During the last day or two of the term, the captain, with a view to making up his Torpids for the next term, generally tries to arrange one or two crews selected from the best of the fresh men and such of the old hands as are available ; and justly proud is a freshman if, having got into a boat for the first time at the beginning of the term, he finds himself among the select few for the first Torpid at the end of it.
At the beginning of the Lent Term the energies of the college boat clubs are entirely devoted to the selection and preparation of the crews for the Torpids. The smaller colleges have one crew and the larger ones two, and in some cases three, crews each. No one who has rowed in his college Eight in the races of the previous summer is permitted to row in the Torpid, so the crews are generally composed partly of men who rowed in the Torpid of the preceding year, but who were not quite good enough to get into the Eight, and partly of freshmen ; the boats used must be clinker built of five streaks, with a minimum beam measurement of 2 ft. 2 in. measured inside, and with fixed seats.
Although I do not propose here to say any thing about the general subject of training, I cannot refrain from making one remark. It is in practising for the Torpids that freshmen generally get their first experience of strict train ing, and for this reason there is no crew more difficult to train than a Torpid. Most of the men after their first experience of regular work have fine healthy appetites, and, as a rule, eat about twice as much as is good for them, with the result that, even if they escape violent indiges tion, they are painfully short-winded, and find the greatest difficulty in rowing a fast stroke. The Torpids train for about three weeks before the races, which take place at the end of the fourth and the fifth weeks in term. They last for six nights, and are bumping races, the boats starting 16o ft. apart. A hundred and sixty feet is a very considerable distance to make up in about three quarters of a mile, and at the head of a division a crew must be about fifteen seconds faster over the course to make certain of a bump.
Of performances in the Torpids that of Brase nose stands by itself. They finished at the head
of the river in 1885, and remained there for eleven years, until they were displaced by New College in 1896.
The only other race in the Lent Term is the Clinker Fours. This race is rowed in sliding-seat clinker-built boats, and the crews consist of men who have not rowed in the Trial Eights or in the first division of the Eights in the previous Summer Term. For some occult reason there is never a large entry for the Clinker Fours, although the race affords an excellent opportunity of seeing how the best of the Torpid men row on slides, and should thus be a great help to the captain of a college boat club in making up his Eight for the next term. With so small an entry for the Clinker Fours, most of the college captains devote their time after the Torpids, for the rest of the term, to coaching their men in sliding-seat tubs, the time at the beginning of the Summer Term being so short that it is absolutely necessary to get the men who have been rowing on fixed seats in the Torpids thoroughly ac customed to slides by the end of the Lent Term, and also to have the composition of the next term's Eight as nearly as possible settled.
At the beginning of the Summer Term, time, as I have said, is rather short, and consequently it is the custom at most colleges to make the Eight come into residence about a week before the end of the vacation. The esprit de corps and energy which are shown during the practice are, perhaps, the most noticeable features of college rowing at Oxford—a circumstance to which may be attributed the fact that the crews turned out by the colleges at the top of the river are often wonderfully good, considering the material out of which they are formed. The Eights are rowed at the end of the fourth week and at the beginning of the fifth week in term, six nights in all. They start 13o ft. apart—that is to say, 30 ft. less than the Torpids. About the same number of boats row in a division in the former as in the latter, the bottom boat starting at the same place in each case ; consequently the head boat in the Eights has a slightly longer course to row than the head Torpid.