After posting yesterday’s entry about the 1920 Henley Royal Regatta programme, I remembered that at the fund-raising party in March in memory of Hart Perry, which HTBS wrote about on 10 March, two old Henley programmes were up for auction. They had belonged to Hart and were not only ‘old’, they were the two oldest ones in the history of the regatta, programmes from the 1839 Henley Regatta and the 1840 Henley Regatta (at that time, the Regatta was not ‘Royal’ yet). Both programmes – they were only a sheet each – were framed together, and one bidder bought them for the starting bid: $3,000. Very gracefully the bidder allowed the programmes to stay in the display case in the rowing exhibit at the NRF’s National Rowing Hall of Fame, at least for now.

1839 Henley Regatta Programme

1840 Henley Regatta Programme

See also this HTBS post on an old Henley programme from 1851.