Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Right. I’ve been gone for an age. The reasons are too tedious to explain, but now, like Whoopi Goldberg, I’m back in the habit and raring to turn ‘Fact of the Season’ back into ‘Fact of the Day’ – or at least ‘Fact of Every Few Days’.

For the last six weeks I have mostly been moving house and growing sunflowers. I had a few hours to spare in the midst of all that so I trotted along to the Boat Race, and today’s facts are brought to you courtesy of that rather spiffing event.

The University Boat Race has taken place almost every year since 1829, when some no-doubt-ghastly Cambridge student by the name of Charles Merivale (I mean, honestly) challenged his friend Charles Wordsworth of Oxford to a boat race at Henley. Wordsworth (nephew, by the by, of the Wordsworth) was a student at Christ Church College, and his crew wore dark blue in honour of that college’s colours. It wasn’t until a few years later that Cambridge decided they also rather liked blue, and started wearing light blue, in homage either to Eton school or Caius College, Cambridge.

After a few years at Henley and on the stretch of river from Westminster to Putney, the Boat Race relocated to its current course, from Putney to Mortlake. The course is, for reasons best known to itself, exactly 4 miles and 376 yards long – that’s 6779 metres – and the current course record is 16 minutes and 19 seconds. The end of the course is marked with the ‘University Stone’ on the south side and, on the north side, a post painted in dark and light blue stripes.

Cambridge has so far won the race 79 times to Oxford’s 75. On four occasions one of the boats has sunk during the race, and both crews went under in 1912. (This photo is the Cambridge crew of 1978.) There was a bit of a kerfuffle in 1877, when the race adjudicator passed out pissed under a bush at the end of the course; when he came to, he declared the race to have been ‘a dead heat – to Oxford by four feet’.

But possibly the most bizarre Boat Race fact is that Hugh Laurie rowed for Cambridge in 1980.