GAMES GLORY
A family connection to 1938 medal
Ayoung girl on a bicycle that is slightly too big for her keeps pace along the riverbank with a lone sculler pulling downstream against the chop of an incoming tide.
It’s her father on the water preparing for the most important regatta of his life and the 10-yearold occasionally accompanies him on training days, urging him on from the banks of the Whanganui River.
Sometimes the oarsman is shadowed in the turbid and periodically turgid waters by floating logs much bigger than his fragile-looking racing shell.
The year is 1937 and the rower AKG Jackson, my grandfather, better known as Gus, has been selected as a member of the New Zealand rowing eight to contest the 1938 British Empire Games in Sydney.
A member of Whanganui’s famous Union Boat Club, Gus – short for Augustus, was a type-1 diabetic and about to turn 34.
The girl riding her mother’s bike along the bank was his eldest daughter Valarie, who would eventually become my mum.
Gus was a champion. He had won multiple New Zealand singles and doubles titles, and was about to cap his rowing career with two British Empire Games bronze medals, one of which has been passed on to me.
With the 21st Commonwealth Games about to commence, the 80-year-old rectangular medal has stirred memories, started conversations and led to interesting discoveries.
Established in 1930, with New Zealand a founding participant, the third quadrennial British Empire Games of 1938 marked the first time an international sporting fixture of any such magnitude had been held in the southern hemisphere.
It would also be the last major international sporting event before the outbreak of World War II.
Re-established in 1950, they were renamed the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in 1954.
In a final and belated admission that the Empire was no more, the name was only shortened to the Commonwealth Games in 1970.
Eighty years ago, the Sydney Games featured seven sports – track and field, wrestling, boxing, cycling, swimming and diving, lawn bowls, and rowing.
On February 9, 1938, Gus pulled the No 5 oar for the New Zealand rowing eight in a Wwi-era skiff alongside his Union clubmates Howard Benge and James Gould over a 2000 metre course (1.25 miles) on Penrith’s Nepean River.
A fourth member of the eight was Oswald Dennison, from Whanganui’s Aramoho Club, underscoring the depth and strength of the river city’s rowing prowess.
Despite that, they were outrowed by English and Australian crews.
Less than an hour later, Gus was back on the course for the double sculls with Aucklander Bob Smith, five years his junior, to come in third behind Australian and English pairs.
This first outing as a New Zealand representative was to be my grandfather’s last hurrah as a competitive rower.
After the games, Gus called time on a sport that had begun as a necessary activity for a boy brought up on a family farm on Arapawa Island, now Arapaoa Island, in the Marlborough Sounds.
Trips to the mainland meant juggling Tory Channel winds, currents and tides using sail or oar, and from a young age the youngest of three Jackson brothers, born Christmas Day 1903, was an accomplished boatman.
His forebears had been Ka¯ piti Island and Marlborough whalers. Details of that heritage and his early life are recorded in Carol Dawber’s 2001 book The Jacksons of Te Awaiti.
As a teenager, Gus worked as a farmhand and also served on a Tory Channel whaleboat for the Perano Brothers.
He then moved to Manawatu¯ , becoming apprenticed to Palmerston North cabinetmaker Chris Peterson, and playing rugby for the Kia Toa club.
A family story told of him regularly cycling the 15 boneshaking kilometres from Palmerston North to Ashhurst to visit the home of Minnie Flowers, the young housemaid who would become my grandmother.
When Minnie moved with her Batt St, Palmerston North, employers to Whanganui, Gus followed to what was then New Zealand’s fifth biggest city, finding work with cabinetmaker John Kay.
Joining the boat club, he continued with rugby for Whanganui club Pirates, was a keen amateur heavyweight boxer and apparently a dab hand at table tennis.
A building industry partnership with Brian Mccarthy joined in the construction of Waiouru Military Camp during WWII.
In the 1940s and 50s, the company’s red Chev flat-bed truck was equipped with a frame to ferry Union skiffs to regattas around the country.
In Whanganui, Union Boat Club captain and Rowing New Zealand board member Bob Evans, showed me around the iconic clubhouse on riverside Taupo¯ Quay.
Established in 1877, the boatshed had been rebuilt in the early 1900s. On the upper level, AKG Jackson features prominently on the honours board as New Zealand single sculls champion in 1928, 1933 and 1935.
Blades from his five New Zealand champion double sculls partnership with Eugene Traill between 1928 and 1933 are mounted high on the wall.
The club gallery has a large framed colourised black and white photograph of Gus carrying a single rowing shell across his shoulders.
It’s then Evans reveals that the skiff raced by the 1938 Empire Games eight still exists, and what’s more, is undergoing restoration by a specialist team in Palmerston North.
Known as the ‘‘Army 8’’, the racing shell was built in Putney, England, in 1919.
Evans says it became the boat that every international New Zealand eight rowed, claiming silver in Canada in 1930, and getting as far as the repechage at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.
The 1938, the eight trained with it on the Whanganui River before heading across to Sydney by steamship.
The heritage skiff remained in possession of the Union Boat Club
Sometimes the oarsman is shadowed in the turbid and periodically turgid waters by floating logs much bigger than his fragile-looking racing shell.
until the mid-60s, when it was gifted back to the army and stored at Waiouru.
Knowing roughly where it was, Evans said he found the opportunity to have a fossick around for the craft.
‘‘In 2009 or 2010, I found it in the roof of a shed at Waiouru and spoke to the manager of the army museum about it,’’ Evans says.
Eventually, a trust headed by chairman of the Whanganui River Institute Rod Trott, was set up to fundraise for its restoration with hopes of it being ready for display in Whanganui and at the Sir Don Rowlands Centre at Karapiro in time for its centennial next year, and as part of the country’s WWI commemorations.
According to Whanganui History and Heritage historian Kyle Dalton, the Army 8 was bought by the New Zealand Army and rowed in the 1919 Henley-on-thames July 4 Peace Regatta by a New Zealand Expeditionary Forces crew.
Several of those rowers had been members of the successful New Zealand Command Depot Rowing Club at Codford Camp, dominated by Union Boat Club members.
‘‘That’s where rowing eights all began for New Zealand,’’ Trott says.
Shipped back to New Zealand, ownership of the Army 8 was eventually vested in the Union Boat Club, with the stipulation that New Zealand representative crews should have prior rights to it.
Trott says restoring and displaying the boat was about creating a legacy for ‘‘100 Years of Eights 1918 – 2018’’ and it would be accompanied by the service histories of those who rowed in the 1919 Royal Peace Regatta.
Fundraising is ongoing, with the cost for the boat’s conservation and exhibition about $140,000 plus additional expenses for maintenance, curation and digitisation.
To further acknowledge those who have contributed to New Zealand’s rowing heritage, Rowing New Zealand has its own Legacy Programme honouring the 407 elite New Zealand rowers who have competed at major regattas.
Launched in September last year, the programme’s Ivan Sutherland, himself a rowing eight bronze medallist at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, said AKG Jackson has been awarded Legacy Medal No 24.
The 17 members of that 1938 Empire Games rowing team contributed three bronze medals – Smith had claimed bronze in the single sculls – to the country’s 25-medal tally, making New Zealand fifth on the results table out of 15 countries.
By comparison, New Zealand was sixth, with 45 medals out of 71 nations, at the 2014 Glasgow Games.
No longer on the Commonwealth Games programme, rowing last featured at Edinburgh in 1986, leaving New Zealand third on the all-time rowing medal table behind Australia and England.
The 21st Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast from April 4-15 will involve 70 nations competing across 18 major sporting codes, but no rowing.
To see the current crop of New Zealand rowers competing against the world’s best, fans will have to wait until September, when the World Rowing Championships are held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.