This section is for readers' queries. Please send answers to the email addresses quoted, not to the Rowing Service! Thanks.
An historical query: "I'm trying to hunt down the origins of a trophy - the Dewar Shield, that is in the possession of one of my clubs (West Australian RC) old members. The Shield was presented to George Rogers on 3 occasions, 1902, 1903 and 1904 for sculling (which race, where?) by the Iris Rowing Club, somewhere in the UK. The shield was donated by Sir Richard Thomas Dewar MP. George left for Perth, Australia in 1905, taking the shield, which had become his own after the third win. Can any of your readers help fill in the rest? Where was IRIS RC? What distance was the race? Who was Richard Dewar..? Thanks, Tim Downs."
Record times
Links and direct pages:
The long-promised Rowing Results Database from Ronald Janssens is now here. To be honest, only useable with Java running well, but that doesn't stop it being the answer to all the statsmeisters' prayers, with results from 1947-1985 (and extending) for Worlds, Olympics and European championships (senior). Searchable in several different fields, this is going to be handy for journalists, athletes and rowing club/pub bores alike.
WorldRowers.Com, a JAMCO site listing extensive World Championship and Olympic historical data on the 2000 Olympic Rowing team members from all countries. This is an extremely useful resource for journalists, as well as being fascinating for statsmeisters and browsing rowers.
May 1999: A cutter containing an interesting assortment of British rowing names-and-faces arrived at the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, having rowed there from London to break the old London-Paris rowing record.
Jamco Times is running a new databasing and analysis system for results at world level, and for the 1999 Worlds, did a prediction page for every race in the Olympic boat classes. They were extremely accurate not only in their overall qualifying predictions, but in the boat positions too.
Books on rowing
Those with a sense for the history of the sport may be interested by Way Enough!, Recollections of a Life in Rowing, by Stanley Richard Pocock. As well as building boats, Stan was the most successful coach of Olympic crews in U.S. history. There is apparently much in the book about English rowing, Henley, and the Thames.
A Cambridge (UK) publication: "The Bumps", a book with enclosed interactive CD-ROM, showing everything from the college bumping charts, history and photographs, to video footage of racing and the varying rowing styles.
A page online for a book called
Daring The Sea,
about the first men ever to row the Atlantic Ocean, back in 1896.
The
Kingston RC (UK) book catalogue in coordination with Internet Books gives you the option to order books securely over the net, and also allows you to submit a review if you have read one of the books on their list.
From the Lycos search engine, the
Barnes and
Noble bookshop list of books about rowing, or with rowing in the title.
Quite a lot have good reviews with their details.
Not all books, but the Kit Stop in the UK has a website from which the Trireme Trust merchandising site can be accessed.
History of rowing - weblinks
If you haven't seen it, the Friends of Rowing History website has a rapidly growing collection of stories, links, information and archive material. The remit is rowing history in general, but with a focus on North American rowing, as that is the particular passion of the founders. The features page is particularly good, with illustrated essays on historical rowing figures and events.
Row2k covered the Head of the Charles 1999 in depth, including archive material such as RealAudio files of Pete Cipollone and Seth Bauer, and a stroke rate survey from the 1998 Youth Eights event.
Kalle Jonsson writes: -
"In sweden, especially province H²lsingland and Dalarna we have juge old
traditional church boats which was used when going to church a long time ago, year 1800-1900. Have you seen any similar when you have travelled around the world ? Do you have any good sites to look into? If you go and look in http://kvasir.se/se/sport/row/ and then go into Borl²nge Roddklubb you see what kind of boats I mean. Today we have competitions like Viking row competition (27 km) and other shorter distances between provinces. If you have anything to tell please contact me." KJ from Dellarnas KyrkbÂtsroddare.
On a personal page, "Andre's rowing page", an odd article in Brazilian Portuguese about the history and background of rowing, global and Brasil:
O que È remo?. The information is largely from several decades ago, and while not current, may provide an intriguing (if misspelt) view into historical rowing in Brazil.
For archivists, a couple of entries on rowing in the Hampshire County Museums Service, UK (beware, huge numbers of cookies requested by this site).
Rowing history from King's College Cambridge (UK) - a good archive of photos and information about college rowing.
The History of Rowing
