COLLEGE ROWING AT OXFORD.
If we try to examine the causes of success or failure, of a run of good crews or bad crews from one University or the other, it is sible to overestimate the importance of good ization, good management, and friendly rivalry in the college boat clubs. In the long run, the success or failure of the University Crew depends in no small measure upon the amount of trouble taken and the amount of keenness shown by the various colleges in practising for their different races during the year. It is only by very careful ing and assiduous practice in his college Torpid and Eight, that a man who has not rowed before going up to the University can ever hope to attain to a place in the University Crew ; and it is only by trying to apply his learning to advantage in college races during the year that one who has just gained his blue can hope to be of greater value to the University in the following spring.
Only a small number of the men who take up rowing at the University attain to a seat in the Trial Eights, and fewer still, of course, get their blue. It is by rowing for their college, then, in Eight or Torpid, that the majority of University men gain their experience, and so it is but natural that even more interest is usually manifested in the practice of the Eights than in that of the University Crew itself.
Most of the colleges at Oxford have now what is known as an " amalgamated club," which supplies the finances of all the various branches of athletics. That is to say, every undergraduate member of the college pays a fixed subscription to the amalgamated club fund, and the money thus collected is allotted proportionately to the different college clubs. The money thus allotted, with the addition in some cases of small sums received as entrance fees for college races, forms the income of the college boat club ; and out of this income is paid a capitation fee to the University Boat Club, which varies according to the number of undergraduates on the college books, the rest of the money being devoted to providing boats, oars, etc.—the ordinary expenses, in fact, for carrying on the college boat club.
A freshman, when he first comes up to Oxford, has, as a rule, made up his mind to which par ticular branch of athletics he intends to devote himself. If he intends to play football, and does
not happen to have come up with a great reputa tion from his public school, he finds it somewhat hard at first, however good he may be, to make himself known ; but if he makes up his mind to row, he finds everything cut and dried for him.
At the beginning of the October Term, a notice is put up for the benefit of freshmen and others, that those desirous of being coached must be at the barge on and after a certain day, at 2.3o. The coaching is undertaken by any of the college Eight of the preceding term who are in residence, and any others whom the captain of the boat club may consider qualified. The men are taken out at first in tub-pairs or heavy fours ; and grotesque, to say the least of it, are the movements of the average freshmen during the first few days of his rowing career. The majority of men who get into a boat for the first time in their lives seem to imagine that it is necessary to twist their bodies into the most uncomfortable and unnatural it positions, and is hard at first to persuade them that the movements of a really good oar are easy, natural, and even graceful. It is not long, how ever, as a rule, before a considerable improvement becomes manifest, and, at the end of the first fortnight or so of the term, most of the novices have begun to get a grasp of the first principles of the art.
About the end of the second week of the term the freshmen are picked up into Fours. These crews, which row in heavy tub-boats, practise for about three weeks for a race, which is rowed during the fifth or sixth week of the term. After a day or two of rest, the best men from these Fours are taken out in eights. No one who has not rowed in an eight with a crew composed almost entirely of beginners can imagine the dis comfort, I might almost say the agony, of these first two or three rows. One of the chief causes of this is that the boats used on such occasions are usually, from motives of economy, very old ones, the riggers being often twisted and bent by the crabs of former generations, and the boats themselves heavy and inclined to be waterlogged.