THE BIRTH OF ENGLISH ORTHODOXY his heavy boat with reasonable economy of effort, and with reasonable dispatch. “If he was asked to race for a wager, that was but a by-product of his trade, and if he was asked to teach a young gentleman, he naturally taught him to row or scull as he rowed or sculled himself. “Since his style was designed to pull a heavy boatload of people, it was not ideally suited for propelling a lighter boat at racing speed. It is a safe assumption that he favoured a short, choppy stroke, with something of a hoick at the finish; the same style, in fact, that we can see in a ferryman today [1952], or in a seaside boatman.”304 The First Ever Description of Rowing Technique History’s earliest surviving written description of how to row properly was contained in Donald Walker’s aptly titled 1834 compendium, Manly Exercises: In Which Rowing and Sailing are now first described; and Riding and Driving are for the first time given in a work of this kind; As well as the subjects of Walking, Running, Leaping, Vaulting, Pole-Leaping, Balancing, Skating, Carrying, Disk- Throwing, Climbing, Swimming, &c. &c. &c. Together With the Preliminaries of Training, Position, Extension Motions, Indian Club Exercise, &c.305 Apparently, Walker considered the inclusion of the new sport of rowing to be significant for his book. It was the first sport he listed in the title, a picture of a sculler was embossed onto the leather front cover, and an engraving of two scullers participating in a “river wager”306 was placed on the title page. 304 Burnell, Swing, p. 23 305 published in many editions in London and in Philadelphia, where the word “British” was added to the beginning of the title. 306 See Chapter 2. But Walker was not a rower himself. He was a London-based professional writer who was in the midst of producing a comprehensive survey of physical education in several volumes. In addition to his book on manly exercises, he also wrote books on exercises for ladies, on indoor and outdoor games and sports, on defensive exercises, along with additional volumes on reading and writing, spelling and pronunciation. Of the thousands of pages he produced in his career, exactly seven were about rowing. Since he specifically referred to “watermen,” it seems apparent that he had consulted with them while writing his short chapter on sculling, but the technique he described was not the old artisan waterman’s stroke. It was a new technique recently developed at the gentleman amateur rowing clubs on the Tideway, probably by the amateurs themselves in conjunction with their professional waterman coaches. According to rowing historian Rudie Lehmann writing more than seventy years after the fact, the move away from the original waterman’s stroke had indeed begun in London, perhaps as early as 1820. However, all that Lehmann had to rely on in his own day were inferences gleaned from old issues of Bell’s Life, the world’s first sporting newspaper, a London weekly founded in 1822. Lehmann: “The task [of reconstructing the early evolutionary history of rowing technique] is not an easy one, for the heroes themselves have long since rowed their last course, and the records they left of their ideas on this subject are few and scattered. “Indeed, the references to style are mainly incidental.”307 One explanation for this dearth of documentation was that for an English gentleman, trying overly hard to succeed at a sport or activity was unseemly, “not cricket,” as it were, so to actually give 307 Lehmann, p. 24 89
