This is one of the crews that won the Oxford City Bumping Races and the Serpentine Sprint Regatta School Fours event in the 1958/9/60/61 period. Not all those years. But for some consecutive years.
So, this is not long after Archer Cowley & Co had had its centenary in 1957. Not that that event signified much to me just then. For some reason, I didn’t even attend the dinner. Why not, I absolutely do not know. I wonder if it had anything to do with my (then) objection to swearing the oath of loyalty to the Crown needed to become a Freeman of Oxford? And which I disagreed with on the ground of not wishing to deny myself the right not to fight in some idiotic war such as the 1956 Suez Crisis created by the Conservative Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.
Crew: Paul Marriott (bow); Robert Herbertson (2); Phil Archer (3); Bill Simmons (stroke); Marcus Champ (Cox).\
The direction of view is from the City Boathouse launch raft (or was it just an edge of the river bank?), looking across towards Hinksey and the Abingdon Road beyond the Hinksey swiming baths. The hills in the background are probably Boars Hill, or thereabouts. The gravel ‘towing path’ along the Thames/Isis, here, where the rowing coaches ride their bicycles, is on the far bank (the west bank). Iffley Lock is to the left or downstream (the direction in which the boat is heading in this view), a distance of several hundred yards. In the Oxford City Bumping Races (and for that matter the Univesity Bumping Races) the boats line-up head-to-tail (quite close but with a gap of say half-a-length) along the far bank in this view, with the boats pointing upstream, from left-to-right, as seen in this photo. And Long Bridges bathing place is a similar distance towards Folly Bridge (to the right in this view), alongside Timms Boathouse at the south end of the so-called ‘Green Bank’ after the so-called ‘Gut’, where the river winds between the Iffley straight and the Green Bank straight.
So I was a relatively new recruit to rowing. I had been picked-out in(I think) 1956 to try my hand in the Colts VIII coached by Mike Cooper (MP Cooper), to whom I am eternally grateful for what that crew and his coaching did for me. Then the following year, instead of going into the third VIII as you would expect, I was given a trial in the first VIII (in competition with two boarders (from Chavasse House), Staniland and Pitts. I found myself a regular seat at bow in the first VIII, alongside Ricky Gallop, John Dart, Andrew Crisp, Fred Marshall, Robert Herbertson, and….. the rest of the names elude me for the moment (7.2.17) That was a turning point in my life, looking back. I had never been involved in sport before, except compulsorily. And here I was, on some sort of sporting pinnacle. I couldn’t believe it. And took it seriously. And have never looked back!
Heaven knows how many times I rowed up and down this stretch of water from Iffley Lock to Folly Bridge in the ‘Willy Waynflete’ and other boats. Up to 5 or 6 times (ie 3 times each way) per training session during Spring and Summer terms (say 11 weeks average) = 22 (weeks per year) x 5 (years: 1957-1961) x 5 (rowing days per week) x 5 (lengths per training session) x 50% (to allow for ‘slippage’) = 22 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 50% = 6875 lengths between Iffley Lock and Folley Bridge. Well, seems much too many. But anyway, the answer must be ‘a good many hundreds and probably some thousands’, over the years. And all that time I had no idea that when we arrived at Folly Bridge, sometimes feeling more dead than alive (a test of which, I found, in those days, was whether your teeth ached during the hour or so after the training session), I had no idea whatsover that we were quite close to where the Archer family, notably James Archer, had, in the 19th century, lived and worked, including having a farm for the horses which drew the wagons, at Grandpont (i.e. at Folly Bridge), and which had also been the location of Oxford Station in the years after the GWR arrived in Oxford first.