INTRODUCTION #

On April 29 1828 some men of St. Peter’s College - their names seem to be past recovery - joined the bumping races on the Cam which had been officially established in the previous year. Except for an intermission from 1833-5, in 1836, and during the Great War the activity of the boat club is unbroken. It is not only one of the oldest of the college boat clubs, but is the longest lasting undergraduate society in Peterhouse. It is therefore proper that its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary be commemorated, however insufficiently, in this pamphlet.

The minute books of the club are naturally the most important source of information. They are all preserved and date from 1836 when the club was refounded; quotations have been freely taken from them and are marked in the usual fashion. Our account books date from October 1850, and they cast a bright light upon the daily conditions of rowing in the middle years of the last century. More practically, they give the names of members. But in 1884 the Amalgamated Athletic Club was set up to handle the financial affairs of all the College’s sporting societies. From that date the account books no longer list members, though the disbursements remain fascinating (e.g., to towpath sweepers). It is a pity that at this time too the Honorary Secretaries gave up the practice of listing newly elected members in the Michaelmas term. These can sometimes be gathered from the crews of college trial eights, which tended to be made up of freshmen. But the method is not reliable and it is my hope that no important figure in the life of the club or College has been slighted by omission. T.A. Walker’s ‘Admissions to Peterhouse’, 1615-1911, has been invaluable in tracing the careers of members and in clarifying affinities. But men who came up in the 90’s had not begun to make their mark by the time Walker published, and so it is again possible that something of note has been passed over.

The account as a whole reflects my own interest in the conditions of rowing in the distant past. After the Great War there seems to have been little alteration to the present day, and from the late 20’s on there are happily many members still alive to whose memories this short account could not aspire to do justice. It was my purpose to record what could only be with difficulty, recovered from accounts of the nineteenth century. Thus in the twentieth my focus has been on the periods of greatest success: the late 20’s, middle 50’s, and the present day.

The histories of other boat clubs have been of use for they often include accounts of riverine encounters with ‘ye Pet’, as in early days our boat was known. Rouse Ball’s history of the First Trinity (1906) is particularly readable. The histories of the following clubs have been consulted: Christ’s, Trinity Hall, Jesus, and Lady Margaret; the last two clubs printed their minute books in the last century. Valuable information is to be found in Bateman’s ‘Aquatic Notes’ (1852), Armytage’s ‘Cam and Cambridge Rowing’ (1886) and Lehmann’s ‘Complete Oarsman’. I should also like to thank T.G. Askwith, C.M. Beavis, J.E. Cox, T.G. Hewlett, J.G. Miller, L.B.H. Reford, and J.A. Sankey for troubling to write me some account of their time in the P.B.C. Our greatest debt is to Tim Ambrose whose patience in producing the clear and accurate charts of the progress of the College boats saved me much work and greatly facilitated the narration of the Club’s activities: the pamphlet is very much a collaboration. Its function is, as I said, commemorative; by those of us whose happiest times at Peterhouse were spent upon the waters of the Cam and in the company of our fellow oarsmen (not to mention coaches and coxswains) this short history may not be found unwelcome.