THE SPORT OF ROWING Eton has long had a tradition of creating its own elaborate games with esoteric rules. Frank Grenfell, River Master at Eton for ten years: “[In early centuries,] the school involved itself with academic work and had no opinion on [sports and recrea- tion]: what the boys did out of school hours was of no concern to the authorities.”97 Tom Weil: “Such activities were actual- ly restricted or even banned for years, giving rise to an elaborate looking-the-other-way charade between students and masters in which the students had to make some effort not to be too obvious. There were occasion- ally repercussions for those who broke the rules too wantonly.”98 Grenfell: “From an early time, all sport was organised by the boys themselves, a custom which lasted recognisably certainly into my time at Eton.”99 The boys created Eton Fives, a game resembling American handball first played between any two attached buttresses on the outside wall of the Romanesque-style Eton Chapel and now played on a complex three- walled court designed to replicate the sur- faces of the chapel exterior. There is the Field Game, which seems to be a precursor of modern football.100 And then there’s the Wall Game, some- thing like rugby football101 played on a nar- row strip of field alongside a long, high brick retaining wall. It involves a garden Harrow opened its doors relatively recently, in 1615, in Northwest London. It has produced a mere seven British Prime Ministers. 97 Grenfell, personal correspondence, 2007 98 Weil, personal correspondence, 2011 99 Grenfell, personal correspondence, 2007 100 for Americans, soccer. 101 The first rules for what evolved into the mod- ern sport of rugby were written by the boys of Rugby School in 1870, some 150 years after Etonians had begun playing the Wall Game. door at one end and a tree at the other acting as goals, a ball and two teams, the King’s Scholars against the Oppidans,102 the rest of the school. Much of the action occurs in grinding contact with the wall, and over the years several boys have died playing the Wall Game. It has been nearly a century since anyone has scored a goal in the annual game held on St. Andrew’s Day, November 30. Etonians Take to the Water Sometime during the 16th Century, the fertile imaginations that young Etonians ap- plied to their sporting pastimes grew beyond games on land. Around four hundred and fifty years ago, they began to look at the busy river that almost completely surround- ed the campus and town and imagine it as a recreational venue. The water was not as polluted as further downstream toward Lon- don since “there was no town nearer than Maidenhead103 to defile the water.”104 Recreational swimming had become a common pastime for Eton students as early as the 1500s. By the 1700s, “school authori- ties employed watermen to look after the boys bathing.”105 During this period, however, there were no recreational excursions in boats while school was in session. “The objections to boating probably depended on the difficul- ties and dangers of navigation [amidst] the old flash locks, frequent weirs [built to di- 102 “Oppidans, although the term means ‘town,’ were the sons of nobles and other important fam- ilies who had been sent to Eton. Under the early practice of separating them from the King’s Scholars, they were frequently required to find lodging in the town.” – Weil, op.cit. 103 6 miles or 10 km upstream. 104 Byrne & Churchill, p. 23 105 Ibid, p. 25 38
