INTERNATIONAL ROWING TURNS PROFESSIONAL ‘When I was training in the Cambridge Blue Boat during the winter and spring of 1962, we were told that we were to have a ‘brush’ with Barn Cottage during a very lonely late winter training session at Henley. We were living at Leander Club for a week or so. Chris Davidge was stroke of that boat, and they had a formidable reputation in the UK. Can’t remember the distance we raced nor the outcome (which means that they probably beat us), but I recalled being impressed with their toughness and fitness. “Although I only got to know a few of the members of that crew, I believe that there was another reason why they so dominated English rowing. Class distinction and the notion of ‘the working class’ was alive and well in 1962 England, and most of the leading English crews were predominantly made up of university graduates, many of whom were ‘Oxbridge’ or University of London oarsmen. What distinguished Barn Cottage to me was that they welcomed all comers regardless of class as long as they were large, tough, and fit oarsmen and enjoyed pounding those they rowed against.”2977 The 1962 Barn Cottage Eight failed to make the final at the 1962 World Championships in Lucerne and earned a Bronze in the ‘62 Commonwealth Games in Perth. In his last race before retirement, Colin Porter and half the Barn Cottage Eight won a second Commonwealth Bronze in the coxed-fours. Post Mortem Colin Porter had failed to win a European, World or Olympic Gold Medal, and so his dangerously open mind and revolutionary attitude toward selection and training could be ignored, discounted and eventually forgotten by the British establishment. His contemporary as a 2977 Budd, personal correspondence, 2011 coach, Jumbo Edwards, defined Porterism as “the cult of hard work and fitness to the exclusion of almost all else.”2978 Doug Stuart: “Colin Porter's legacy to British Rowing is that he was the catalyst which broke the dead hand of the Rowing Establishment, the effect of which is still felt today.”2979 Great Britain produced a superb Silver Medal Coxless-Four for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo,2980 but it would be another decade before foreign coaches would come to Britain during the coming Age of Enlightenment2981 and help their adopted country begin to loosen its grip on the “outmoded attitudes” that had so frustrated Colin Porter. Jumbo Edwards In the culture war between the English Orthodox and Fairbairn camps, Hugh Robert Arthur Edwards (1906-1972) was a man who refused to take sides. His mind was as fertile as Colin Porter’s, and he was nearly as controversial, but he ended up following a different path from Colin. Edwards: “My father always had an ambition that his sons should get Blues, so when I went to Westminster, naturally I elected for the water in preference to cricket and football. There I had a good grounding in rowing. I started on the tank on a fixed seat, of course, and was not permitted to go out in a boat until my second term. I eventually became a very stylish oarsman and rowed in the eight my last three years. I was always inclined to put on weight, so in order to get the necessary additional exercise, I used to do a lot of sculling, in which art I became most proficient. 2978 Edwards, p. 186 2979 Stuart, op. cit. 2980 See Chapter 85. 2981 See Chapter 116ff. 835
