9 February 2026

By Göran R Buckhorn, Editor, HTBS

It was with great sadness I received the news from Tim Koch that our dear colleague and friend Chris Dodd had passed away on 25 January. Chris was, as the readers of this website know, an esteemed historian, journalist, writer and editor of all matters rowing.

The first time I saw Chris was at the Rowing History Forum at Mystic Seaport Museum in 2004. The Forum in Mystic was organised by the National Rowing Foundation’s Bill Miller, Hart Perry and Tom Weil. There were a few other rowing historians present, and to me in the audience it was, to borrow from Kipling, “to see the elephants dance”. I write “saw” as I was not bold enough to get into a conversation with any of them. However, I bravely asked Chris to sign some of his books that I had brought with me.

Other Forums would continue in Mystic and by then I had built up the courage to speak to the historians and writers at these gatherings, also including Bill Lanouette and Peter Mallory. After a few years, Chris, as the rowing historian at the River and Rowing Museum in Henley, would organise Rowing History Forums at that institution, so that these Forums were held one year in Mystic and the next year in Henley, unless the Forums were cancelled due to Inclement weather in Mystic. Sadly, I never attended any of the meetings in Henley.

Of course, I knew who Chris was long before the 2004 Forum in Mystic. Ever since my old chum Per Ekström and I founded the Swedish rowing magazine Svensk Rodd in 1990, I had purchased English newspapers at the large newsstand at the railway station in Malmö to read the reports and articles on rowing. It was The Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Gurdian I bought to see what Richard Burnell, Geoffrey Page, Mike Rosewell and Chris had written about the Oxford – Cambridge Boat Race, Henley Royal Regatta, the World Championships and the rowing at the Olympic Games. Some of their stories I then retold to the readers of Svensk Rodd. Per and I also subscribed to Regatta, the magazine that Chris had founded and edited.

With access to most famous rowing historian’s email at hand, I sent Chris all kinds of questions, which he kindly replied with patience and wit. When Chris told me that he was working on a book celebrating London Rowing Club’s 150 first years, I asked him unassumingly if he wanted information about James “Jack” Farrell, a London oarsman, who coached some Swedish crews for the 1912 Olympic Games. Among the rowers were some who came from my club in Malmö. After the Stockholm Games, Farrell came back to Malmö to successfully coach the club’s eight in the 1910s. The Malmö eight became Nordic champions in 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1916. And Farrell made it into Chris’s Water Boiling Aft: London Rowing Club, The First 150 Years 1856-2006 (2006).

I was also able to help Chris with information and stories for his book on Thor Nilsen, Thor Nilsen: Rowing’s Global Coach (2020), as I had work with Nilsen in Sweden.

All of Chris’s books are brilliant: they are well-written, knowledgeable in their subjects, entertaining and filled with wonderful anecdotes. To me there is one of his books that stands out: Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians (2012). In a long review of the book, where I write of my admiration for the books that came out of Chris’s pen and keyboard, I say:

Pieces of Eight: Bob Janousek and his Olympians is indeed a must-read, must-have book. If you would like to understand how British rowing has managed to reach its high level of today [2012] – when we are only weeks away from the Olympic Games in London where the British yet again will meet glory on the water – this book will tell you how it all started, how one man taught the ‘bloody English’ how to row again.

I dare say that Pieces of Eight is as good as James Brown’s book about The Boys. Unfortunately, Chris’s book never received the marketing it deserved and is now out of print and impossible to find. A fate it shares with his Thor Nilsen biography.

While I’m writing about Chris’s books, in his last published story preserved between covers, the American Civil War novel News Fit To Print: The Birth of War Reporting, published in 2024, he shows his ability to write not only about rowing – although there are some rowing references in the book – but also his skill to pen a fiction tale on the highest level. When Chris published News Fit To Print, he mentioned that there was a sequel to come. However, the book he was working on at the time of his death was based on his old articles in Regatta magazine, if I understand it correctly. Regrettably, we will now never see them in print.

I was delighted and proud when Chris agreed to become a regular contributor to HTBS in December 2015. After that he delivered one beautifully written article or essay after another. He also sent me different series. One was about Three Men in a Boat, another was about American boatbuilder George Pocock. One first-rate example is his piece “Fixed Seat Reading”, published in the pinnacle of the Covid pandemic, in April 2020. It is about good reads he had come across when he was writing his own books. Tim took it upon himself to help Chris find relevant images to illustrate the essay; something Tim continued to do for Chris’s work on this website. I would like to think that Chris was proud to contribute his writings to HTBS.

During last fall, I received a few emails from Chris where he wrote about some ideas he had for HTBS articles. I replied enthusiastically, however I knew that his illness would probably put a stop to his efforts to deliver. Looking back, his last piece on HTBS was published on 24 September 2025. It deals with the closing of the River and Rowing Museum in Henley, which Chris co-founded – it opened its door in 1998. In his piece, Chris quotes the first lines in John Keats’s “Endymion”:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 

It was in November I had a lengthy email exchange with Chris. I had sent him a couple of questions about his time working at The Guardian. I had just bought and started reading Witness in a Time of Turmoil: Inside the Guardian’s Global Revolution Volume One: 1986–1995 by Ian Mayes. Chris was working at the newspaper during this time period and is of course mentioned in Mayes’s book. In Chris’s reply to me he mentioned his old boss at the paper, Richard Gott, who had died on 2 November 2025. In 1994, Gott resigned from The Guardian after being accused of being a Soviet agent. In Chris’s email he wrote about “comrade Richard Gott”. Chris never missed an opportunity to throw in an amusing anecdote in his books, The Guardian articles, HTBS articles, and emails.

Chris will be sorely missed by us at HTBS and the international rowing community, whether its members are holding an oar or a pen. He can now share stories with his friends Desmond Hill (†1984), Richard Burnell (†1995), Geoffrey Page (†2002), John Rodda (†2009), Hart Perry (†2011), Jim Railton (†2017), Mike Rosewell (†2021) and Tom Weil (†2024) at, as Chris would like to say, the Great Enclosure in the Sky.

His spirit will live on.

More tributes will follow tomorrow.