50 years ago this week, in 1970, Regent’s first took to the water to compete in the annual Summer Eights bumps races.
Sadly, the current pandemic has led to the first cancellation of Summer Eights since 1945. Here, David Crowther shares some of RPCBC’s history.
As you enjoy the beautiful weather this week, spare a thought for one of the more stash-heavy groups in the college community; the perpetually loved rowers may be enjoying the sunshine rather less than others. For the rowers, this week would have been the Summer Eights competition, the culmination of year of hard work on the river and the rowing machines; to see that the weather had – for once – turned out to match the occasion just makes it all the more bittersweet. It gets worse; this year was no ordinary Summer Eights. Our Boat Club has now been going strong for 50 years; in normal circumstances, this Eights would have been a celebration of that, a chance for rowers from throughout those 50 years to join together and cheer RPCBC on for (hopefully) another successful bumps campaign. Instead, all we can do is write slightly sad articles about our Boat Club’s successful history.
Our Boat Club began in 1970; student Martyn Kelly had been rowing with Oriel College when he decided it was time Regent’s had a boat club of our own competing in Summer Eights. So, after rounding up fellow students to join him in a crew, and borrowing a boat and blades from other colleges, RPCBC was formed.
The crew started 104th on the river in Division IX – these were days before a separate women’s competition existed and all crews competed across these nine divisions – and the men’s crew went on to win blades (the goal of all college rowers – awarded for catching the boat in front, or ‘bumping’, every day) in their first-ever competition.
The men’s Eights crew climbed to the middle of Division VI by 1979, and a men’s crew entered Torpids for the first time in 1978 – gaining 10 places in their first competition and reaching their highest-ever Torpids position of 39th on the river at the end of 1979.
Soon, our men’s boat was joined by a women’s boat as well. Regent’s Women first competed in Summer Eights in 1985 – and Torpids in 1991 – winning Summer Eights blades in 1994, including a bump on St Antony’s W1 … a rare occasion for RPCBC to catch a college 1st VIII in bumps! The Women’s crew reached their highest-ever positions on the river of 36th in Torpids in 1997 and 40th in Eights in 1998.
The mid-1990s also proved successful for the RPCBC Men’s crew with Torpids blades in 1991, and Eights blades in 1993, 1994, and 1995. The Men’s and Women’s crews both winning blades in Eights 1994 remains the only time both crews have won blades in the same competition.
The early 2000s brought difficult times for RPCBC with much of Michaelmas and Hilary Terms often washed out with flooding, leading to very limited training time. No RPCBC crews competed in Torpids between 2000-2005, and in Eights – although 2000 started with men’s blades – the men’s and women’s crews collectively dropped -18 places over these six years.
However, in 2005, two members of the women’s crew and their cox took on a big challenge, teaming up with rowers from LMH to take part in the Oxford-Cambridge Channel Challenge, rowing a coastal 4+ from Dover to France over 21 miles across the English Channel, and setting a record time for their boat class.
And now we come to the recent history of RPCBC – a decade which has been marked by consistent success. A remarkable few years of success on the women’s side saw Double Blades (blades being earnt in both Torpids and Eights of the same year) being earnt in 2015 and 2016, matching the feats of the Men’s crews of 1979 and 2006, as well as an incredible victory in the university-wide Christchurch Regatta for novice rowers. This success – driven more recently by the Women’s winning of blades last Eights – has seen the women take up their highest Eights position since 2000. On the men’s side, 2005-10 incredibly saw thirty-four consecutive starts in a bumps race without being bumped once in Eights, a Regent’s record; the Men have currently gone sixteen days without loss, the third-best record on the river. This recent success has seen them rise to their highest position since 1982 in Torpids and their highest ever position in Summer Eights.
I maintain this year would have seen a similar success, with two very strong crews training extremely well through difficult weather earlier in the year; all we can do is smile, regroup and get ready to return even stronger next year.
