man training boat) as a mould. Happy could then drive the launch with Frank splendidly installed in the bows. Reading was, maybe still is, one of the top non-collegiate Universities as far as rowing was concerned so the year after RUBC was the fastest in that category at the Tideway Head of the River race Gust before my time) Frank donated the Ortner trophy for the winners. Subsequent to that Nottingham or Durham always pipped us by a few seconds so Reading never won his trophy in my time.

We had a beautiful stretch of the river to row on as mentioned earlier. Perhaps this was a good thing as many hours per week were spent concentrating on catch, drive with the legs, fast hands away and let the boat run. The rowing stretch is from Caversham to Mapledurham, ever changing from meadow to willows and, at the Reading end, large riverside houses. We always seemed to be on the river at 11 o'clock on remembrance Sunday. On the sound of the maroon we drifted silently in our eight with only the birds and our heavy breathing breaking the two minutes silence.

Anyway, back to the start. I turned up for rowing at the start of my second year and after a couple of goes in the tub was selected for the third VIII. So I had the simple purple ribbon sewn on the arms of the white rowing vest. Incidentally the Boat Club was the only one to have it's own scarf (which most members wore as it was more striking then the Uni. Scarf). The club also had its own blazer, which almost no one wore, as it was white with purple banding plus badge. You looked like a right prat (you would have to have been a rich prat to have paid the price anyway - one or two 'old boys' turned up in it on big occasions). Our main races were fixtures with other Universities, away to the University of London seconds, Imperial College and Nottingham. Bristol and Exeter and sundry others came to us as we had better water. When I was president I combined all these home fixtures into a regatta which we usually won. The third VIII competed in regattas as a maiden (novice) VIII (by regulation no one in the crew had won at a Regatta). We won the maiden VIII's at Pangbourne & Whitchurch Regatta - in 1961 as it says on a corroded pewter pint pot on my shelf. I had lost my virginity! This was no mean feat as the rowing public schools Radley (Radders), St Edward's (Teddies), Shrewsbury etc. tended to dominate the lower division events. To win our novice event we had to beat an Eaton crew and Pangbourne Naval College amongst others.

Years, fixtures and regattas followed with me rowing a 5 or 7 in the first VIII, sewing on the fancy multi uni coloured ribbon to my vest. I won't bore you with details. One year, our best, we won the Junior/Senior (now Senior A - just below the International class, now called Elite) Divisions of all the Thames heads also Wallingford Regatta and were narrowly beaten by a good Twickenham crew (Thames Grand in disguise) at Henley in the Thames Cup. Mike Macleery and I then did a spot of pot hunting as a Junior/Senior pair. We were always encountering (by encounter I mean crash into) the same Thames pair. They were disqualified twice, but my Veteran Mate Doug will attest that my steering (with a swivelling foot) is not always beyond reproach. I remember being impressed with Mike's Velocette with polished copper oil pipe. I was not so impressed with his riding the one time I rode pillion as he was a bit of a looney Agri Where is he now?

Another year I joined Kingston Rowing Club in the summer vac. as did 3 of a victorious (at Henley) Bristol Uni. IV. We rowed as a IV and also as the stern 4 in an VIII. In training they said that the IV was about 1/2 a length slower with me in the boat, but as I replaced the giant Wardell-Yerborough who was in the British IV at the Tokyo Olympics I was not too miffed. Anyway we won a hotly contested IV competition at Staines Regatta (as mentioned in a previous chapter), surviving four heats, broken blades, and re-row of a dead heated final. The VIII also got through a couple of rounds and I think the other four members thought we 'threw' the semi-final but I think that we were just out of puff.