Thames Rowing Club - History

History

Thames Rowing Club was founded under the name City of London Rowing Club and according to its first rules, its objects were 'organised pleasure or exercise rowing'. The earliest surviving minutes of a club meeting are dated January 1861 but are headed 'City of London Rowing Club. Founded 1860', and 1860 is commonly accepted as the year of foundation.

The initial members were chiefly clerks and salesmen working in London's textiles trade around Fore Street and St Paul's Churchyard. At least one of the early meetings is known to have taken place in the Lord Raglan public house in St Martin's-le-Grand. The club had boats at Simmons Boathouse (the building currently occupied by Chas Newens Marine) and a room at the Red Lion Hotel at the foot of Putney High Street. There were very few members at first, but the numbers rapidly increased, and in 1862, when club races were first started, the club numbered nearly 150.

In 1862, the club sought and gained the permission of Frank Playford, the only traceable member of "The Thames Club" which had rowed on the Tideway in the 1840s, to rename itself "The Thames Rowing Club".

By 1864 a growing interest in competition led to the club’s first recorded win, in a four-oared race against the Excelsior Boat Club of Greenwich. The club also put on a crew for the Metropolitan Junior Eights, started in 1865, and followed this up the next year by securing the Challenge Cup for Junior Eights at the first Metropolitan Regatta.

In 1870 the Club won at Henley Royal Regatta for the first time, taking the Wyfold Challenge Cup from the Oscillators Club of Surbiton and the Oxford Etonians in a race that, according to the Rowing Almanack, was ‘a pretty hollow affair, the Thames crew winning as they pleased from first to last.’ Over the next twenty years, Thames had its first great flowering, with 22 wins at Henley by 1890, including four victories in the most prestigious event, the Grand Challenge Cup for eights.

In 1877 the Thames Boathouse Company (Limited) was formed for the purpose of providing a boat and club house for the club. Money was raised by means of shares, the club and the company being kept quite distinct. The construction of the present Thames boathouse on a site about 300 yards above that of London Rowing Club followed and the building was completed in 1879 at a cost of over £3000.

Thames, under its captain James Hastie, was now established as a mainstay of amateur rowing in London, and as a rival to its Putney neighbour London Rowing Club. In 1879 Thames, like London, was one of the founder clubs of the Metropolitan Rowing Association which later became the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA).

This early period was the time of the great Victorian amateur. Many Thames members were keen on all sports and the club itself also had an influence beyond rowing:

In December 1867, Thames organised a two and a half mile handicap steeplechase or paperchase similar to a cross-country race around Wimbledon Common as part of the oarsmen’s winter training. These are generally accepted as the first open cross-country events to have taken place in Britain. One eventual result was the foundation of the Thames Hare and Hounds in October 1868, the first cross-country club, which would itself go on to an illustrious history.

Another addition to rowing training was boxing, with a ring frequently set up in the hall at the clubhouse. George Vize, a member of five winning crews at Henley, became amateur heavyweight champion of Britain in 1878 and a founder member of the Amateur Boxing Association. Boxing finally disappeared after the First World War, when the coach Steve Fairbairn ended it because of the damage caused to oarsmen’s hands.

From the late 1890s into the first decade of the 20th century, Thames suffered a decline but recovered as the decade wore on, notably through the efforts of Julius Beresford and Karl Vernon.

After the First World War, Thames came under the influence of the coach Steve Fairbairn. Fairbairn was an Australian graduate of Cambridge, with boundless charisma and innovative (and highly controversial) views on training and technique. He was one of the major influences on the club and on the sport in general, becoming generally accepted as the father of modern rowing. Under his tutelage in the 1920s, and that of Julius Beresford, Thames reached new heights. Fairbairn left the club for London Rowing Club in 1925. The precise reasons are unclear but undoubtedly a clash with Julius Beresford was partly at the root: the two coaches, despite holding similar views on technique, were unable to get on. Under Beresford, Thames won four events at Henley in both 1927 and 1928, something which no club has replicated in the 20th century.

At the same time, Thames was home to Britain’s greatest ever single sculler. Jack Beresford (son of Julius) took Silver at the 1920 Amsterdam Olympics in an epic race with Jack Kelly, before going one better with Gold at Paris in 1924. He won the Diamond Sculls at Henley four times and the Wingfield Sculls for the Amateur championship of Great Britain a record seven times. Then, with Thames crews, he took three further Olympic medals: Silver in the eight in Antwerp, 1928, Gold in the coxless four in Los Angeles, 1932 and Gold in the double scull in Berlin, 1936. It would be 60 years before Steve Redgrave bettered his record.

Although never again reaching the heights of the late 1920s, Thames continued to be successful through the thirties and then, after the Second World War, into the forties and fifties. However, in the early sixties the club began to experience a marked decline in membership and standards and by the early seventies it had very few active members and came close to bankruptcy. The club went for 47 years from 1956 without a win by a men's crew at Henley Royal Regatta. Finally in 2003, Thames achieved an emphatic win in the Wyfold Challenge Cup and this was repeated in 2006.

In 1972, Thames became one of the first British rowing clubs to admit women and rapidly became the powerhouse of women's rowing, a position it retains to this day. Thames women have represented Great Britain at every Olympic Games since Los Angeles; most recently Elise Laverick won Bronze in the double scull at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Athens Olympics in 2004 and sisters Guin Batten and Miriam Batten won Silver in the quadruple scull at the Sydney Olympics. Since the founding of Henley Women's Regatta in 1987, the Club has won there 49 times.

Rowing by older oarsmen (and more recently oarswomen) has been a part of the club's activities throughout its history, but has increased since the 1970s in line with the greater opportunities for veteran competition now on offer. A group of casual and veteran men came into existence in the 1970s; separate groups of veteran oarsmen and women of different ages, such as the self-declared "fatties", "slims" and "slimettes" have since arisen from time to time.