Downing College Boat Club (or DCBC) is the rowing club for members of Downing College, Cambridge. Despite the college admitting undergraduates in 1821, Downing's boat club did not form until 1863, with their first race being in the spring of 1864. Downing women formed in 1981 and held their first headship of the Lent Bumps from 2004–2005, regaining it in 2011, and attained their first headship of the May Bumps in 2011. They retained both headships in 2012. Not until the 1960s did the men's 1st VIII regularly feature in the 1st division of the Lent and May Bumps, holding the headship for several years in the 1980s and 1990s (15 in total, including a double-headship in 1996). Downing men have not been below the top 9 boats for over 3 decades, on occasion being the only boat club with a second boat in the first division, and regularly ahead of other college first boats. Downing men and women have rowed internationally, winning world rowing championship medals, and even Olympic medals.
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“The democratic youth ... lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practising gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Clear and diminished like a scene cut in cameo
The lighthouse, and the boat on the beach, and the two shapes
Of the woman and the man;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)