The Eton Book of the River - With Some Account of the Thames and the Evolution of Boat-Racing

By L. Byrne

First published in 1935, this fascinating volume traces the history of English boat-racing from its origins as a forbidden pastime, to the respected sport that sport that it is today. This book will appeal those with an interest in the history of boat-racing and Eton college, and it is not to be missed by collectors of vintage sporting literature. Contents include: "The Thames Highway", "River versus Road", "Bathing up to 1840", "Bathing after 1840", "Black Potts to Brocas Clump", "Brocas Meadow to Monkey Island", "Eton College Boat House", "Floods and Frosts", "The Boats", "School Races", "The Eight", "Racing Boats", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with the original artwork and text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macha Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473343528

Book preview

CHAPTER I

THE THAMES HIGHWAY

USES AND ABUSES

THE Eton Boating Book provides a record of the races rowed at Eton as far back as they can be traced. The present volume is its natural corollary. No previous attempt seems to have been made to describe the conditions under which those races were contested, the development of the boats, the state of the river, the attitude of the authorities at Eton and other schools towards rowing as a pastime, and the dangers and absurdities that such an attitude involved—the evolution, in short, of the various activities of the Eton wetbob of to-day. In the following pages an attempt is made to supply this deficiency. A brief survey of the history of the river as a whole is essential to the proper understanding of the subject.

That the Thames was from the earliest times a regular and much-frequented means of communication is abundantly proved by numerous petitions for the better administration of the river and by various instances of legislation intended to facilitate its use. The earliest authentic record of the kind is found in the Chronicle of Abingdon Abbey. Mr. Thacker, whose books¹ on the Thames may be regarded as the standard works on the subject, gives the following translation from the Latin of the passage in question:—

‘In the days of Abbot Ordric (1054–1066) . . . at a place called Barton . . . the wide bed of the river used to cause rowers no little difficulty. For the land below being steeper than that above often made the said channel slack of water. The citizens of Oxford, therefore, having most traffic there, petitioned that the course of the river might be diverted through the church’s meadow further south, so that ever after by all their vessels a hundred allecia’—probably herrings—‘should be paid as toll to the cellarer of the monastery.’ A human touch is added by the fairly well attested story that the man who actually handed in this toll was to receive back five fish for himself, together with a meal of bread, cheese and ale.

Even earlier indications exist that the river was used for navigation. There is a legend, by no means incredible, that Alfred the Great (circa 875) went from Oxford to London by boat; while Domesday Book some two hundred years later records that the inhabitants of Wallingford regularly transported goods by water to Reading, Sutton and Benson at least as early as the reign of Edward the Confessor (circa 1050).

Harwood¹ proves that the use of the Thames for the carriage of passengers and goods was continuous from the Conquest to the end of the seventeenth century, as the following brief summary will show.

Between 1150 and 1200 there are various notes of the cost of carriage by boat between London and Windsor of such things as wine, iron, ropes, the royal baggage, and a Jew who had been imprisoned. In 1205 King John gave his servant William, the son of Andrew, the right to have one ship travelling free from molestation between London and Oxford. Henry III was conveyed by water from Wallingford to Windsor by Henry de Appelworth; and later, at the height of the agitation against his foreign favourites, his Queen, Eleanor of Provence, having started for Windsor from the Tower was driven back by showers of mud and stones thrown at her boat from London Bridge. The second wife of Edward I, the French Princess Margaret, seems to have made an excursion up the river for pleasure, for there is record of the payment of £10s. 8d. to Gilbert of Hedsor and three other master mariners and their twenty-five sailors for their services in taking her from place to place in the course of four days. Elizabeth, while virtually a prisoner before her accession to the throne, was taken from the Tower to Richmond and thence to Windsor by water.

PLATE I

1. RICHARD 11 AND THE REBELS, 1381 (John Harris)

2. THE CITY WELCOMES CHARLES 11, 1662

Additional evidence can be found in old prints. Our illustrations give instances from the fourteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first Richard II is represented at Mile End addressing from his barge the rebels under Wat Tyler who had got possession of London. This was in 1381. The second shows the reception accorded to Charles II in 1662 when he had travelled from Hampton Court to London by river. The subject of the third is somewhat similar. The King of Denmark, when on a visit to this country in 1768, is being escorted from Whitehall to the Temple by a flotilla of boats and barges.

These instances suffice to show how much use was made of the Thames by royalty. It was no less freely used for the transport of materials. In the middle of the fourteenth century, when new works at the Castle were in progress, Reigate stone and Teynton stone were conveyed to Windsor from Kingston and Henley respectively in boats, as, some years later, was the great bell for the Round Tower from Blackfriars. In 1683 the contents of Elias Ashmole’s Museum were removed from London to Oxford to be housed in the building in The Broad which still bears his name, and he notes on February 17: ‘The last load of my rareties was sent to the barge, and this afternoon I relapsed into the gout’—a poor reward for his generosity!

In connection with the use of the river for the transport of goods mention may be made of the curious old custom of ‘deodand’ by which inanimate objects responsible for the loss of human life became forfeit to the Crown. William Shrympelmersh was tried in 1386 because a man fell out of one of his punts and was drowned while conveying ale to Windsor for the King’s use. He was pardoned. But five years later a similar accident occurred in a ‘lyghter’ laden with wine and other goods belonging to Long Johan, and this time the vessel was confiscated and sold by the authorities.

As regards Eton the existence of the old wharf in the Playing Fields proves that goods were brought to the school by water; and William Paston, writing to his brother in February 1479 to acknowledge the receipt of a remittance, mentions that he has been told that a consignment of figs and raisins which was on its way was coming ‘in another barge.’ To Etonians before 1850 the waggons bringing coal from the wharf were a familiar sight in the Playing Fields.

3. THE KING OF DENMARK VISITS THE CITY (Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1768)

4. AN EARLY POUND-LOCK (S. Owen)

That the river—‘Thamesis flud’ as it is quaintly called in an early map of ‘Barkshire’—was commonly used is therefore indisputable. But it must not be imagined that its use was free from difficulty and danger, or that it in any way resembled the placid stream we know to-day. The fact is that the history of the Thames for some five hundred years before the end of the seventeenth century, as far back, that is, as the clause in Magna Carta enacting the destruction of all weirs—‘omnes kidelli de cetero deponantur penitus de Thamesia’—is a history of the struggle between two opposite and often actively hostile interests: on the one hand the traders and barge-owners who wanted the river kept as free from obstruction as possible; and on the other the millers, fishermen and riparian owners.

The obstructions were apparently of many kinds, and the names given to them are not always easy to interpret. They are summed up in an Act of Parliament of the reign of Edward III. ‘Whereas the common passage of boats and ships,’ so it runs, ‘in the great rivers of England be oftentimes annoyed by the erection of gorces, mills, weirs, stanks, stakes and kidels—gortz, molins, estanks, estackes et kideux—in great damage of the people, it is accorded and established: That all such gorces etc. . . . ,which be raised in the time of King Edward, the king’s grandfather and after . . . shall be pulled up and cleared away without being re-erected.’

Of the various obstructions named in this Act something more must be said.

Phillips’ Dictionary (1706) defines a gorce as ‘any stop in a river, such as Wears, Mills, Stakes, etc. which hinder the free passage of Ships or Boats.’

A Stank (Latin stagnum) denotes—

1. A pond or pool. Also a ditch or dyke of slowly moving water, a moat.

2. A dam to hold back water, a weir or flood-gate.

A Kiddle (or Keddle) is defined as—

1. A dam, weir, or barrier in a river, having an opening in it fitted with nets or other appliances for catching fish.

2. An arrangement of stake-nets on the sea beach for the same purpose.

The Keddle nets of Rye still preserve the latter sense of the word.

Mills and stakes need no comment. Weirs in those days meant obstructions built out into the river to enable the owners to net fish. An Act of Edward I, for instance, laid down that ‘the water of Thames is to be so widened that ships and great barges may ascend from London to Oxford, and descend, without hindrance from any weirs; as the Thames is so narrowed in divers places that ships cannot pass.’ Weirs in the modern sense, spanning the whole width of the stream, would have been styled ‘lokes’ (locks); but up to the time of the Oxford-Burcot Commission of 1605 nothing resembling the modern lock existed on the Thames. Then three pound-locks, as they were at first called, were made at Iffley, Sandford and Swift Ditch. These were completed by 1635. There may have been a fourth at Sutton Courtenay, but this is very doubtful. In spite of the obvious advantages of locks of this new kind no others were built on the Thames till 1771.¹

Why this was so is not clear. The political convulsions by which the country was distracted up to the Revolution of 1688 may account for the inactivity of the first half-century of the period. But from this date up to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 there was little to check internal development; and the outburst of energy in all directions that occurred during the Napoleonic period proves that foreign wars do not necessarily entail stagnation at home. A possible explanation is that the period in question coincides with the beginning of Parliamentary government. In earlier days the merchants of London and others interested in the maintenance of proper communication addressed petitions to the King in person, and he on his own initiative appointed commissioners to deal with the matter direct. The procedure in Parliament was much more cumbrous, and the transference to it of the power of the purse reduced the influence of the City of London.

Up to the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, all traffic—and that there was a large amount of it has been shown—had to be conducted without the aid of locks of the modern kind. Their place was taken by what were known as ‘flash’ locks, a name probably due to confusion with ‘flush.’ At any rate their object was to produce what would now be called a flush of water. They consisted of a barrier right across the stream with an opening in it about twenty feet wide ordinarily kept closed by means of movable tackle. If a barge grounded on some shoal during its passage between two such locks, the sluices were opened and a ‘flash’ was sent down—for a price—to float it off again. In the early days the locks were privately owned and the owners charged what they saw fit for the passage of a barge or for a ‘flash.’ Later, when all the locks were taken over by a central body, periodical flashes were let down, and a time-table for them shows that in about 1830 this was done twice a week, and that the flashes took roughly seventy hours to travel the seventy or eighty miles from Lechlade to Sonning.¹

The passage of these flash-locks—weirs as we should now call them—was a difficult and often dangerous business. The whole barrier consisted of three parts—the bridge, the rimers and the paddles. Part of the bridge was movable, pivoting on a post fixed in the edge of the bank, the part on the shore side being weighted to balance the part that extended over the water. The rimers were upright posts fitting into grooves in the bridge above and the sill of the weir below. The paddles which held up the water rested against the rimers and had long handles by means of which they could be raised or lowered from the bridge. The whole apparatus resembled the tackle used at the sides of most modern weirs, except that in the latter neither the bridge nor the rimers need be moved.

Before a barge could pass through a lock of this kind, the paddles and rimers had to be pulled up and the foot-bridge had to be swung open. When the level of the whole of the reach above had been lowered and that of the reach below raised sufficiently to make it possible, the barge, if going downstream, shot through the opening, or, if upstream, had to be hauled through by means of winches, capstans and the like, or by mere horse or man power. Gangs of fifty or even eighty men are mentioned. The print of Radcot Weir, reproduced opposite, shows how the bridge could be swung back much like a modern lock gate.

PLATE III

5. A FLASH-LOCK, EYNSHAM

6. A FLASH-LOCK, RADCOT

That the passage of these locks was not without danger is evident from what Strype writes in his edition of Stow’s Survey of London. Strype wrote in 1720, but the authority is that of Stow (1580). Strype describes how one John Bishop made a complaint to the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, ‘to whom he shewed, how by these Stoppages of the Water, several Persons, to the number of 15 or 16, in four Years only, had been drowned, and their Goods lost; having been Persons belonging to Barges and Vessels using the river. . . . Some of these Locks were extraordinary dangerous in passing. The going up the Locks were so steep, that every Year Cables had been broken that cost 400l. and Bargemen and Goods drowned. And in coming down, the Waters fell so high, that it sunk the Vessels, and destroyed Corn and Malt wherewith they were laden.’

This complaint having, apparently, proved of no avail, Bishop repeated it—in verse!—in 1585. His second outburst was immediately answered by ‘those concerned in these Locks, Wears and Mills.’ ‘The causes,’ according to them, ‘of the increased peril of the passage was that the Barges were become of greater burthen; almost double what they used to be; that they laded them beyond reason; that they used partly to unload below the lock and reship again above, even when they used to bring but seven or eight loads. Now they came with twenty they would unload nothing; they employed people of no skill; they travelled so late and so early as to be unable to see what they were doing; they commonly spared neither the Sabbath Day nor others. And lastly it was likely there would be more accidents, as the number of Barges was increased from ten or twelve to fourscore. . . . And it was no wonder the cables parted; they were often made of ill stuff, and the barges so great and so heavily laden.’

The dangers are similarly described a century later by Dr. Plot in his Oxfordshire (1677). Speaking of the ‘Locks and Turn-pikes made upon the River Isis’ as the result of the Act of 1623, he defines the object of a lock as being twofold—‘to keep up the water and give the vessels an easie descent.’ ‘For the first,’ he says, ‘a lock’—i.e. flash-lock—‘will suffice, which is made up only of bars of wood called Rimers, which must be all pulled up at arrival before the boat may pass either down or upwards; which with the stream is not without violent precipitation; and against it, at many places, not without the help of a Capstain at Land; and sometimes neither of them without imminent danger.’

In 1770 the whole situation was changed by the appointment of a new Commission, one of the members of which was James Brindley, to whom the canal system of this country may be said to owe its existence. As an instance of his foresight it may be mentioned that he laid down from the first that twelve locks were wanted between Mortlake and Boulter’s Lock at Maidenhead. All these have since been made; but Richmond, the last of them, was only finished in 1894. Yet, though the whole of Brindley’s programme took so long to complete, matters moved comparatively fast; and the Secretary to the Commissioners was able to report in 1810 that twenty-seven locks had been built, mostly with cuts, ‘in places where the water has been anciently penned up for the purpose of working mills or fishing.’

Up to a fairly recent date there were other circumstances besides the difficulties and dangers described which made the Thames unsuitable for pleasure traffic as we now know it. The insanitary condition of the river in earlier ages is almost indescribable. Harwood¹ gives a number of revoltingly suggestive instances.

In 1361 the butchers of London were forbidden, under severe penalties, to slaughter animals nearer the City than Stratford on one side and Knightsbridge on the other, because their habit of casting the entrails into the Thames poisoned the air and, besides the abominable stench, caused sickness among those dwelling in the City.

In 1372 the river and port of London were so obstructed by noxious matter of all sorts, ‘which had been and was daily cast into the channel,’ that vessels could not pass.

In the spring of 1519 members of Oxford University complained to Cardinal Wolsey that they were frequently visited by plague in hot seasons, because their drains were obstructed as a result of the river outside their jurisdiction being dammed up by various obstacles.

In 1632 John Taylor, the river poet, in his Thame Isis, a tirade in verse against the condition of the river, sums up the position thus:—

Dead Hogges, Dogges, Cats, and well flayd Carryon Horses,

Their noysome Corpes soyld the Waters Courses;

Both Swines and Stable dunge, Beast-guts and Garbage,

Street-dust, with Gardners weeds and Rotten Herbage.

And from those Waters filthy putrifaction,

Our meat and drink were made, which bred Infection.

As the riverside population increased, conditions grew worse, and sporadic efforts were made to improve them. John Taylor relates how he was commissioned to help:—

I was commanded, with the Water Baylie,

To see the Rivers clensed, both nights and dayly . . .

and with evident pride and a delightful Gilbertian rhyme he concludes:—

My selfe and partner, with cost, paines, and travell,

Saw all made clean from Caryon, Mud, and Gravell.

And now and then was punisht a Delinquent,

By which good meanes away the filth and stink went.

Similarly for half a century or more after 1650 the Court of Sewers for Berkshire and Oxfordshire kept the river clean from Oxford to Burcot. But such efforts were the exception. Not much improvement was effected till the end of the eighteenth century, when the first attempt was made to bring the whole river under the control of permanent commissioners. Even in 1794, when the construction of Romney Lock was contemplated, a letter of protest against the proposal stated that Nature formed the river as the common sewer of the country!

Nowadays throughout the whole of the Thames Valley no sewage or other pollution is allowed to pass into the river. The cleansing of the Upper Thames began about 1880. In London, where the Thames Conservancy had not full powers, matters were unsatisfactory until the London County Council, instituted in 1888, had had time to improve the drainage system; and up to 1890 sewage was discharged untreated into the river, the state of which was still such as to be dangerous to the public health. Since then all noxious matter has been carried fifty miles out to sea before being deposited, and every care is now taken to keep Thames water unpolluted.

¹ See pp. 8, 59.

¹ Windsor Old and New, pp. 9 ff.

¹ An example of an early pound-lock is shown in fig. 4, facing p. 4.

¹ Thacker, Thames Highway—General History, p. 176.

¹ Windsor Old and New.

CHAPTER II

RIVER VERSUS ROAD

TRIALS OF TRAVELLING

ITS use as something not much better than a cesspool naturally rendered the Thames, up to the latter half of the eighteenth century, unsuited to pleasure traffic; the difficulties and dangers of its navigation might equally have been expected to outweigh its advantages as a highway for the carriage of merchandise or passengers. That they did not do so has been shown above; and something must be said to explain this apparent anomaly.

Before 1825, when Stephenson first demonstrated the possibilities of a steam-driven locomotive running on a railway track, the only alternative to water transport was road transport. The rulers of the Roman Empire had linked the various portions of that Empire to Rome and to one another by a network of magnificent roads, but when their power declined no new masters of the world rose to take their place as road-makers. The Middle Ages may be regarded as an era of pedestrians and pack-horses.

It must not, however, be imagined that the Romans were the only or even the earliest providers of roads capable of supporting wheeled traffic—viae munitae, fortified roads, as they termed them. J. W. Gregory, in his Story of the Road, describes the Imperial roads of China and the wonderful Inca roads of Peru. In early Britain, too, as the same author relates, the Cornish tin was brought in waggons to the Channel ports before the invasion of Julius Caesar. This is definitely stated by Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian contemporary of Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus, who travelled over a considerable portion of Europe and Asia in quest of the materials for his Historical Library, and, though devoid of all critical faculty, collected a mass of interesting information. He states that the tin from Cornwall, after being beaten ‘into knucklebone shapes,’ was carried in waggons across England to be shipped to France, but was taken down to Marseilles on pack-horses. His description of the shape of the ingots is verified by the discovery of one of them in Falmouth Harbour. This is flat on one side and convex on the other, with a long triangular notch at each end. The curve enabled it to lie conveniently in the bottom of a boat, and the notches made it easy to fasten to a peg on the pack-saddle.

When the