28 November 2023
By Chris Dodd
Chris Dodd meanders in mutiny.
Once upon a time a Dark Blue Cloud hung over the Dreaming Spires of Oxford. It was in the academic year of 1986-87, and the ancient academy beneath the spires was without a figurehead chancellor, without a resident poet and without eight ‘good men and true’ to challenge Cambridge to a Boat Race.
My memory of all this is misty, for it was 35 years ago that all three were in dispute. I’m fairly certain that politics were at play in the election or appointment of a chancellor, for at around this time Oxford refused to award an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher, thus breaching the university’s practice of awarding honorary degrees to its own graduates who serve as prime ministers. Poets encountered bad blood among candidates and the electorate – an MA was required to have a vote – over couplets and stanzas. And there was mutiny among the aspiring Blues of Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC).
Mutiny was far more serious than the absence of a chancellor or poet because the Boat Race is the easiest and most effective provider of publicity that the university and its Fenland competitor could hope for in their wildest dreams. Since the first race in 1829 Oxford’s Boat Club has cost the university precisely zilch, and since 1850 the club had turned out a crew for every race. The Cambridge club is also grant-less from its faculties except for the gift of a boat from the university on the occasion of the crammer’s 800th anniversary of its foundation in 2009.
These days the boat clubs enjoy sponsors, professional coaches and a TV audience of several millions worldwide to watch them race each year from Putney to Mortlake. Thus whatever the outcome of the 4.25 mile struggle, 16 oarsmen and two coxswains remind the world annually the meaning of the terms ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’, and it doesn’t cost the chancelleries of either university a penny, a euro, a nickel or even a dime.
No wonder the vice-chancellors are wont to hire a steamer on Boat Race Day to entertain their client bankers, financial advisers, hedge funders and leaders of industrial giants – many of whom are their own graduates – to remind the world that they are high-powered institutions that score well in the academic and ‘best years of your life’ league tables.
I was reminded of all this the other evening when I went to London Rowing Club to hear Donald Macdonald sing for his supper. Donald is the OUBC president who was mutinied against in 1987. Although it was 35 years ago, the English graduate is still paddling round the corporate lecture circuit to teach the art and science of strategic planning and pit-falling.
I guess that mutinies are not uncommon in rowing clubs. I took part in one at school, but it was over in a day or two. Oxford suffered a mutiny in 1959 and disruption during the Australian sculler Stuart ‘Sam’ Mackenzie’s brief stint as coach. But Donald’s mutiny was to last for months, and still I doubt that anybody knows the whole story.
In 1987 OUBC followed custom and elected a president after the 1986 race, the electorate consisting of Blues in residence and captains of college boat clubs. The new president – equivalent of captain and boathouse manager/human resources – invited Daniel Topolski to be ‘finishing’ coach, and Daniel recruited Hugh Matheson, Steve Royle and Mike Spracklen to take the crew for two weeks each after the Christmas break, with Dan himself taking the last fortnight before the race at Easter time. Everyone involved enjoyed amateur status, i.e. nobody was paid.
Thus the chief coach and the president were mutually dependent on one another. Dan must support Don for giving him a job, and Don must show faith in his choice of coach. And thus began a winter of discontent that lasted from October to March as rowers, coaches and newspaper men trawled the damp and dark alleys of Oxford under gloomy skies in the search for clues as to who was doing what when and why and with whom.
Here is a random recollection of incidents sparked by Donald’s lecture, an occasion where I learned stuff that I didn’t know.
Nobody finishes second in the Boat Race
First, what kicked off a mutiny that began in the long vacation after the 1986 race? The significance of 1986 was that Cambridge won. In doing so they stopped an Oxford run of ten wins that was masterminded by Dan Topolski. Losing was traumatic for the Dark Blues of Oxford because nobody involved who was under 30 years of age had experienced losing, while no Cambridge Light Blues had experienced winning. And nobody comes second in the Boat Race.
Clark and kicking arse
Chris Clark, an American in the Oxford 1986 crew, declared that he would return next year with a bunch of American oarsmen to ‘kick Cambridge’s arse’. When the 1987 aspirants gathered for their initial get-together in October there were no Americans in evidence. Clark showed up late and behaved boorishly in the boathouse, arguing with Dan and on one occasion throwing a cup of soup at the coach. More Americans with rowing pedigree turned up hot foot from the US Olympic training camp to claim their college places. Chris Penny was an Olympic champion. Chris Huntington, Dan Lyons and cox Jonathan Fish were accomplished internationals with an eye on selection for the Seoul Olympics in 1988. And the Brits in the squad had not been told that Olympians were lined up to contest their seats.
‘This was my first mistake,’ Donald said. ‘We [Dan and Don] should have told them at the beginning.’
Once the Americans were present, arguments broke out over several issues. The Yanks criticised Dan’s cavalier approach to outings. For example, if dissatisfied with a long pull up and down Henley Reach, Dan would order an immediate repeat, causing his men to be late for studies or lab work. The whole squad was pissed off with Clark’s behaviour. Eventually the grumpy American Blue (now an award-winning coach at Wisconsin) got the message and resigned – or did he jump before he was pushed?
Clark was certainly a player in Topolski’s dilemma (see below), but he chose to retreat to University College’s library, where he refused to talk to the press except for explaining his reasons in an exclusive with the Guardian. I wrote a piece in January saying that Donald had dug a pit for himself by failing to gauge the mood of his men before vesting selection in his coaches and getting their agreement to sack Clark ‘last Sunday’.
Coach Topolski’s problem was that his super-talented squad contained more than enough good oarsmen for one side of the boat but not enough for the other. His invitation to Clark to change sides brought reluctant compliance but immediately sparked rumours that Dan was trying to protect a seat for the weakest man, President Macdonald, or that he was planning to drop Tony Ward, an excellent oar who had been kicked out of the Blue Boat in the previous year in favour of a four-times winner of the Boat Race, Australian medical student Graham Jones.
The crew mostly thought that Clark – not a popular guy because of his bad behaviour – was a better boat mover than Donald. When seat race trials took place Dan suspected that the men stroking the boats defied his strict instructions of stroke rates to bring about the outcome they desired, while the two strokes suspected Dan of fixing his record, jotted down in pencil, of the trials.
As I reported in the Guardian, making up a cox and eight is not a simple matter. ‘You need calm men to counter head cases and socialists to counter anarchists, apart from right and left-handedness with brawn, sinew and the will to win.’
Winter of discontent
Discontent on the Isis was pretty much confined to rowers and frequenters of boathouses from the initial rumble in the summer of 1986 until the Christmas vacation. The troubles entered the public domain in January when papers heard of an incident when the crew minibus drove 31-year-old Macdonald to the house he shared with his wife and three young sons and demanded possession of the keys to the vehicle.
This, as far as I knew and now know, was the actual mutinous act. This was on the first day of Mike Spracklen’s two weeks with Oxford on the river at Marlow Scout Camp. He told me on that day that he had just coached the best Oxford crew he had ever seen, but not having yet had the opportunity to spend time with individual squad members, he had failed to notice that Donald was not on board. He was told that the president was suffering from a cold.
The Fourth Estate sniffs a scandal
Enter the press, rushing about like headless chickens looking for stories about rowing toffs at Oxford. Richard Burnell of the Sunday Times, a Dark Blue of 1939 vintage, was incandescent with rage for weeks that anyone could tarnish the good name of OUBC by mutiny. Hugh Matheson, Dark Blue of 1969 vintage, was scribe to the new sheet on the street as well as signed up for a couple of weeks of coaching, tasks that made for an uneasy partnership that would seat him on a knife edge when writing pieces for the Independent.
Jim Railton of the Times was a former sprinter and a shrewd writer with a day job as manager of Oxford’s Iffley Road sports centre. Jim had the slight advantage of an office closer to the cast of the mutiny than the rest of us. Among his talents was playing jazz piano, a skill that he studied along with sprinting at Loughborough.
Geoffrey Page of the Daily Telegraph was a Purple (London University’s equivalent of a Blue) who was an eloquent correspondent, priding himself on being first to predict a crew’s tactics or the outcome of a race. Of course, it goes without saying that the bearer of such insight was always right. But Geoffrey got off on the wrong foot in the mutiny by boasting to his press colleagues that he had known about it for some time because he had been coaching ‘possibles’ for Oxford’s trial eights, a fixture rowed just before the Christmas break. Geoffrey made the mistake of mentioning this to his editor at the Telegraph and received a bollocking from Putney to Mortlake for failing to break the story.
Reporters from news agencies, notably Bill Martin of the Press Association, put their heads round the boathouse door occasionally, as did feature writers and so-called ‘colour’ writers from Fleet Street such as Neil Allen of the Times, Frank Keating of the Guardian and Stephen Kiesling of the New Yorker who was in the habit of trading info in Chelsea Arts Club.
And there was me. I guarantee you will not believe my story, but I swear it’s absolutely true. After The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race was published (1983), I had the idea of writing a murder thriller among Blues. In January 1987 I was due a four-week sabbatical by my newspaper, and I had the loan of a cottage in Burford to see if I could convert the idea into a story.
After chasing the elusive Macdonald and Co for a few days I shoved my manuscript into a drawer and never looked at it again. My only regret is that my cast of pairs – Fortnum and Mason, Kendal and Milne, Marshall and Snelgrove, Arding and Hobbs, Debenham and Freebody – would never achieve familiarity like the stores they were named after. The stroke man who may have turned out to be the villain was christened Sidewinder after the nuclear missile of the day.
Flood, sweat and tears
Memories are mixed and the order of events is a muddle after all these years. The mutiny went on and off and on for weeks, and despite having better things to do, all of us media types were required to attempt to unravel it for our editors and our readers. I described our plight for Guardian readers in a piece headlined ‘Flood, sweat and tears’ at the end of January 1987:
‘As college porters stoically answer calls from Fleet Street searching in vain for rowers, and photographers snap anyone within a mile of the Carfax Tower wearing a sweatshirt, the air is thick with ‘No Comment’ while the atmosphere is charged with opprobrious epithets. It was even rumoured yesterday that Mr Terry Waite [a C-of-E lay preacher held hostage for more than a year in the Middle East] may be on his way to rescue the hostages of fortune.’
An added complication for the journalists was a long-lasting industrial action by British Telecom engineers who were responsible for emptying coins in public call boxes. Making calls became harder and harder. This was an age before mobile phones or email. Topolski and Macdonald were the only players with phones in their houses, while colleges had only pay phones in corridors. On the evening that the Oxford Union debated the mutiny I checked into the Randolph Hotel because its telephones were still working.
I spent many mornings in cafes in Oxford’s covered market and many evenings in the Eagle and Child public house on the other side of St Giles opposite St John’s College. The college was the nearest thing that mutineers had as a headquarters, and the pub served decent food and fine beer as well as being frequented by contacts and acquaintances among boat club captains, the student journalists of Isis magazine and Cherwell newspaper, and dons who revelled in speculation and remembrance of past mutinies.
Once or twice Chris Penny invited me to his rooms in St John’s of an evening to give me some leads, and I learned that the subject of his higher degree was the Carthaginian General Hannibal who took on the Roman empire in the Second Punic War and won several battles in Italy after crossing the Alps with war elephants. I thought at the time that Penny’s grasp of disciplined strategy in conflict was likely to be far superior to Dan’s impulsive coaching by the seat of his pants, effective as this had been in the past decade.
When the famous Oxford Union debating society decided to consider a motion that Donald Macdonald had lost his way in command of OUBC, Chris Penny spoke for the mutineers. The tall blond American addressed short considered sentences in a low slightly rasping voice to the packed house, interspersed by long pauses during which you could have heard a pin drop. ‘We are rocket fuel’ he concluded, and he won the argument by a landslide.
Hear The Boat Sing 