8 July 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch has returned from Henley and is immediately preparing for an event 124 years older.

The 310th Doggett’s Coat and Badge Wager will take place over the traditional course, London Bridge to Chelsea (Cadogan Pier) tomorrow, 9th July, beginning at 12.30.

In 2019 I wrote:

If a pub quiz asked what rowing’s oldest event is, most ale house academics (and many rowers) would answer either the Oxford – Cambridge Boat Race (1829) or Henley Royal Regatta (1839). Few would know that it is, in fact, a single sculling race, the curiously named ‘Doggett’s Coat and Badge Wager’, a contest that has been run continuously since 1715… The obscurity of Doggett’s is, in large part, because each annual race is only open to six young people who, in the previous three years, have completed the long apprenticeship to qualify them to carry goods and people on the River Thames. 

If that were not enough of a barrier to entry, the course itself should dissuade all but the brave or the foolish. It runs from London Bridge to Chelsea, that is 7,400 metres of unsettled and unsuitable water containing washes, bends, bridges and currents. 

The prize for this winner of this mad event is suitably eccentric: the scarlet costume of an 18th-century waterman, complete with buckled shoes, white stockings, knee britches, and a high-collared tunic, a sleeve of which sports a solid silver badge the size of a dinner plate. The less tangible prize is the honour of lifelong membership of a band of brothers. A Doggett’s winner still has enormous prestige in the tightly knit community of the Thames Watermen and their families, many of whom have worked the river together for generations.

There will be an audio commentary of the race broadcast on the Doggett’s YouTube Channel beginning at 12.15.