THE SPORT OF ROWING stated ideal of all muscle groups starting and ending concurrently. In practice, Burnell varied a bit from his To perform the ferryman’s finish, the athlete must end his leg and back motion slightly before the release in order that the arms can continue alone to lever the upper body back toward vertical. See the film frames of Bushnell on the previous page. This was a rejection of a fundamental English Orthodox tenet. Interestingly, after long reflection, Fairbairn had also incorporated the ferryman’s finish into technique.2899 Burnell and Bushnell How the 1948 British Olympic Champion Double was formed is an interesting story to be dramatized in 2012 on BBC One. Dickie Burnell was not just a rowing journalist, thinker, philosopher and historian. Son of four-time Boat Race winner Charles D. Burnell, 5-seat on the 1908 Olympic Champion Old Crocks,2900 the man Steve Fairbairn called the finest oar he had ever seen,2901 young Burnell seemed destined from birth to row in the 1939 Oxford Blue Boat. By contrast, the father of Bertram Herbert Thomas Bushnell (1921-2010) had a boatyard in Wargrave, upstream from Henley, and Bushnell fils had been primarily a runner in his youth. Journalist and historian Christopher Dodd: “The wiry 11st 5lb 5ft 9in 26-year- old Bushnell was chalk to 14st 4 lb 6ft 4in 31-year-old Burnell’s cheese. Bushnell left school at 14 to join the Thornycroft marine engineering company as an apprentice and began rowing at Maidenhead RC, while Burnell was Eton, Oxford, Leander. 2899 See Chapter 19. 2900 See Chapters 17 and 24. 2901 Page, p. 100 his preferred “Bushnell carried a large shoulder chip about academia, the establishment and the upper classes, while Burnell was carving a career as The Times’s rowing correspondent. Bushnell was bolshie, Burnell benign”2902 Bushnell: “There was class tension there. The only thing we ever agreed on was what time to go out, but we got on well because neither of us bore grudges.”2903 “Because I was a marine engineer, I qualified as an amateur, but had I been a boat mechanic, they’d have said I was a professional and couldn’t join in the Olympics. My sculling boat weighed 28lb., and the boats I worked on weighed 300 tons – not much comparison really. It was all about snobbishness in those days.”2904 Dodd: “Bushnell spent the war testing torpedo boats; Burnell helped liberate Northern Germany, and in particular Ratzeburg, which was to become the epicentre of German rowing revival after the war.2905 Bushnell sailed to Dunkirk with the Little Ships, while Burnell won a medal on the battlefield.”2906 Bushnell: “During the war, I was moving all over the country using my engineering training on motor torpedo boats. It was tough and so very boring in digs on your own, so I’d get up and regularly go for a five mile run, often uphill.”2907 After the war, Bushnell lost the 1946 Wingfield Sculls to Burnell, but in 1947 he won. An Argentine official invited him to visit South America. Bushnell: “During the winter of 1947, I was unbeaten in races there, but I also 2902 Christopher Dodd, Bert Bushnell obituary, The Guardian, February 28, 2010 2903 Ibid. 2904 Janie Hampton, Bert Bushnell: Britain’s last surviving Gold Medallist from the 1948 Olympics, The Independent, February 15, 2010 2905 See Chapter 91ff. 2906 Christopher Dodd, op. cit. 2907 Allen, op. cit., p. 4 816
