BENNY GREEN
The Boat Race is one of those peculiar events in the London calendar generally assumed to be there by some kind of divine right, but which on closer examination turns out to have no more justification for its own existence than its own existence, so to speak. And now it seems even this is in jeopardy. A few days ago the Cambridge president was reported as saying that one way of shoring up the grand old institution of the Boat Race would be to plug it in America with beef- eaters and the Tower of London as part of a package deal for rubbernecks.
In any case, I doubt if anyone takes the race seriously any more, which would cer- tainly explain the vast popular miscon- ceptions about the event. Your average Man in the Water takes the race to be an annual public event on a March afternoon, wherein two rowing eights labour from Putney to Mortlake. So ingrained is this superstition that the very phrase 'from Putney to Mortlake' rings down the marmoreal halls of English social history like a clarion call or the title of a volume of ecclesiastical memoirs.
In fact none of these accepted truths is true at all. Until recently, when seduced by BBC TV's fairy gold, the Boat Race always took place in the middle of the morning. Nor is there anything in the rules which says it must be an annual event. Indeed, in at least one summer of the last century there were two Boat Races. As for March and Putney- to-Mortlake, the first-ever race in 1829 was staged at Henley in June over two miles, proving such a riotous success that nobody bothered to arrange another one till 1836. Incidentally, that first race appears to have been a much more rabelaisian affair than the official history would have us believe. The record says that Oxford wore black straw hats, blue striped jerseys and canvas trousers, while Cambridge wore white shirts and pink sashes. The inference here is irresistible, which is that the Cambridge crew turned up with no trousers on.
This kind of thing will come as no surprise to students of an event whose history is positively peppered with romance. In 1843 Oxford, for reasons best known to its presi- dent, turned up with only seven men, and had the bad manners to win despite all. Then, in 1858 came a pure orgy of disaster. At the very start the Oxford stroke caught a crab, fell back into the lap of number seven and damaged his rigger, which in those days of medical primitivism, must have been ex- tremely painful. Meanwhile the Cambridge crew, understandably intrigued by what ap- peared to be a mutiny in the enemy boat, failed to look where it was rowing and crashed into a moored barge. It is hardly surprising that the race next year was a sad anti-climax; the Cambridge boat sank.
Any illusion that this was a race for milksops was finally dispelled in 1868 when on the eve of the race one of the Oxford men, relaxing by cleaning his revolver, ac- cidentally blew his brains out. As the official history puts it, 'morale was sadly under- mined'. Perhaps it should be mentioned at this point that there was no starting mech- anism and no finishing line. Only this and the English genius for compromise could pos- sibly explain away the official 1877 result, 'A dead heat to Oxford by five lengths.'
By 1898 they were getting a bit more sophisticated and, dare I say it, a bit more effete. Bored by their frequent contact with the water, both crews inserted bladders under each seat. These proved no use at all in 1903, when. having introduced starting pistols for the first time, the officials were mortified to realise that the mechanism had jammed, the starter himself being reduced to such parox- ysms of rage and frustration that according to one apocryphal story he finally got the crews away by shouting `Bang'—or words to that effect.
Then there was 1912, which must have been interesting in a different way. That was the year both boats sank. There was a varia- tion on this ploy in 1951, when the Oxford boat sank and its crew went on rowing for some time under the pathetic delusion that they were still above water.
But.which of all the homeric encounters is the archetypal Boat Race? It would have to be late Victorian, when the imperial idea was rampant enough to stop foreigners from laughing. It would have to be a disastrous race, so that the ethos of public school heroism could be shown in all its stolidity. And it would have to be something slightly crazed, so as to justify the British claim to eccentricity. And there, sure enough, shining down the years with the lurid light of the long long ago, is the race of 1880, when the starter dropped his handkerchief by mis- take and only the Oxford crew noticed.
Naturally the race was a little one-sided, as races often are when only one contestant starts moving, but there was, as it happens, an excellent reason for the Cambridge crew not noticing the falling handkerchief and the disappearing rival boat. On that forgotten spring morning, the English climate turned up trumps again. The race had begun in pitch darkness in a blinding snowstorm. Per Ardua ad Mortlake.
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