19 April 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch tries to avoid using the titles, Here Comes The Son or By George!

Greg Denieffe posted his Artsy Fartsy Rowing Quiz on HTBS in August 2023 but he only recently received this comment from Gerry Macken:

Interesting that you reference George Harrison in your article. Just to inform you, his son (Dhani) coxed a Shiplake School First VIII, which was coached by my great friend and crew mate Nick Dunlop and competed in the Princess Elizabeth Cup at HRR during the 1990s.

Dhani Harrison (b.1978) is the only child of George and Olivia Harrison. For the benefit of younger readers or anyone not American, George Harrison was a member of the Beatles, the iconic pop and rock band active from 1960 to 1970 and still the best-selling music act of all time and arguably the most influential. George was the “quiet Beatle” who was often overshadowed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and whose contribution to the group is often underrated.

In a 1967 interview with Melody Maker, the 24-year-old George Harrison speculated on what sort of father he would become in the future: 

I can’t really know what I’d do… But I do know I wouldn’t let (my child) go to school. I’m not letting Fascist teachers put things into the child’s head. I’d get an Indian guru to teach him — and me, too.

Twenty years on, Harrison junior was sent to Shiplake College, a conventional private boarding and day school with a strong rowing tradition sited near the family home in Henley. Here in 1993 he took up coxing and in Henley’s Junior Eights event, the Princess Elizabeth, he steered the school’s B crew in 1995 and the A crew in 1996.

At Henley in 1997, Harrison coxed Leander’s entry in the Ladies Plate. He continued his involvement in rowing while attending Brown, the prestigious American Ivy League University in Rhode Island between 1997 and 2001. When he graduated at the age of 23, his father allegedly joked, “What was I doing when I was 23? Oh yeah! Sgt. Pepper.”

At Brown, Harrison studied industrial design and physics and after leaving university worked as an aerodynamicist for the British sports car company, McLaren. Rather at odds with his image as a devotee of meditation and Indian mysticism, George Harrison was a petrolhead who owned several supercars including a 240mph McLaren F1 (admittedly, this bespoke version had a little shrine to Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god, in the back).

While initially resisting going into his father’s trade (despite – or because of – drum lessons from Ringo) Harrison had made his concert debut at the age of 13 on 17 December 1991 performing on guitar with his father and Eric Clapton at the Tokyo Dome in front of a crowd of 45,000. Back at Shiplake, this episode must have helped if he had to write an essay on “What I did in my holidays…”

Harrison soon abandoned aerodynamics for music and has since had a successful career as a musician, composer and singer-songwriter. In November 2009, he confessed to Billboard:

I did everything I could to not be a musician… I went to university, I worked as a designer, I competed in… (rowing)… and I ended up being a musician. It’s in the DNA, I guess.

In November 2023, Harrison told the San Diego Union-Tribune:

My parents were pretty cool… I never needed to get negative attention, as some kids do, and I always did very well in school. But I definitely spent a lot of time — I don’t know if you’d call it rebelling — but doing amateur sports, like rowing…

For years, I’d get up early and go to the river to row. I think my parents always wondered why I did that! It was more about proving something to myself. Because you don’t get in a squad like that based on your name. It was hard to do and it was a hard-working squad.

Sadly, Dhani Harrison’s time at Leander started five years after the coxed four had ceased to be a men’s Olympic event – so he probably never had the chance to steer a Fab Four.