It has not been much of a secret that Univ did not like the place. No one I knew could understand why. A historic structure, it was a Class II listed building. Yet Univ had let the place deteriorate, and maintenance was shoddy at best. There was a rash of break-ins when I was in Oxford.
One theory was that Univ wanted to develop the property, but could not so long as a listed building sat there. Let the building fall down and it would no longer be an obstacle to development. But Oxford being Oxford, there is a certain slavishness to tradition, and this building exemplified tradition. It is hard to believe that University College, one of three colleges which claim to be the oldest college in Oxford, would not show a little more respect for tradition. Meanwhile, the college was making a good amount on the property. The colleges which rowed from there paid racking fees in line with the going rate in Oxford. This was a rip-off, because Univ did not provide the benefits of paying for a rack in another boathouse (mostly having to do with the non-existent building maintenance and pitiful security). This money did not go to Univ's boat club, but rather straight to the College itself. Complaints by tenants about maintenance and security problems fell on deaf ears.
Despite its decaying condition, the building kept a certain nobility. Over the years, it had been joined on the river by a succession of ugly concrete boathouses devoid of taste or character. OUBC was by far the class of the river.
It is gone now. And so are all of its residents. This is a sport where it is easy to become attached to the equipment. While insurance will replace the destroyed shells, nothing will replace the sentimental connections. Everyone who has rowed out of OUBC will have stories of this or that. I am merely going to add my own stories, in memory of my old friends now gone forever.
These stories are snapshots. They are not a complete album.
Sir Raymond Hoffenberg (Janousek 8+)
For many years, Sir Raymond was perhaps the most over-protected boat on the Isis.
Natasha Whitestone bought Sir Raymond during her captaincy in the Winter of 1992-93. She called it her "baby." Problem was, the Wolfson women’s squad was so pathetic at the time that it couldn’t use it, remaining in the Graduate (see below) until I started coaching at Wolfson in late April 1994. I let them use Sir Raymond for the four weeks prior to Eights that year, and then I shelved it again. In 1994-95, I kept it on the shelf until the week prior to the Eights Head, put it back on the shelf immediately after the Eights Head, and then did not use it again until I set a first eight in mid-April when the first eight used it through Henley and then for one summer regatta. In 1995-96, I also kept it on the shelf for most of the year. It made a brief appearance for the Bristol Univ Head (only because there wasn't enough time to double up two crews in the Graduate) and the Eights Head, and then got brought out again after the first eight was set just before the racing season in Trinity Term. I was very protective of that boat, even at the expense of having as many as four crews training in the Graduate at one time!
Sir Raymond suffered only two mishaps which required repairs during that period. During Eights Week in 1995, we had overlap on Christ Church coming out of the Gut. There are two theories on how to steer the Gut - Christ Church was using the more common one, and we were using the one taught to me and sworn on by Catherine Hawkins who had coxed on that course more than anyone else in Oxford (and I had asked Catherine to teach our coxswains the course). But if we held our course, Christ Church would have to steer into us coming out of the Gut, and with the amount of overlap we already had, a bump should have been certain.
Instead, the rudder sheered off. Sir Raymond changed course and crashed into the stone wall above Timms Boathouse. We got no bump on ChCh, and Teddy Hall, several lengths behind, ultimately got credited with a row-past. For a boat which at that point had been used for hardly six weeks in its entire life, we could not imagine what had caused the rudder to sheer off. An engineer (not from Wolfson) later examined what was left of the rudder shaft and determined that the metal was shoddy. I later learned that a number of people had experienced similar problems with other Janousek eights - very poor quality metal in the rudders which sheer off unexpectedly. Other than the rudders, I am a great fan of Janousek eights.
Our women’s first eight that year was huge. They literally could not fit into the Graduate - and I had bloodied several hips by forcing them to row the smaller boat throughout the Fall and Winter. Due to race times, they would not have been able to share the men’s first eight hull (Growltiger). And the men’s second eight hull (Bladerunner) had taken a hard hit and was also knocked out of commission on the same afternoon with the rigger and gunwale mangled along the stroke seat. We went home that night worrying about whether the crew would even have a boat other than Sir Henry (see below - not a pleasant prospect) to sit in for the next day’s races. Fortunately, boatman Jim Ronaldson worked well past midnight and repaired all of the damage, and our fleet was intact for the next day’s racing. I bought Jim a bottle of the MacAllen 18 year old.
Every coach has a magic crew at some point. For me, at least to this point in my coaching career, that was this 1995 Wolfson Women's First Eight (pictured here with a bunch of trophies). I picked up a group of athletes who all did other sports seriously: an ice hockey player, a sprinter, two rugby players, a footballer, a marathon runner, and two martial artists made up the final line-up (the woman in bow, the captain Mary New, weighed in as the toughest 117-pound athlete I have ever met and she was the inspiration behind this crew, the rest of whom averaged well over 160 pounds). All of them had laughed at their friends who rowed, never understanding why rowers were so obsessed with the sport. But they agreed to try. Over the course of the year, they all caught the rowing bug one by one, and quit their other sports to row for Wolfson. Their learning curve never leveled off during the season.
When I had selected the line-up for the First Eight, the crew moved into Sir Raymond and got brand new hatchets a week later - the apprenticeship in the Graduate with macons was over, and excitement mounted. Each week during racing season we saw remarkable improvements in speed - despite nursing non-rowing injuries and putting up with people's dreadful lab schedules which meant we had to maximize effiency when we did manage to find practice times. I conducted some experiments with technique for this particular crew and learned a ton in the process. We traveled more than any other crew in Oxford that season, as I sought race experience to make up for the lack of actual rowing experience. These were athletes, true competitors, and they needed to take their aggressions and learn to row under racing conditions. When the season ended, this group of inexperienced rowers had become a match for the Oxford University squad and competitive across the country (in British terms, they rose from absolute novice to competitive senior 2 status in the course of one season). The season ended at Henley, where we went out to Imperial College, the top collegiate program in Britain that year. This was a truly magical crew, and these women taught me to believe in the power of the human will. Indeed, as physically strong as they may have been, it was their mental strength which made them the successful athletes they were.
The other serious damage to Sir Raymond came the next Winter. After seeing use in the Head of the River (by the Second Eight), it had returned to Oxford and was waiting on the trailer to be re-rigged and returned to the rack. During the night, a vandal took a screwdriver through it. LMH/Trinity boatman Mark Seal, who did work for us when Jim was unavailable or busy with other commitments (and he was on vacation at that point), fixed it that time.
Sir Raymond began seeing more use after my departure, and was replaced as the first eight shell this past Spring. A fine hull, it had many years left in it. Requiescat in pace.
The Graduate (Aylings 8+)
Most of the Graduate’s history pre-dates me. But this was once one of the winningest shells in Oxford and quickly became one of the most unsuccessful - proof that it is bad luck to rename boats.
The Graduate dates to about 1987 (this photo may too). It was originally known as the "Long Throbbing Python of Love" (or something like that) and under that name won the college event at Henley in 1989 and 1990. This was the pinnacle of Wolfson’s rowing history.
Winning Henley two years in a row meant that the College actually took some notice of what the team was up to, and the College was not amused when it discovered the boat’s name.
We all know how renaming boats is bad luck - after it was rechristened as "The Graduate" it never won a single race or scored a single bump until it was no longer the women's first eight shell (1990-1994)! During this period, Wolfson went from rowing power to having the worst women’s crews on the Isis - if there were even enough women to form a crew (thank goodness for the old "associate member" exemption, which in its current wording would no longer apply).
I remember Torpids in February 1994, back when I was still coaching at Lady Margaret Hall and wanted nothing to do with a Wolfson program which was the laughing stock of Oxford rowing (I did not object to the fact that they were slow, merely that they did not care and still thought they could compete). Starting first in their division, Wolfson’s women got bumped six times before the Gut. For those unfamiliar with Oxford’s river, that means that in about 500 meters of rowing, the crew got caught by crews starting as far as fourteen lengths behind. And believe me, most of the crews which caught up were not even any good themselves. The crew would have been bumped down an entire division (twelve places), except that one crew in the middle of the division mishandled the gut and crashed, leaving the whole bottom of the division to bump it instead of catching Wolfson. Even so, Teddy Hall, unaware that it had been awarded a bump on the crew which had crashed, made up ten places (twenty four lengths - or more considering it had to avoid the carnage in the Gut) on Wolfson before OUBC. The final three days were canceled due to flooding, or else Wolfson would have continued its freefall.
It was this sorry performance which led to the Wolfson women deciding it was finally time to get serious. James Hopkins, one of the finest (and most patient) novice coaches in Oxford, came in to teach them to row. When I returned from two months in Spain, they persuaded me to take them from there through the last four weeks of the season. The Graduate was demoted and the curse lifted. The shell began winning races again the following year. It even appeared on a postcard about to score a bump in the 1996 Torpids (although the postcard people reversed the negative). Requiescat in pace.
Growltiger (Janousek 8+)
Growltiger dated to about 1990/91 (the date I would guess this photo was taken). It was involved in a major collision with a barge around 1993 and had to be sent back to be remolded after losing most of its bow deck.
I rowed in it during two brief stretches back in the days when the men’s program was also disorganized. The first time came in the Summer of 1994, I was stroking a scratch crew doing Summer regattas for fun. I remember being amazed I could still hit the rates.
The following year, I decided it might be the last chance I would have to row competitively, so I was training to try to make the first eight (I was still a graduate student at Wolfson at the time, and thus eligible to compete). The men’s captain was horribly disorganized, and practice didn’t really happen much - and when it did, he had often forgotten to tell everyone, particularly the cox. He also forgot to arrange a coach. In the first two terms that year, only two or three people actually practiced enough to be liable for subs (dues) - and dues kicked in after only five water practices!
We entered the one day of Torpids which got run that year (the usual flooding canceled the other days) with a scratch crew (very scratch - not only was the line-up cobbled together for the occasion, but, as mentioned, we hadn't been practicing at all due to the captain's ineptitude). Kath Allen was coxing her first bumps race. Unfortunately, the German bowman, Lars Wulf, couldn’t understand Kath’s Irish accent and didn’t touch it up on the start, so when the gun went off we were pointed across the course and went right into the middle of a very fast stream while the crews behind us stayed in the clear along the bank. We were dead meat before we even got going. Whoever first bumped us ran over our stroke and six oars, spinning us into the bank. The safest thing for us to do was to sit there and let the rest of the division row past.
We hoped this would be a wake-up call, but the men’s captain didn’t get the clue. I ultimately quit in frustration (quit what? it's not like we actually practiced), as did others, while still others who had considered coming back to row in the Spring never saw the need. By Spring 1995, we had enough disgruntled rowers to form a "Schools" Eight, which raced in the third eight slot (behind a scratch first eight composed partly of people whom we’d never seen before but who were the only people still willing to row for that captain - most of them came from our affiliate St. Cross College and rowed more as a favor to the man who ultimately agreed to coach what few outings they did have before their races; and a second eight which was atrocious but which had been training all year independently). The Schools Eight will appear below in the entry for Bladerunner.
After Lars took over as Men's Captain and the men’s squad began its rebound, Growltiger returned to the racks in emulation of what I was doing with Sir Raymond. When the men became worthy of such a good boat, they made their return to it. It too had life in it when it was replaced as the first eight hull two years ago. Requiescat in pace.
Bladerunner (Carbocraft 8+)
Bladerunner was an old boat, dating back to the very early eighties. Jim Ronaldson reconditioned it in the late 1980s, including a coat of gold paint. It looked to me like a Carbocraft, and Jim, who would know, swears it was one, but it had some Aylings labels for some reason (possibly involving work Jim had done on it). By the time I came to know it, it was sagging horribly. With some slings broken at one point, we had taken to rigging boats at regattas with the stern end in a sling and the bow end resting on soft mud. We tried that with Bladerunner once, and its midsection nearly collapsed. This boat required three slings to support it by the time I left Wolfson in 1996.
When things were not breaking, however, it was a good boat for our novices, stable and faithful. It won blades (the trophies for bumping up four or more places in Eights without being bumped) for our Schools Eight in 1995 (with me in the two seat), and our first novice crew won the Christ Church Novice Regatta, Oxford's collegiate novice championship, the following Fall (the collegiate novice category exists in the Fall - colleges are so small that the novices are normally incorporated into the regular squad during the Winter). Although it was clearly time for the second eight to have a better shell to row in (which is what Growltiger became when the new eight arrived in 1997), it is always good to keep a boat like Bladerunner on the racks. It is no more. Requiescat in pace.
Sir Henry Fisher (old wooden 8+, don’t remember builder)
Sir Henry was an extremely heavy boat. But it was a boat, and in remarkably good condition the last time I saw it in 1996. It got trotted out in the beginning of the Fall, as the novices first ventured down to the river, because there wasn’t a whole lot the novices could do to damage such a sturdy hull.
I did indeed get the dubious experience of rowing in Sir Henry. During Eights Week in 1996, St. Cross College realized it had enough former rowers hanging around to put out most of an eight. Wolfson had no "Schools" (old boys’) eight that year since everyone was rowing in real crews, so the St. Cross contingent took the spot. Unfortunately, Sir Henry was the only boat available. What could have been a reasonable crew never really got up enough speed. Some of the St. Cross rowers realized blades were not to be had and mysterious illnesses cropped up during the week. A succession of Wolfsonians filled the empty seats. I would have been exempt (especially since I was no longer a student and thus could only row under the "associate member" exemption, which meant I could only sub for someone who would be rowing under that exemption), except that the Wolfson men’s coach, Mike Woodin (who taught at Balliol College and had rowed in some fast Wolfson men's crews when a grad student several years before), was supposed to be rowing as an associate member in that St. Cross crew. He happened to mention to me that his teaching schedule would make it tight for him to get to the river - would I be there just in case? That was the year I was coaching a crew in almost every division (except the one the St. Cross Eight was in), so I was, of course, at the river all day every day during Eights Week. On the third and fourth days of Eights Week, Mike showed up five minutes after launch time - so, while biking alongside one of my crews in the previous division I got roped by the St. Cross people into sitting into their crew since Mike had not arrived in time. I raced both days - in six seat - with Mike, who had finally arrived, biking alongside, and then I hopped back onto my bike to catch up with my crew in the next division. Mike still owes me a few pints for that. Sir Henry was heavy and slow, but was also a useful old friend. Requiescat in pace.
Fourmidable (Janousek 4+)
Fourmidable dates back to the early 1990s, and became a very useful training tool which our men and women fought over (producing endless debates over whether the responsibility for adjusting rigger heights belonged to a crew setting heights for itself before practice or setting heights for the next crew after its practice).
During my time coaching at Wolfson, I bizarrely served on the Boat Club Committee in an acting position in almost every conceivable capacity (including two stints as Acting Women’s Captain). My first acting role came in Trinity Term 1994 in early June. The Annual General Meeting of the Wolfson College Boat Club coincided with an Oxford University Rowing Clubs meeting. Wolfson needed to send a captain to represent it at the OURCs meeting. However, the terms of the previous officers had ended and the new officers were being elected at the Wolfson AGM. Since the entire outgoing board and all of those standing for positions on the incoming board had to be at the Wolfson meeting, there was no one to represent Wolfson at the OURCs meeting. Since Wolfson wanted representation from someone who knew what was going on and who could be empowered to speak on Wolfson’s behalf, the outgoing board sent me.
When I got home from the OURCs meeting, I found out several things which had gone on at the Wolfson AGM. One of those was that I had somehow been appointed Acting Women’s Captain. Another was that I was supposed to stroke a four in the Oriel Regatta the following week.
I hadn’t rowed in a while, but it sounded like some fun. We won the first two rounds on Thursday and Friday. Friday night was the Wolfson College Boat Club Annual Dinner, with alcohol flowing (as it tends to at these things). I remember a party shifting back to my apartment after the bar locked up. At about 6 a.m., those people who had not passed out carried those who had home. Our final was scheduled for 10 a.m.
When I got to the river, I realized there was a problem when the other guys in my crew talked about not drinking at the Dinner and then going home to bed by midnight. Well, there wasn’t anything I could do at that point, so we launched. We got off to a clean start and took an early lead on Worcester College. By OUBC, we led by several lengths. At that point, Worcester stopped, turned perpendicular to the course, and crossed over to their own dock on the other side of the river. James Hopkins (who, to make things more bizarre, was coxing our crew) didn’t see this and called for a sprint. Feeling the previous night, I did not think this would be a good idea, but he did not believe me at first when I told him the other crew had pulled off the course and docked. I took the rate down. We won, obviously.
In March 1996, the women’s first eight had to scratch from the Head of the River. As a bit of consolation, we entered four members of that crew, with me coxing, into the Kingston Head a week later. We stashed Fourmidable onto Linacre’s trailer. As we pulled into Kingston, Captain Karen Sidwell looked out the window and saw the boat in the field, and commented how nice it was of Linacre to have taken the boat off the trailer, carried it into the boating area, and put it in slings for us. I looked over and noticed a little problem: the boat appeared about a foot or so too short.
Sure enough, after we parked and walked back, Linacre handed us our bow. Their driver (Simon Cornish, who that Summer would end up stroking a development crew I coached) had taken the wrong road off a traffic circle. When he realized that that road was not passable by a trailer, he attempted a U-turn since there was little traffic and a wide open area. He did not quite notice a lamp post.
Linacre offered us duct tape, but we opted against it. Asking around, we finally did find someone with a spare four we could borrow: a boy’s boat from the Tiffin School. It was a little small for our women, but they were willing. I was not, however, since it was bow-coxed and my limited experience with bow-coxed boats has taught me that they are a stupid idea (made stupider by the fact that this one was not wired for a coxbox and there was not enough time to move the wiring from Fourmidable). Meanwhile, though, the stress had gotten to Karen, who broke out into hives. We scratched. Linacre paid our entry fees. Jim Ronaldson had left for several weeks’ vacation, yet we needed the boat for training. Mark Seal was already fixing Sir Raymond (see above), so we gave him Fourmidable as well. One week later and it was impossible to tell anything had happened. But Fourmidable is now gone, too. Requiescat in pace.
Thesis? What Thesis? (old wooden 4+, don’t remember builder)
I don’t really have much of a story about Thesis. But it appears periodically when people compile lists of the funniest boat names they have ever seen. Thesis was an old wooden boat and had been around long enough for thousands upon thousands of people who had been to the Isis to have seen it and remembered the name as they moved around the world. Requiescat in pace.
Up Two (old wooden 2-, don’t remember builder)
We had Liz Leach to thank for this old pair. In 1995, Unilever announced a competition for student organizations in Oxford who wanted sponsorship. The proposals had to be for the purchase of some item in specific, not for general sponsorship. Liz decided we should put in for something, and asked me what was the single best item we could buy to help our training the following year. I replied that I would like a pair. Liz wrote the application.
Unilever decided to sponsor about seven organizations out of the fifty or so who applied. We were the only college-based (as opposed to Oxford University-wide) club to receive sponsorship and one of only two sports clubs to receive funding. We took great glee in the fact that one of the teams turned down by Unilever was the Oxford University Women’s Boat Club (the sponsors said our women sounded more serious - I would agree). That Summer, Liz, Karen, and I took the money and went shopping for a second-hand pair. We found the old pair sitting unused in a boathouse in Worcester (the town, not the college), where the owner wanted to free up rack space at his club. Liz and Karen - neither of whom had been rowing a year yet - took it for a wobbly test-spin. They stumbled on a swan’s nest and were nearly attacked, which is one way to learn to row a pair in a hurry. We bought it, and Mark Seal gave it a home in the LMH/Trinity boat house.
The following Fall, I trained the senior (non-novices, that is) women mostly in the pair. This was great for rowing, but not for time-efficiency (but Wolfson was generously paying for my Post-Doc in part so that I could stick around and have ample time to coach). I had women coming to the river every hour and trading up. Those who did not previously row both sides learned in the pair. The boat was everything we had wanted.
Sometime after I left Oxford, it migrated over to live in OUBC boathouse. Requiescat in pace.
Dreissigacker hatchet blades (no tape necessary)
It's hard to attach the same sentimental value to oars, and I do not. But it is worth repeating the story behind one set. In 1995, Wolfson belatedly bought its first set of hatchet blades (finally!). It was the only program in Oxford that year to have women racing with hatchets while the men used macons (other than Somerville, which had just started accepting men, and St Hilda's, which had no men). Some sexist programs had switched to hatchets for their men but had refused to buy the women hatchets, while others were waiting to be able to afford a second set and had bought the men's set first. Indeed, almost all men's programs raced with hatchets by then and some had several sets, but only about half of the serious women's first eights had even one set of hatchets.
It was clear that crews could not be competitive without hatchets. In the Winter of 1994/95 we reviewed the accounts and decided we had enough money to buy two sets if we were willing to postpone by a few months the purchase of a new boat (which was still a couple of years off anyway). The trade off was definitely necessary. Mary New, then the women's captain, got the order in for the women's set, but the men's captain (yep, the same disorganized one as described above) never ordered his set - the best that could be said for him is that he at least never stood in the way of the women's success. The new oars arrived in time for the Spring racing season. They were popular. (As a postscript, one of the many things Lars did over the Summer after he was elected Captain was to order the men their set for the following year. Of course, thanks to his disastrous predecessor who himself had been preceded by a string of competent but unambitious captains, Lars needed to do more than merely order hatchets to turn the men's squad around. To his credit, he did.)
From my experience at Wolfson, it is worth commenting that even when tension has existed between men's and women's squads, it has not been tension based on sexism. That is saying a lot for British rowing. These first hatchets were a symbol of that. Requiescant in pace.
