My roommate, Donald Schultz (who was to become Professor of Engineering at Oxford and later an OBE, and who died in 1988 while hiking in New Zealand), rigged up a system for me. He tied a cord to a boot that he placed on his desk and ran the cord out the window to a height of about two and a half metres above the pavement below. I could just reach it with a jump and, by pulling hard, drag the boot off the table to make it clatter into his metal wastebasket and wake him up. He would then get dressed, go down to the quadrangle, through the arch at the other side into the centre quad, and climb up on top of the four-metre wall looking down into Oriel Street by means of a ladder we had left concealed behind the shrubbery. Once on top, carefully straddling the rotating spikes set there to discourage just such exploits as these, he would heave the ladder up and over to the spot where I was waiting. With all my hockey gear in a duffle bag, I would climb up and both of us would balance precariously as we then reversed the procedure. I still have a small scar on one hand where the spikes took their toll.
After several months of this routine, including a disastrous match with Cambridge for which I won a Half Blue, I realized the futility of this exercise and took up rowing instead.
“Come on, Jesus!”
This bizarre shout was followed by three cracks of pistol shots in quick succession and then a chorus of other loud cheers. I stopped in my tracks. I thought I had inadvertently stumbled into the making of a film—a weird sacred western of some kind. Otherwise, it must be cloud-cuckoo-land. A knot of rowdy undergraduates was surging directly towards me, yelling and firing. But the location was a towpath alongside the River Thames (or the Isis as it is called when it curves around Oxford). The occasion was Eights Week, the annual five-day rowing event to determine which college is “head of the river.”
The cheers were for the eight-man crew and coxswain of the Jesus College boat. The blank shots were to signal that they were overlapping the boat ahead of them and could sweep across for a “bump.” Since you row with your back to the direction in which you’re headed, it’s impossible for an oarsman to get an accurate assessment of the right moment to strain to strike. It’s even hard for the coxswain, steering with eight large, toiling bodies in his line of sight. Hence all the shooting.
Rowing has long been a hugely competitive tradition between Oxford and Cambridge in the annual boat race that takes place every spring around Easter. The Captain of Boats at Oriel, as previously mentioned, lived in rooms on the ground floor of number one staircase. Since mine were on the same staircase, I had to pass his door several times daily. It wasn’t long before he invited me to sign up. I soon discovered there was a great deal more to oarsmanship than simple brute strength and determination. To begin with, every initiate had to toil for many autumn afternoons at what was dubbed a “bank tub.”
Near the boathouse on the Isis, just off the towpath, was a stubby, squarish-looking “boat” permanently bolted on one side to a dock. It was really a mock version of a section of a racing eight, complete with a sliding seat, foot stirrups and an oarlock. The chief difference from the real thing was that the oar one was given had two wide gaps in it that ran close to the full length of the blade. Once the art of squaring the blade to cut the water at a firm right angle was mastered, the stroke could be carried through with a firm sense of pressure but without the full weight of water caught and carried forward by a normal blade.
It took time, under the critical eye of a member of the crew of the college’s first eight, but after a few weeks I was deemed fit to go out on the river in a regular boat. What a mess we made of it! The coach shouted instructions from his bicycle on the towpath, but he was close to losing not just his voice but his temper before the outing was over. It was one thing to pseudo-row in a bank tub, it was quite another to try to coordinate one’s oar with those of other beginners just as shaky as oneself. Nobody had warned us that balance was just as important as timing your stroke. The boat rolled easily, so that the surface of the water could be at quite a different place or plane between the time one stroke was ended and another was begun. If once the boat was actually under way your oar “caught a crab” (was too deep in the water), it almost brought the boat to a total halt as the handle was forcibly wrenched from your hands to end up striking your solar plexus while the blade was pulled uncontrollably downwards. The offending oarsman immediately became the focus of a number of intensely cross glares and much shouting from the riverbank.
Once we finally settled in and became the crew our coach was doggedly determined we should be, it was sheer joy to be out on a crisp fall day with a crew on the river. You never forget the crack of eight long oars simultaneously biting into the water as the racing shell beneath you leaps suddenly forward. As you drive your legs, back and arms into the full stroke and then slide ahead, coiling to release the next, the boat becomes a living thing, gliding with barely a susurrating curl of wave at the bow. Eight muscled bodies move as one. Everything melts into a rhythmic single-mindedness. If you close your eyes, as we sometimes were told to do in practice drill, it feels as though you are flying. The wind is on your face and the rest of the world is forgotten. It’s a glorious feeling.
In the distance, the towers and Gothic pinnacles of the colleges kept silent watch; in nearby meadows, geese and cattle grazed; close by, the majestic swans sailed on in sublime indifference. It was an almost mystical experience—until a passing barge would occasionally send a swell that would slap over the side of the shell and douse your sweaty back with cold spray. However, after a warm shower later and sitting down to tea in your study—toast and honey or a bit of cheese—before hitting the books, you felt truly alive, glowing and at peace. Our crew managed to win our oars twice and went on to wear with pride the distinctive tortoise ties—a dark blue tie with a white tortoise image sewn into it just below the knot—that marked our membership in the Tortoise Club. It is composed of those who manage to row in the long-distance races held annually on the River Thames at Reading. The college mascot was a big tortoise that could sometimes be seen sunning itself in a corner of one of the college’s three quads.
One of our crew members, Ronald Watts, the son of a Canadian Anglican bishop, later went on to become provost of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Ron and I went to the coronation of Elizabeth II in June 1953 by paddling down the Thames from Oxford to London. At night we slept under the canoe, which I had had my father ship over to me during my first term, and we dined off a very large Dutch cheese and a couple of loaves of bread. We spent two full days on the trip, paddling past Eton College, Windsor Castle and Runnymede Island, where Magna Carta was signed, and later brought the craft back to Oxford on the train.
Many years later, in 1983, at the Oxford eightieth reunion of Rhodes Scholars, which we were both attending with our wives, the Queen spoke to us and I was able to tell her of our perhaps eccentric mode of getting to her ceremony all those years ago. Her eyes twinkled as she laughed and said: “How clever of you to have paddled downstream!” A Reuters cameraman caught the happy exchange and it was featured not just in the Toronto Star but also in the New York Times and several other international newspapers the next day.
This photo op didn’t just happen by chance, although luck lent a hand. The Toronto Star foreign editor had asked me to cover the reunion since I was planning on being there in any case. So I had arranged for a freelance photographer from Reuters in London to be in the gardens at Rhodes House for the Queen’s visit. The former Governor General of Canada, Roland Michener, the oldest Rhodes Scholar on the list of those attending, was supposed to be there to greet Her Majesty. My instructions to the photographer were to capture a shot of the two of them meeting to accompany my story, to be filed later that night by phone to Toronto. Just as the rope line had been set up in the gardens and the crowd of scholars and their partners was buzzing in anticipation, the Australian freelancer whom Reuters had sent came up to me to say that Michener had reportedly been taken ill and would not be available for a picture. I told him: “Do you see that attractive lady with the coral dress and white hat?” I pointed to Susan, who was standing nearby talking to the Wattses. “If you see the Queen come anywhere close to her, get that shot if you possibly can.” I went