THE REGATTA starts next Wednesday. Crews have been at Henley for the past two or three weeks, and today they are rowing their last full courses. All the experts will be there-waiting at the ' barrier' with their stop-watches out and agreeing that rowing is not quite what it was in their day. Except, of course, for the coaches, who live again in the crews they look after.
Colonel Gibbon, the Oxford coach, is probably there, and Peter Haig
Thomas, who has coached Cambridge to victory for the last eleven years, and is now by all accounts going to turn his attention to Oxford. Steve Fairbairn with his ' Jesus' style and swivel rowlocks, George Drinkwater and so on. The course is dead straight for its full length of I mile 550 yards, no easy thing to find on the Thames. They had to cut away a bit of an island to get this just after the war. Booms mark the course, and have been in position for the last ten days. The enclosures with their marquees and geraniums are more or less ready for next Wednesday. The stage is set for this oarsmen's Mecca, and as gay and pretty a carnival as the summer has to offer. George Drinkwater , who twice rowed for Oxford, can be relied on to give an interesting account of how the crews are shaping.