CHAIRMAN’S VIEW

At the General Meeting on Wednesday 5th August the proposed changes to the governance structure of the Club were passed unanimously.  We also noted the intention to change the accounting year end from 31st January to 31st July to align with the rowing season. The vote followed an open discussion and debate on the proposals.  I am grateful to Jeremy Hudson in particular for his work in drafting the proposed rule changes, talking us all through them and ensuring that the meeting could be held in a COVID-safe environment. We all learnt a little about the challenge of a hybrid meeting with members able to join both in person, in the Long Room, and via Zoom.  We will adopt a similar approach to the AGM to be held on Wednesday 2nd September with some changes to assist in the flow of the meeting.

I took the opportunity to attend the meeting in the clubhouse.  It was great to meet up with other members present in person after just over four months of lockdown.  Tommy was in excellent form behind the bar and is looking forward to seeing more of us over the coming months.

In line with Government and British Rowing guidance, we are now planning a return to rowing in fours and eights over the coming weeks; the gym is already in use.  Please take the opportunity to familiarise yourself with the new protocols for social distancing and hygiene and enjoy getting back on the water and ready for any events that are able to be run this coming season.  The protocols have been established to enable us to enjoy our sport whilst minimising the risk of transmission of COVID-19.  It is important that we all follow these and keep ourselves and others safe.

With our committee structure reformed and active subcommittees created, we now need to make these work to the benefit of all members and the future of our fine club.  A number of the current team will be stepping down at the AGM after many years of hard work for LRC.  If you have time available and feel able to contribute to the management of our club in any capacity, please do not hesitate to contact me or any other committee member.

Simon Harris
Chairman, London Rowing Club

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

See more detail for these events, visit our Calendar of Events…

IRREGULARS’ REPORT

While activities have been restricted to single sculling we are all much looking forward to getting together on Sunday, 16th August for an expected return to crew rowing! Obviously, nothing is certain and confirmation and protocols will be issued and become clearer in the preceding days.

Sculling, of course, has come with huge benefits as we now have more steerers and more single scullers - a great benefit to the Irregulars when there are uneven numbers on a Sunday and this offers greater flexibility for getting everyone boated. Rumour has it that at least some of our number should be entering for the Scullers Head - COVID and the weather permitting of course. You know who you are - get out there!

We are also thinking of having a dinner in September (hopefully the 16th) which Jacquie Grosch is finalising with Shane - early signs are good - news soon.

Lastly, I have just spent a very agreeable week on the Wye adjacent to Hay - apart from the inevitable literary pursuits I managed to arrange an outing with Hereford Rowing Club. So many thanks to their captain Jason Lee who made the arrangements as I pitched up and then had a lovely single outing on this beautiful river. I was accompanied by a charming gentleman who shepherded me upstream for about 2000m and then back. The weather was glorious and neither of us could resist another half a mile or so upstream.

An idyllic day at Hereford with Iain Watt and Alison Fraser.

The photo above is of my sculling buddy and a very nice lady member with three boys at HRC- her eldest son being a great friend of a squad member at LRC! - small world - you know where to come guys!

Eddie Markes

ERGS OUT FOR THE SUMMER!

Mark Lucani has asked me to try to get a club wide effort going - an LRC 5k Summer Attempt.

Now in deep summer, and hopefully heading into race season, we are inviting members to help each other train and improve (and compete!). We think it would be ‘fun’ for people to do a 5k ‘test’ in August, and then follow-up in 3 months, at the end of November, with a further test. If people submit scores, we will benchmark against international records (by gender, age and weight) and then give ‘awards’ for most improved, closest to benchmark etc.

If you are interested in taking part, please use this link to register your scores and see how you compare to world class athletes in your age group and your peers in the Club.

Record your results here!

James Brooks

THE LONG ROOM IN 1911

Packing PPE with the OneDegreeofSport Initiative: Sehrish Rafique

This atmospheric photograph of the downstream end of the Club’s Long Room was taken 109 years ago in 1911, and has recently been brought to our attention by the UK editor of the rowing website, ‘Hear The Boat Sing’. It appeared in an article published in ‘The Bystander’, an up-market journal which later on merged with The Tatler. (Readers of a certain age may remember the full title ‘Tatler and Bystander’).

Members will have some fun recognising items which are still in the clubhouse – well, almost all of them.  You will not fail to notice the large table which remains in regular use, still with its five legs.  Over on the right wall is the 1880 painting by Alfred de Prades of a four at Henley plus the sculler F L Playford (and a coach on horseback!), restored some years ago and now adorning the Members’ Room; and some early versions of the Henley honours boards, which hung until 2006.

The missing item is the large painting above the mantelpiece, executed in 1860, also by de Prades.  This was lost in World War II when sent for storage to a furniture depository in Chiswick which was bombed (eventually replaced by Theodore Ramos’ well-received copy of the painting in 2006 hanging over the mantelpiece in the Members’ Room).  Several crew photos and portraits which still hang in the Long Room or Members’ Room can be recognised, also Casamajor’s Wingfield Sculls clasps (now in a new Victorian frame).

About the only feature with which today’s member will not be familiar are the flags. The bar in those days was at the upstream end of the Long Room (and remained so until the major 1969-72 rebuild).  This photo will be included in a booklet currently being planned by a Sub Committee on the 150th Anniversary of the clubhouse building, which falls in 2021.  Members of this Sub Committee are – Chris Dodd, Peter Fraser, Anthony Jones, Richard Metcalf, Richard Philips, Simon Smithson, James Roslington, Miles Preston and me.  The Covid pandemic has hardly helped with the research we are currently engaged on but progress is being made, and we hope to produce something during the course of the anniversary year.

Julian Ebsworth

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Dear LRC,
      Geoscience tells us the Atlantic is widening, but this year accelerated that wildly, and though I was buoyed by the Roar and videos from John Auber and Lee Reilly, my status as Overseas Member of LRC kept reminding me exactly why we say longing. The “overseas” seemed comparable to the one my Scottish grandparents knew. The reality of London, the British Library, the Boat Race, and LRC were as beyond as the moon.
      Meanwhile, on the West Coast of the U.S. where I live, there has been some relief from election-year politics and pandemic news: rowing, of course.
      The Corvallis Rowing Club , founded in 1993, trains very seriously on the Willamette River, 19th largest in the nation. CRC owns no boathouse, instead renting space for shells and time on the ergs from the Oregon State University’s century-old rowing program. Below is an aerial shot of the facility during last year’s brief flood, when the Army Corps of Engineers, calibrating flow by inches, fertilized farmland and kept the towns dry.

Our maritime winter climate gives way to dry California summers, and soon the gentled current flows clear over a stony riverbed. A screen of trees blocks both wind and sun, and makes perhaps too much calm. In any case, our training in eights for 2020’s spring regattas was going very well.
On March 12, COVID-19 ended the university’s rowing workouts, canceled all regattas, and closed the boathouse. CRC stopped meeting immediately. Our and the students’ hard winter training earned only callouses. But a very generous administration agreed to allow CRC to launch singles from the OSU docks, so unlike any other club I know of, we have sculled uninterrupted all spring and summer, improving technique as only small-boat work can, and watching the ospreys and bald eagles argue over fishing rights.
Like every paradise, this one has a problem, and several newbie scullers have had “interruptions.” Each winter leaves gifts at random; these appear gradually as the water recedes, and must be memorized. This year one in particular, two lanes out from the east riverbank, has caused the most trouble:

We attempted to civilize it with a bright and visible cap, dubbing it the Knoch Less Monster, but somehow it manages to surprise the unwary. Perhaps it resents the 2K “Yeah Beavs” marker: as if, in the absence of student rowers, the university’s beaver mascot should no longer own the river.
However, I readily admit that the Thames at Putney requires much more vigilance than the Willamette at Corvallis. May you someday get to make the comparison . . .
Best wishes to the Irregulars! Good luck for evolving a new normal. I hope for everyone’s safety and the chance of a reunion in 2021.

Kerry Ahearn

ROWING ON THE THAMES IN THE 50s & 60s

PART 4 - COACHING AND TRAINING

Believe it or not, crews were coached from a bicycle in the 1950’s. This would be impossible today as the trees and bushes have grown and multiplied long the old towpath. Then the coach would set the distance to be rowed or paddled, this would be to be to the chosen steps down to the foreshore. When the crew reached the steps, the coach would leave his bicycle and descend to the foreshore to speak to the crew.

The Towpath to Barnes would have looked like this.

In those days there were there were a variety of very different rowing styles including the American Conibear and our own Jesus and Lady Margaret (LMBC).

A crew demonstrating the LMBC style at Putney in 1922.  Note the working Thames Sailing Barge in the background. — A crew demonstrating the LMBC style at Putney in 1922. Note the working Thames Sailing Barge in the background.

Colin Porter, at one time a member of the Club, in 1959 published a book “Rowing to Win”. An interesting title resulting from the previous concentration on style and the “Gentleman Amateur”, which prompted one distinguished old oarsman to say of Porter’s crews “Oh well, they think of nothing else but winning races.”

Colin Porter considered fitness to be the most important facet. He coached National Provincial Bank RC, whose land training consisted of circuits, a 20 minute row on the tank and a 3-4 mile run around Barnes Common four times a week. LRC did similar land training using outside gyms as well as the Tank and a very small gym at the back of it for weight training. London crews were allowed to drink up to two pints of beer a day.

A couple of LRC members joined Nautilus which was the first attempt to provide national squad to represent the country as against club crews, which was the practice in those days. Many years later these efforts were to come to fruition.

The LRC Grand Eight outings were usually upriver to Chiswick rail bridge or downstream to Battersea Power Station. The stretch through Fulham and Wandsworth was a wasteland of disused wharves, wharehouses and a defunct coal fired power station. The eight would be coached from the Casamajor launch.

This was kept in the boathouse on a somewhat rickety trailer which was viable launching down the hard but required six men to push it back up.

Hugh Dulley

Part 5: ‘Regatta and Henley’ will be published in the September edition of The London Roar.

THE LRC TUB PAIR - NOW CALLED TUBBY BRYANT

Spectators on a wharf located just downstream of the Old Ship Pub, watch the University Boat Race in 1949.

According to Tom Phelps, LRC’s much loved and long serving boatman (mid 1920s to 1970) the tub pair was built at Eton College around the late 1800s. It was much used in the ‘20s and ‘30s for technical coaching and the 1st and 2nd V111’s were regularly “tubbed”.

Tubby Bryant first encountered it in 1949 when he was taught to row as a schoolboy and again when he was rowing in the 1st V111 prior to Henley.

Fashions change and in the 1960s (but by now some 70 to 80 years old) its usage had declined to such a degree that its sole use became to set off the fireworks opposite the Club on Guy Fawkes night!

It was at this point that Tubby made a contribution to the Boat Fund and rescued it.

With the help of other club members, over the following decades the boat was regularly refurbished and had much usage by a wide but always enthusiastic collection of friends and acquaintances on the Upper Thames. On one occasion, Tubby recalls, Colin Kester and he rowed over the Henley course with wives, children and picnic baskets in eight and a half minutes! Their proudest moment!

The boat was converted to a double sculler in the ‘80s to make it more user friendly and continued to be enjoyed by many. Iain Laurenson rowed in it in the late ‘90s and can testify that it was a joy to scull and “runs beautifully between strokes”.

In 2016, Tubby decided, with a heavy heart, that he was no longer able to handle the boat and with the help of Iain Laurenson vowed to find a way of keeping it alive and retaining it within the LRC family. He decided to offer it back to the Club whilst also raising much needed funds for the Gym Appeal.

The challenge was duly taken up and a syndicate of about 20 got together and donated a good sum in return for the boat. It now resides at Woottens Boatyard just downstream of Marlow and is hugely enjoyed by many members and has been expertly refurbished to ensure many more good years of service.

Mad dogs and Englishmen?  Iain Laurenson, Meike and Hugh Samuel take to the water near Marlow on the 31st July 2020 (record temperature day!). — Mad dogs and Englishmen? Iain Laurenson, Meike and Hugh Samuel take to the water near Marlow on the 31st July 2020 (record temperature day!).

Many thanks to Tubby Bryant and to all those members that show the enthusiasm to have fun and most significantly to retain and care for this important part of LONDON history.

Should anyone be interested to know more or take a part in this venture then please contact ecmarkes@marldon.net

Eddie Markes with Tubby Bryant’s assistance

GENERAL MEETING 2020 STYLE

As you will all know, last Wednesday evening we held our first General Meeting using a combination of some members coming to the Club and others attending by Zoom.

Last minute preparations with five minutes to lift off.

Two minutes to go. Mike Baldwin clearly demonstrating that men can do more than one thing at a time.

After a little initial confusion as people joined on Zoom, with some not muting and others not using their video link, the meeting got under way.

The President chaired the meeting with contributions from the Chairman, Hon. Secretary, Lynton Richmond and others.

Questions were raised first by members present in the Long Room (socially distanced of course) and then by those attending via Zoom.

Following very constructive discussion, the proposals for amending the Rules were unanimously approved.  The new governance structure has been adopted and is now being formally implemented.

Thanks are due both to those who organised the meeting but also to all the members who attended, participated and enabled the Club to move forward towards the AGM scheduled to take place at 7.30pm on the 2nd September.

You will be sent the relevant notices shortly.  Please attend the meeting (even if you didn't attend the General Meeting) either by coming to the Club or via Zoom.

Great progress has been made at LRC over the last twelve months.  You should join in so that in years to come you can say that you were part of this regeneration process.

Miles Preston
Editor, The London Roar

REPORTING SAFETY INCIDENTS

All members are reminded that if you are involved in or witness a water safety incident, you are required to report it on safety@londonrc.org.uk

The Club will file any necessary reports on your behalf with British Rowing and the PLA. Members should not submit reports directly to either body.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

My thanks to everyone who has contributed to this edition of the London Roar. If you have an idea for an article or would be interested in submitting a piece for inclusion in a future edition, please email me on miles.preston@londonrc.org.uk

Please do not submit an article without first liaising with me.

Miles Preston
Editor of The London Roar