12 March 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch sends birthday greetings to the now adolescent Hear The Boat Sing.

Today, 12 March 2024, is the fifteenth anniversary of the first posting on Hear The Boat Sing. From the start, its “mission statement” was to cover all aspects of the rich history of rowing, as a sport, culture phenomena, a life style, and a necessary element to keep your wit and stay sane. I think it has done a rather good job in keeping to these aims.

For those HTBS Types who have not read the contributors’ biographies on the website recently, it says of our editor:

Göran R Buckhorn, a Swede living in Mystic, Connecticut, began rowing in the 1970s at Malmö Roddklubb in Malmö, Sweden; but truth be told, he never excelled at the oar, though he has continued to look backwards ever since. For some years in the 1990s, Göran was the president of the club. The same decade he co-founded a rowing club at his old university, Lunds Universitets Roddklubb.

In March 1979, Göran saw his first published article in a newspaper, a piece about The Boat Race. In 1990, he co-founded the Swedish rowing magazine Svensk Rodd and co-edited it for ten years. Since moving to America in 2000, he wrote for the magazine until it ceased to exist in 2014.

Throughout the years, he has written numerous articles on rowing for books and magazines, and for a short stint he had a rowing history column in British Rowing’s Rowing & Regatta. In 2000, he published a book with six essays on rowing in Swedish. In June 2015, Göran published a book about Benjamin Hunting Howell, an American who rowed at Cambridge and for Thames RC between 1894 and 1900, A Yank at Cambridge – B.H. Howell: The Forgotten Champion. In October 2023, The Greatest Rowing Stories Ever Told, an anthology that Göran edited, saw the light of day. The book, which has fiction and non-fiction stories, articles, essays, poems and an excerpt from a play, was published by American publisher Lyons Press and is available in good book shops and at internet bookstores.

Göran is married to Ellen (‘Mrs. B.’ who is the website’s valuable IT staff) and they have two children. Göran collects rowing books and has a general interest in history. He spends a lot of time ‘on rowing’; luckily, his family is very understanding.

On a personal note, I have been contributing to HTBS since 1 December 2009. I am not sure what standard of writing and photography I have reached in absolute terms, but I think that I am better than I was fifteen years ago. Contributing to HTBS has become a big part of my life and I am very grateful to Göran for ignoring his better judgement and deciding to put rowing history on the Internet. Through my association with Hear The Boat Sing, I have gained all sorts of privileged access to this splendid sport, something that I do not take for granted. I have also discovered much about rowing’s under-researched and under-recorded history.

I now hand over to Göran, our editor-in-chief:

Dear HTBS Types: it is with great pleasure – and I must add, surprise – that after 15 years HTBS is very much alive and kicking. What started as a project to keep boredom at bay has grown to be a family affair among rowing friends. During these 15 years, HTBS has started friendships amongst its writers, historians and readers – and it is thanks to these groups that HTBS is still around and available to all those who are interested in “the rich history of rowing”.

The daily contact that I have with writers and readers has made me understand that despite “rowing history” being a small niche in the grand scale of things, HTBS does fill an important role in the international rowing community and beyond.

Looking at the stats for HTBS shows that since 12 March 2009 we have published 4,706 articles and have had a total of 3.279,836 pageviews (as of late yesterday evening).

My warm thanks to HTBS’s regular and irregular writers and, of course, you readers who have been sticking with us. And now onwards, and over to to Tim again:

In conclusion we must acknowledge that the name, Hear The Boat Sing, comes from the poem, The Oarsman’s Song, by the legendary coach, Steve Fairbairn (1862 – 1938).

A viewing of Iain Weir’s wonderful 2017 video of The Oarsman’s Song seems an appropriate way to finish – until 2029.