First in the Boat Race
QUESTION What were the Boat Race vessels like when the competition began in the 1820s? AT A meeting of the Cambridge University Boat Club in February 1829, it was decided to challenge Oxford ‘to row a match at or near London, each in an eight-oared boat during the ensuing Easter vacation’.
The race was deferred to the summer, and held on June 10, 1829, for a prize of 500 guineas. The course was a 2.25-mile stretch of the River Thames between Hambleden Lock and Henley Bridge. Underdogs Oxford won the race.
We know what the original Oxford boat looked like because it survives at the River & Rowing Museum at Henley-onThames. It was built by Stephen Davis and Isaac King of Oxford in 1828, to a design resembling a cutter.
Unlike modern racing boats, it had a keel and sides well above the waterline. The boat was clinker built (the edges of the hull planks overlap) of spruce, with timbers in oak and small ribs in ash.
It was almost twice as long (46ft 11in) and half as wide (4ft 3in) as an eight-man sea boat of the era.
Key innovations were made over the years. The keel was perceived to be a drag on the boats, and in 1844 designer Henry Clasper put a smooth shell around a frame that did not have a keel. His design was perfected by Matt Taylor in 1854 with a thin wooden skin around the frame. In 1856 his boats beat the competition and became the boat of choice.
By the 1860s the more familiar shells, with sides that are only a few inches above the waterline and rowlocks that are set off from the side of the boat, were standard. In 1872 sliding seats were introduced to the race, and the general structure of the modern racing boat was in place.
Modern designers focus on materials, developing lightweight carbon- fibre composites for the hull, while paying specific attention to moving parts, aiming to make the best use of the energy supplied by the rower.
Daniel Wright, Goring, Oxon. Victory: Oxford’s boat for the first race against Cambridge in 1829 QUESTION In 1971, Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, sang a song called Chicago. The opening line is: ‘So your brother’s bound and gagged and they’ve chained him to a chair.’ What incident in American history inspired this song? THIS song was written by Graham Nash and was included on the live album 4 Way Street, released in 1971, months after the band had split up in August 1970. It was a protest song over the jailing of the Chicago Eight in 1968, who had disrupted the Democratic National Convention to try to halt the Vietnam War.
They needed funds for their defence, so poet Hugh Romney called Nash to ask if CSN&Y would go to Chicago to raise money. He and David Crosby were keen to go, especially after he learned that one of the Chicago Eight, Bobby Seale, had been bound, gagged and chained to a chair in the courtroom.
Stephen Stills and Neil Young had other commitments. Nash was so affected that he wrote the song, which also included lyrics that had a dig at the two band members who were reluctant to go.
R. Gough, Bristol. QUESTION Did William Tyndale introduce more words to the English language than William Shakespeare? HUNDREDS of neologisms have been edged into circulation by the writers who coined them. Authors such as Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss delighted in inventing nonsensical words, and 265 words and compounds are cited as having been first used by Charles Dickens.
William Shakespeare is credited with giving us more words and phrases than anyone else. He used a vocabulary of about 21,000 words. But translator and Protestant martyr William Tyndale has been called the father of English prose.
He spent much of his life in exile translating the Bible into English. At least 3,000 copies of the Worms New Testament Bible were printed in Germany in 1536 and smuggled into England. For this ‘heresy’, Tyndale was strangled and his body then burned at the stake.
When the authorised King James Bible was published in the Jacobean era, 83 per cent was based on the work of Tyndale.
Some of the phrases that come from his translation include: ‘Let there be light’ (Genesis 1:3); ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Genesis 4:9); ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee’ ( Numbers 6: 24); ‘ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1); and ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name’ (Matthew 6:9).
He came up with: ‘The signs of the times’ (Matthew 16:3); ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matthew 26:41); ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels’ (1 Corinthians 13:1); ‘Fight the good fight’ (1 Timothy 6:12); and ‘. . . be not weary in well- doing’ (2 Thessalonians 3:13). He also created words such as ‘Passover’, ‘ beautiful’ and ‘Jehovah’.
Tyndale’s Bible let the English language develop and encouraged people to learn to read.
Emilie Lamplough, Trowbridge, Wilts.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT; fax them to 01952 780111 or email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.