THE BIRTH OF ENGLISH ORTHODOXY beginning of the stroke, and the advantages of a movement of a few inches on the seat were well recognized. Gradually they began to make the thwart wider.”423 Anthropologist/writer/historian and Yale oarsman John R. Hale: “In the 1850s and 1860s, rowers in the U.S., Canada and Britain began to experiment with a pad of ‘wash leather’ (a soft, pliant leather) sewn to the seat of their rowing trousers. When these pads were greased, the rower could slide.”424 But greasing the rower’s pants, the so-called “buckskin and butter” approach, also had its drawbacks, and rowing manuals of the day often included “various medicinal potions to deal with the boils and blisters that resulted,”425 and many a gentleman oarsman had to “eat his breakfast off the mantelpiece”426 after crew practice. Mechanical ingenuity soon began offering practical solutions. During the 1860s, the mechanical sliding seat was “gradually evolving itself from a pair of well-greased breeches that rubbed up and down a long seat made so that the grain of the wood ran fore and aft, and was turning into a thin board running on oiled runners,”427 then a seat “balanced on glass balls that permitted it to move with the least possible friction,”428 and finally into a seat mounted on wheels and sliding along tracks. American John C. Babcock of the Nassau Boat Club of New York was perhaps the first to develop a reliable sliding seat, but his intent had nothing to do with leg drive. 423 Crowther, p. 237 424 Hale, p. 83 425 Ibid. 426 Steve Fairbairn, qtd. by Burnell, Swing, p. 10 427 Eckford, p. 191 428 Ibid. Crowther: “He found difficulty in properly placing the seats [in relation] to the rowlock. At a distance of nine inches abaft the thwart, the catch was strong and easy but the finish poor, while at fifteen inches the catch was faulty and the finish good. “He found that to both catch and finish well, the oarlock should move about six inches. Since this was impracticable, he conceived the idea of moving the seat. “It was merely a mechanical aid to getting the oarsman into the best position for the catch and for the finish, and the fact that the legs could be made a part of the stroke was not apparent.”429 Babcock: “When we take into consideration that the best oarsmen in the world slide, when spurting,430 from four to six inches on a fixed seat, the moveable seat can only be considered as a mechanical contrivance intended for a better 429 Crowther, p. 238 430 the 19th Century term for “sprinting.” Patrick Okens Sliding Seat of Ned Hanlan World Professional Singles Champion 1880-1884 By the 1880s, seat technology was virtually indistinguishable from 20th Century versions. 119
