Radley College v Tabor Academy, USA – the first international schoolboy rowing competition, 1938

Cartoon from Gordon Chandler’s scrapbook, 1938

Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts, travelled to Britain to complete in the Thames Cup in Henley Royal Regatta in 1936 and 1937. They won the trophy in both years. They became acquainted with Radley College Boat Club as local hosts just along the River Thames from Henley and invited the school’s rowers to visit the USA to compete against themselves in the first ever international schoolboy rowing competition. The invitation was accepted for 1938. Radley College won the Ladies’ Challenge Plate at Henley Regatta in June 1938 – their greatest triumph in rowing – and were subsequently hailed the premier schoolboy crew in Britain. With this reputation behind them, they set off for America on the Aquitania – a trip which captured the imagination of the press on both sides of the Atlantic.

Two members of the Radley College Eight, Captain of Boats Gordon Chandler, and spare man, John Horner, each created scrapbooks of the trip, filled with their own personal photographs and newspaper cuttings. Both men were killed in WW2. Their families recently and separately gave these albums to Radley College Archives in their memory.

The voyage on the Aquitania saw the crew feted as heroes and welcomed in New York with trips to the Empire State Building, lunches, teas and dances. Journalists interviewing asked about differences in food (they didn’t appreciate iced tea!) and comparisons between American and English girls (they politely answered that American girls were prettier but they were disconcerted by dancing cheek to cheek!)

New York in 1938, photographed by Gordon Chandler

And so out to Marion. Rowing conditions were very different to competition on the Thames: Tabor Academy is on Sippercam Bay and they row on the ocean. Radley College had a few days to acclimatise to the mile-long course course and practice with borrowed shells. The race itself had to be postponed by a day because of stormy conditions which persisted during the race, as shown in Gordon Chandler’s cartoon: