THE SPORT OF ROWING and at a smattering of other Cambridge colleges, and on the Tideway, and if he impacted the Cambridge Blue Boat, there were still all the other colleges at Cambridge and at Oxford with coaches carrying on with English Orthodox Technique just as before. It turns out that the two approaches were like oil and water. Even when you mixed them, eventually they separated again of their own accord, and so without constant reinforcement, isolated islands of Classical Technique quickly succumbed to the onslaughts of the English Orthodox establishment. Nevertheless, early in the 20th Century, twenty-two years after Steve’s last row for Cambridge, Fairbairnism would begin to become a formidable movement in world rowing. Haig-Thomas & Nicholson Peter Haig-Thomas was an Etonian, four-time Cambridge Blue (1902-5) and three-time Boat Race winner. He won the Grand three times, the Stewards’ three times and the Goblets once. As a coach he won the Grand three more times and was mainly responsible for thirteen Cambridge Boat Race victories between the two world wars.731 Matthew Archibald Nicholson was another Etonian, the 1947 Cambridge President who stood down and never got his Blue, and then won the Boat Race as coach in 1949 and 50 for Cambridge and 1951 for Oxford. In 1958, when the two of them wrote an influential book, The English Style of Rowing, the two great branches of rowing, English Orthodox and Fairbairn, still divided the British rowing community into two camps which by then had been engaged in a bitter war for half a century. Haig-Thomas and Nicholson were decidedly anti-Fairbairn in their loyalties: 731 Haig-Thomas & Nicholson, p. 14 “‘So-called Orthodoxy’ has acquired a bad name for some reason or other and is synonymous with a style in which the crew is stiff, lacking in leg drive and, on putting its oars in the water, backs the boat down.”732 They pointedly mentioned no individual by name in describing the change initiated by Fairbairn at Cambridge: “By 1886 or a year or two earlier, Cambridge had learnt the proper combination of [body] swing and slide, in which both are driven back together on the entry until the slide reaches the back stop at the same moment as the hands reach the body [concurrency].”733 Rowe & Pitman The 1886 stroke-oar who had rallied the Cambridge Blue Boat to win from behind spectacularly was Frederick I. “Freddie” Pitman (1863-1942), one of eight brothers from the family of the famous “Rowe & Pitman” stock-brokers.734 They all went to Eton, and they all rowed. 735 Freddie went on to win the Diamond Sculls three months after stroking his 1886 victorious Blue Boat.736 Twelve years later, Pitman’s younger brother, Charles Murray “Cherry”737 Pitman (1872-1948), himself Captain of the Boats at Eton and winner of the School Pulling and Sculling, a member of New College, Oxford738 and four-time winner of the Boat Race,739 would write in collaboration with his 1892 Oxford Blue 732 Ibid, p. 13 733 Ibid, p. 34 734 Diana Cook, personal correspondence, 2005 735 By 1932, fourteen Pitmans had rowed for Eton College. 736 Rowe & Pitman, p. 324 737 G.O. Nickalls, Rainbows, p. 94 738 Burnell, R., Oxford/Cambridge, p. 40. They row with purple blades with two thin yellow stripes near the tip. 739 1892-5 196
