ENGLISH ORTHODOX MEETS CLASSICAL TECHNIQUE Boat teammate, Reginald Percy Pfeiffer “Reggie”740 Rowe (1868-1945), the peerless book Rowing, the second volume of the Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes devoted to rowing after the previously- mentioned Woodgate volume, Boating, of 1888.741 The new work, their era’s definitive rowing bible, was inevitably referred to familiarly as “Rowe & Pitman.” Back in 1886, the man rowing in the winning Cambridge Blue Boat 6-seat, directly in front of Steve Fairbairn in 5, had been stroke-seat F.I. Pitman’s enormous Eton and Third Trinity742 teammate, Stanley Duff Muttlebury (1866-1933). Fairbairn had recruited Muttlebury to help him install his preferred longer slides in their Cambridge shell. The two of them “set to work on the boat with screwdrivers.”743 That come-from-behind Cambridge win in 1886 was additionally memorable, being only their second victory of that decade, and it began a Cambridge dynasty. After the elder Pitman completed his studies in 1886, Muttlebury rowed four more years in the Cambridge boat, rowing again right in front of Fairbairn in 1887, and going on to win the Boat Race for a total of four years in a row,744 the only Cantabridg- Vanity Fair, March 26, 1895 “Cherry” Pitman 12 st. 68kg Sir Leslie Ward, aka “Spy,” an Etonian, is perhaps the best remembered of the weekly 740 V. Nickalls, p. 35 741 See Chapter 12. 742 Third Trinity Boat Club is a rowing club of Trinity College, Cambridge University. It was founded in 1833. First Trinity was founded in 1825, and Second Trinity, no longer in existence, in 1831. Membership in Third Trinity was originally confined to Old Etonians and Old Westminsters. The two remaining clubs merged to form First and Third Trinity Boat Club in 1946. They row with blue blades with a yellow band at the neck. 743 Dodd, Henley, p. 132 744 Rowe & Pitman, pp. 308-10 Vanity Fair caricaturists. He contributed 1,325 portraits, more than half the magazine’s total output between 1873 and 1911. Vanity Fair published sixty portraits of current or former rowers. Forty-one were by “Spy.” 197
