Brasenose College and the Origins of Oxford Rowing
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Brasenose College and the Origins of Oxford Rowing by William O’Chee © William O’Chee 2015 Brasenose College and the Origins of Oxford Rowing The exact date of the founding of the Brasenose College Boat Club is now as lost as Lyonesse, flooded by the waters of time, like so many years of spring floods going down the Isis. Perhaps it is this very mystery which calls to us across the years, adding an air of elusiveness to a noble and proud history. The Brasenose College Boat Club has historically laid claim to 1815 as a defining, if not a founding year; the year of the first Head of the River, which Brasenose won. However, there is no extant record of the Boat Club from that year, nor indeed, do we even know the names of many of the men who rowed in that crew. We do know that a race occurred in that year between a Brasenose crew and one from Jesus, for which the winner claimed, for the first time, to be the Head of the River. As generations of Brasenose men and women also know, legend also has it that the Boat Club is the oldest rowing club in the world. This is a considerable and slightly contentious claim, especially when the date the club was established is not known with any certainty. Moreover, any claim to be the world’s oldest rowing club cannot logically rest on the 1815 race alone. If it did, there would be no basis for arguing any precedence over Jesus College Club, and indeed Jesus themselves say that the two boat clubs share the honour of being the oldest in the world. There are also claims to greater antiquity which are sometimes made in respect of Westminster School and Eton College. A thorough examination of the College archives fails to reveal any formal records of the Boat Club until 1837, when the earliest surviving Minute Book commences. Although we know that Brasenose were Head of the River in 1815 and 1816, beating Jesus in both years, the accepted wisdom has been that there is not much more than can be gleaned of these early years, nor is there much point in attempting to do so. However, new research now makes it possible to discern some of the individuals who rowed for the Boat Club in its earliest years, and to trace the formative role played by Oxford men generally in competitive rowing. To put these things in perspective though, it is important to look at the history of rowing outside Oxford, as well as to understand the growth of rowing as a sport within the university, and more broadly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Britain’s rivers had long been navigated before anyone at Oxford thought of making boating a sport; in fact, they had been navigated long before Oxford was a university. The Romans and the Vikings well knew the value of navigating England’s waterways, as did the Anglo-Saxons. There was good reason for this. Roads were difficult to construct and maintain, especially in a country as wet as England, such that many roads were little more than boggy tracks. This made carriage of heavy goods, and even large numbers of people, difficult by road. The rivers however, were largely free of such impediments, and waterways throughout Britain were the island’s lifeblood; a vast network of arteries and veins which carried people and goods hither and thither. Beyond commerce, England’s waterways also had a deeper symbolic or spiritual aspect about them, which preceded even the arrival of the Romans. To the Celtic inhabitants of Britain, rivers and pools of water were powerful liminal zones between the world of the living and the dead. This symbolism seems to have been especially associated with bends and confluences of rivers, and the Thames itself is home to numerous cursus monuments between Lechdale and Sonning. These extraordinary earthworks show, five thousand years on, the defining role played by the river in the landscape, and in the imagination. The Romans too attached great significance to rivers and springs, and upon the conquest of Southern Britain, wasted no time in appropriating the sacred Celtic spring at Bath to their own mythology, renaming the goddess Sulis as Sulis Minerva, and building a bath complex on top of the spring. By the late tenth century Bath was a not insubstantial centre, so it is unsurprising that King Edgar chose Bath as the location for of Britain’s first coronation ceremony in 973. But it is Edgar’s claimed royal rowing outing in Chester which shows the significance of ancient rivers. According to various accounts, Edgar received the fealty of six Scottish and British kings, and, ...having set them to the oars, and having taken the helm himself, he skilfully steered it through the course of the River Dee and, with a crowd of ealdormen and nobles following in a similar boat....1 While some modern historians have questioned whether this outing actually took place, its occurrence is probably secondary to the symbolism of the event. Here was Edgar taking command of a crew of powerful men, and demonstrating his capability by “skilfully” steering the course of the river. The purpose of the story was to show the king’s prowess, and it was a story which any reader, or listener, in the eleventh or twelfth century would have readily understood. Closer to Oxford, the upper reaches of the Thames in the Middle Ages would have been quite unlike the modern landscape. There were numerous abbeys and monasteries stretched along its banks in the vicinity of Oxford. Godstowe nunnery lay four miles upstream, and not far above that the abbey of Eynsham. Below Godstowe was Osney monastery, then Oxford itself, where Rewley Abbey and St Frideswide’s Friary were to be found. Below Oxford, one encountered religious houses at Abingdon, Dorchester, Cholsey, Goring and Streatley.2 The riparian land between these places was held by the religious houses also. Meadow was extremely valuable, and by a careful process of accretion, most of the manors along the Thames fell into the hands of the Church. The produce of these manors was transported from granges, and tithe barns by river to market. There were also royal manors along the way. Some, like Woodstock, were hunting manors, situated by the river in substantial woods which were commonplace in the Thames Valley prior to the seventeenth century. Others, like Oxford Castle and Wallingford Castle, were important strongpoints guarding major river crossings. 1 The Chronicle of John of Worcester, quoted in Williams, “An outing on the Dee: King Edgar at Chester, AD 973” in Medieval Scandinavia, 14 (2004), pp. 229-43 2 Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River, p 97. All of this made the Upper Thames a busy highway, where watermen carried people and goods in shallow drafted boats, known as “western barges”.3 Additionally, the growth of London as a port, and as a city, resulted inevitably in the increasing use of the Thames as a commercial waterway. The professional watermen who serviced this trade were regulated by Parliament in 1514, and the Worshipful Company of Watermen was established by statute in 1555. The numbers of watermen were quite surprising: at the end of the sixteenth century it was estimated that there were some 3,000 watermen on the Thames. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the were 8,000 watermen, and by the end of the century, they numbered some 12,000.4 Competition among watermen for business was fierce, and it takes little imagination to conclude that they would naturally have raced each other for reputation, as well as augmenting their earnings with the proceeds of wagers. These races would, by and large, have been scratch events, or one off spectacles organised by wealthy patrons. The oldest such race is Doggett’s Coat and Badge, which was established by the Irish actor and comedian, Thomas Doggett in 1715. This was originally raced by apprentice watermen in wherries between The Swan pub at London Bridge, and The Swan pub at Chelsea. The race is still run today, although under somewhat different rules, and no longer in wherries, but single sculls. For all it’s history, Doggett’s Coat and Badge does not lead to rowing as a sport in Oxford, nor, indeed, as a pastime in Georgian England, for this was a race among professional watermen. Moreover it fails to explain the existence of rowing clubs, which lie at the heart of amateur rowing. Writing of Leander Club, Geoffrey Page has argued that rowing as a sport began with groups of men rowing in boats kept below public houses by the Thames. 3 Ackroyd, op cit, p 189. 4 ibid, p 167. Noting that the foundation date for Leander is now accepted as being 1818, Page outlines the previously generally accepted story about the origin of the club. He quotes from handwritten notes in the Leander archives, compiled by C.M. Pitman, to the effect that: There existed in the last century [i.e. the nineteenth century] two clubs of repute, named the ‘Star’ and the ‘Arrow’, and it is believed that Leander arose from the ashes of these two, or embodied their members when it was established. The Club’s original coat-of-arms consisted of a shield on which was quartered a star and an arrow.5 Page recognises, however, that this story is not correct in so far as the Arrow club is concerned for it was still in existence in 1831.