A Commemoration: 150 Years of Crew at SPS

A COMMEMORATION: PART I

Drawn to the Pond

Exploring the beginnings of rowing at St. Paul’s School.

In 1956, the world watched Tom Charlton ’52 and his Yale teammates row for gold in the eight at the Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Charlton was the first of more than a dozen St. Paul’s School graduates to compete in Olympic rowing, and he remains the School’s only gold medalist in the sport. For the St. Paul’s community, his victory capped a century of finding magic in the waters surrounding the School.

St. Paul’s School is built between and around ponds that feed the Turkey River, which flows to the Merrimack and on to the Atlantic. Follow any path on the grounds and eventually you will end up at the water’s edge, a bridge, or a dock. It’s no wonder that as early as July 4, 1857, students organized a race on the Lower School Pond between two rowboats.

From the beginning, rowing at St. Paul’s has been propelled by students’ curiosity and competitiveness and made possible by supportive — even visionary — School leaders. In 1859, Long Pond, two miles from the School, captured the imaginations of a group of students. The 362-acre “crystal sheet of water” seemed an ideal setting to try the sport of crew, which was finding a foothold in U.S. colleges. First Rector Henry Augustus Coit, who long hoped to make cricket the School’s top athletic pursuit, agreed to satisfy the students’ intrigue and funded the first rowing shell, the Ariel. The boys called themselves the Shattuck crew in honor of the School’s founder.

A decade-plus of rowing on Long Pond amongst themselves, however, left students eager for more opportunities to compete. Once again, they went to Rector Coit. Though he wanted no public notice of any races, he ordered two four-oared boats, divided the School into the Shattuck and Halcyon Boat Clubs, and built a boathouse on Long Pond, just as it became Concord’s official water supply. In the spring of 1871, the Shattuck Boat Club challenged the Halcyon Boat Club to “row a race against time.” They lost, but the tradition of Race Day between the rival boathouses had begun.

For the next 80 years, the Shattucks and Halcyons trained on Long Pond with the sole goal of Race Day glory. Early on, rowers depended on themselves for improvement and gleaned what they could from alumni who returned to share what they’d learned from college coaches. Then, in 1878, Major League Baseball outfielder-turned-gymnastics instructor Lester Carrington Dole became the first rowing coach at SPS; his legacy lives on with the annual bestowing of the Dole Cup at the Flagpole Ceremony. In 1891, eight-oared shells replaced the four-oared shells. The School further invested in the sport by building new boathouses on Long Pond in 1906. These are the boathouses that former Shattuck captain Fergus Reid III ’51 remembers.

Halcyon crew rowing by the boathouse on Long Pond prior to the move to Turkey Pond.

“They were really impressive boathouses, architecturally appealing, on either side of the end of Long Pond, which was a beautiful body of water,” Reid recalls. “Inside, shelves held the long, thin, graceful works of art that were our boats. We’d train every day for at least two hours, maybe three, with the coaches in their motorboats trying to make us better. It was great fun, great exercise, that always led up to Race Day at the end of the year — that’s what kept everybody going.”

Shattuck boathouse, date unknown

By the time Reid and his roommate, Halcyon captain Steve Reynolds ’51, started their Sixth Form year, they were aware of two things: there was more to rowing than competing once a year against the same boys they saw every day, and the New England Interscholastic Regatta (NEIRA) would be held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in May. When they asked their coach, Percy Preston, about participating, he agreed to take the matter to the trustees. They resisted, fearing interscholastic competition would end the School’s club rowing tradition. But after several months, they came around — with a caveat.

“They finally let us compete, provided we sent our top Shattuck and Halcyon crews, not a St. Paul’s varsity crew,” Reid says. “So, we went together to Worcester. Kent School beat Steve and his Halcyons by two seconds, the Halcyons beat us Shattucks by two seconds, and all the other boats were way behind. We did pretty well, though we’ve always felt St. Paul’s would’ve won if we’d entered one varsity boat. But it was a great adventure.”

A week later, the 1951 Race Day went off at SPS with as much enthusiasm as ever, and the victorious Halcyons received the Dole Cup from Reid’s own father, Fergus Reid, Jr. of the Form of 1919, himself a former Shattuck captain.

1952 SPS Crew. Back: B.T. Sullivan, N. Platt, B. Hamm, J. Sewall, T. Charlton; front: T. Bidwell, G. Schade, W.S. Reid (C), W. Emery.

Halcyon barge carrying race winners to the Flagpole Ceremony at Anniversary 1956.

Reid’s brother, Will ’52, would continue the family tradition of captaining the Shattucks, but rowing would never be the same at SPS after the spring of 1951, though not in the way the trustees had feared. While the interscholastic competition window was opening for SPS rowers, the door for rowing on Long Pond was closing as the city detected pollution and some residents protested boaters “play[ing] in our drinking water.”

The city’s water board had briefly closed Long Pond during World War II, a decision overruled by the city council, but this time, there would be no reprieve. In St. Paul’s: The Life of a New England School, August Heckscher of the Form of 1932 writes that, though the Board of Trade and the majority of local doctors found no danger of pollution, the city council voted 16-4 to end boating and fishing on Long Pond in April 1952.

Thanks to the foresight of Fourth Rector Samuel S. Drury, who in the 1930s had urged the School to acquire several hundred acres surrounding the shallow, vegetation-clogged Big and Little Turkey Ponds, the School had some hope of continuing its rowing tradition. The transition from one site to the other, though, was compared by Truman Bidwell ’52 as going from the penthouse to the basement.

“As a rowing site, Long Pond was unbelievable, just a gorgeous big pond,” says Bidwell, a Shattuck who rowed in the last boat on Long Pond and the first on Turkey Pond. “Getting there on the horse-drawn barges was half the fun, and the boathouses were fabulous. And there was nobody there except us. What I remember best is rowing in the fall, surrounded by those glorious New England colors. I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Boy, this is really unbelievable,’ and it was. It was a shame we had to leave it.”

There was no choice, however, and the School cut a road to Turkey Pond so students could row on a short, debris-strewn course.

“Turkey Pond was a bloody mess, there was nothing there,” Bidwell recalls. “We brought the shells over from Long Pond and I suppose it was historic, being the first crew on Turkey, but no one was enthused about it, I can assure you. We waded that first boat into the water and climbed in, and boy, was it cold. It was a pretty miserable situation for a long time. We didn’t have a boathouse, so when we got out of the shell, we were wet and had to slosh back to the dorms to get dry. It wasn’t ideal, but that’s what we got dealt, and we just made do.”

With the addition of docks and huts for the boats, students made do until 1960, when the first levels of the Long Pond boathouses were moved to the shores of Little Turkey Pond and placed 60 feet apart. They were finally connected in their 100th year, 2006, by a state-of-the-art structure to form today’s Crumpacker Boathouse.

Spectators at the first races conducted after the boathouse relocation, circa 1927.

By the time the boathouses were brought to campus, the Shattuck crew had won the 1955 NEIRA championship; Charlton, Reid, and Bidwell had all gone on to Yale; and Charlton had won his gold medal (Bidwell was on the Olympic boat until just before the crew left for Australia, when, he says, he “got kicked off by a stronger guy”); the School had sent its first crew to England to row at the Henley Royal Regatta; and the two Turkey Ponds had been united to form a full-length rowing course.

As Interstate 89 took shape, Heckscher writes, state authorities had been “persuaded to… build a bridge at the narrow neck of land between Big and Little Turkey. In return for the donation of land, the bridge was designed with spans sufficiently wide to permit crews to pass beneath. The School then [dredged and widened] what had been a marshy stream connecting the two ponds.” The enhancements were completed in 1958, in time for a Race Day that established the current template of the event that began in 1871.

More changes would come for the rowing program at SPS, including — again at students’ insistence — the merging of the boathouses into a unified varsity crew in the late 1960s to strengthen the School’s showings at NEIRA, and the addition of girls crew in 1972. Stroke by stroke, year by year, School- and alumni-supported students have pulled the SPS rowing program forward from pond to pond, across the Atlantic, and beyond.

In his four-decade career, Chip Morgan led SPS crews to 22 New England championships. PHOTO: SPS Archives

A COMMEMORATION: PART II

The Davis and Morgan Years

Interscholastic crew is launched at SPS.

It’s somewhat ironic that, when he thinks back on his 41 years of coaching crew at St. Paul’s School, longtime faculty member Chip Morgan recalls the oarsmen who exceeded expectations in the spring of 1970.

That season was Morgan’s first at St. Paul’s, and the crews were still partially configured under the Shattuck and Halcyon colors. While legendary coach Rich Davis guided the first and second boats, Morgan coached the third and fourth crews. Competition between Morgan’s third boat and Davis’s second was fierce and, just before the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association (NEIRA) Regatta at Worcester, Massachusetts, the third crew defeated the second (and nearly the first as well) and earned the right to represent SPS on Lake Quinsigamond.

“I have been through quite a few rowing seasons,” recalls Gregg Stone ’71, who went on to row in four undefeated boats at Harvard and represent the U.S. National Team from 1977 to 1979, “but the spring of 1970 remains special because a boat with a range of experience and skills came together magically and went from a novice-level eight to challenging the first boat in four to five weeks.”

Stone breaks that season down to three key races. “Against Andover as the third boat, our excited and novice coxswain crossed his rudder lines and steered us into the shore before the bridge. We backed off, restarted, passed Andover, and won. The Wednesday before Worcester, we rowed out on a calm and mist-enshrouded Turkey Pond to race the first boat for the honor of representing the School as the first boat on Quinsigamond. Despite our surprise at the contest, we pushed them to a tight finish. Three days later at Worcester, we won [the second boat race] by open water in as easy a championship race as one could wish for.”

Rich Davis retired in 2003, after 37 years of building the SPS crew program into an interscholastic success.

Crew tradition had been solidified at St. Paul’s long before Davis arrived in 1966. When Davis began coaching, crew was still primarily a club sport. In his initial years at St. Paul’s, Davis coached the third and fourth Halcyon club boats and the seventh Shattuck boat. When varsity rowers saw their club counterparts running to the boathouse daily on Davis’s command, they soon followed suit.

The boys varsity first boat captured its first of many Worcester Regattas in 1974, with a Davis-instilled attitude that they should expect to win. “Once that happened,” Davis recalled at his 2003 retirement, “then the expectation was to win every time at Worcester.”

Personal highlights for the coach included 1974, when the three boys boats swept the Worcester Regatta; the first time the boys crew triumphed at the Henley Royal Regatta (1980); winning the nationals with the boys crew in 1995; and the first girls win at Henley Women’s Regatta in 1996 (they also won in 1998 and 2001).

“We were fast due to a mix of talent, hard work, good coaching, and good coxing,” says 2002 Junior National Team rower Alison Crocker ’02, who stroked the girls first boat from 2000 to 2002, “and we fully trusted each other to push to the limit. Those seasons are amazing memories, and I’m so happy to have been part of those boats. [Chip and Rich] both coached for such a long duration and so successfully that I’m sure their ethos still very positively influences crew at SPS, even as things evolve under new coaches.”

Morgan’s coaching numbers are eye-opening as well. In his four-decade career, he led SPS crews to 22 New England championships at Worcester, including eight first-boat wins. He also was the coach of the 1994 boys crew, which won at Henley. In the Davis-Morgan years, SPS boys crews combined for 14 first boat, 19 second boat, and 13 third boat victories at Worcester, while the girls earned 10 NEIRA championships for each of their three boats. During those four decades, Morgan and Davis coached 12 Olympians and 36 National Team rowers. The duo created a consistency that solidified the program in its fledgling years of interscholastic competition as an SPS crew outside of the club system.

The girls first boat, stroked by Alison Crocker ’02 (second from right), won at Worcester in 2001.

Right before Davis arrived, the 1966 Halcyons, coached by Austin Higgins, became the last crew to win at Worcester in the club configuration. The next year, the NEIRA told St. Paul’s it could no longer send two first boats to the regatta. “That was really the end of an era because St. Paul’s had to decide, okay, are we going to be interscholastic or is this program going to be just dripping with club tradition?” Morgan says. But being interscholastic meant combining two crews for the New England championships that were meant to be separate entities because of the SPS club crew structure.

“I used little pieces of paper,” Morgan recalls, “about 1/2" x 2" with kids’ names and sides (port/starboard) on them and in red [Halcyon] and blue [Shattuck] ink to figure out each day’s practice lineup and not lose sight of which club they were in.”

It was Morgan and Davis who went to then-Athletic Director Bunny Barker in the early 1970s to ask that the School allow them to put together the best rosters, regardless of club affiliation. It also saved Morgan from the annual ritual of trying to even out the ports and starboards between the clubs so that there were even numbers of Halcyons and Shattucks to form two competitive boats for each club on Race Day at Anniversary.

“Before [that conversation],” Morgan recalls, “we had to maintain even numbers of two Halcyon and two Shattuck coxswains, eight Halcyon and eight Shattuck ports, and eight Halcyon and eight Shattuck starboards in the four interscholastic boats.”

That also spared Morgan the same task for tracking club membership in the girls crews when they were established for the 1972 season. After Davis returned from sabbatical in 1990-91, he and Morgan decided that they would alternate duties so that each would coach the boys and girls every other year. That created a consistency of expectations that has endured beyond their own tenures.

It was Davis who, in addition to initiating the pre-practice ritual of rowers running down the dirt path to the boathouse, gathered students at his SPS residence on Sunday nights for tea and Masterpiece Theater. (“It was the event of the week,” says 1988 Olympian Juliet Thompson Hochman ’85.) Meanwhile, Morgan was known for keeping meticulous records that included earliest and latest on-water dates from year to year and times needed for a crew to achieve a certain level based on the performances of past SPS crews. (Other secrets to the SPS program success were the Graham King-built wooden boats that, despite appearances, were lighter than their more commonly used fiberglass and carbon fiber counterparts, and a full-time boatman who was skilled enough to maintain the shells.)

“The thing that worked was that Rich and I were different in our own ways, but he agreed on an awful lot and said a lot of the same things when we were on the water,” Morgan says. “At one point, if you made a videotape of practice, and you couldn’t see who was behind the megaphone, we even sounded alike.”

By alternating their coaching assignments, Morgan and Davis also established a sense of gender equity. They insisted that the boys and girls crews alternate boathouses so that each of them had access to the Shattuck headquarters (where the coaches’ offices were located) in equal share. “I think our switching coaching, and which team came out of which boathouse,” Morgan adds, “did an awful lot to disarm some of the inherent hundred years of male chauvinism.”

Many other coaches contributed during that establishing era, among them Gil Birney, Mike Hirschfeld ’85, and Chip Campbell in his first SPS residency (he returned to SPS and is one of the coaches today).

“Rich and Chip created an unquestioned expectation of excellence, not only for rowing, but for everything in their athletes’ lives,” Hochman adds. “Work hard, do the right thing, eat right, follow the rules, get your homework done, be thoughtful, support your teammates, and always get eight hours of sleep. To this day, I believe there is a simple morality in getting into bed by 10 p.m.”

Rowing is a prime example of the ultimate in teamwork — crew members must work in unison, possess equivalent technical and physical ability, and trust one another unconditionally. Technical skill, explains Morgan, is crucial for balancing the boat. Slight imperfections — whether physical or in trust — can force corrections that will slow down the entire boat.

“If you want to find some metaphors for the way Rich and I worked,” Morgan says, “it would be in the trust that we had in each other and each other’s efforts on behalf of the whole program — and in the fun we had doing that.”

THE BOYS IN THE VINTAGE SPS BOAT

The School loaned a 1938 Pocock eight-oared shell to the production team of the movie adaptation of the bestselling book The Boys in the Boat. PHOTO: Michael Seamans

In his 2013 book, author Daniel James Brown captured the underdog story of the 1936 U.S. Olympic crew that defied the odds and captured the gold in Berlin during the reign of Adolf Hitler. His nonfiction account, The Boys in the Boat, is now headed for the big screen.

To prepare for filming, Production Designer Kalina Ivanov reached out to St. Paul’s School to ask if the crew program had any shells from the 1930s in its boathouse. As it turns out, the answer was yes. With the help of crew coach Chip Campbell, SPS loaned an eightoared shell to the production team of The Boys in the Boat.

“The boat is a 1938 Pocock eight-oared shell,” Campbell explains. “They picked it up in early October, and they returned it in early November.”

During its hiatus from New Hampshire, the vintage boat was taken to the Wintech Racing facility in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a team surveyed the hull and took pictures of structural details for the purpose of creating a replica for the film.

“The 1936 Olympic crew used a similar shell, also built by George Pocock,” Campbell adds, “so our shell is a useful reference point.”

Now in pre-production, the movie version of The Boys in the Boat is set to be directed by George Clooney. It details the inspiring story of the University of Washington men’s eight with coxswain that was not expected to defeat crews from the East Coast, let alone compete — and capture gold — at the Olympic Games.

SPS boatman Matt Bailey, who maintains the School’s fleet, cleaned up the classic boat for its voyage to Connecticut.

“It’s extremely rare for a school or university to have a shell of this vintage in rowable condition,” Campbell says. “The University of Washington has the shell from the 1936 Olympics in its boathouse, but it’s set up on permanent display, and it’s not accessible for use. We are one of the very few rowing programs in the country that still maintains any wood shells.”

SPS rowing contributions to the film industry are slated to continue in the coming year. The School is tentatively scheduled to supply two 1972 Pocock shells to the production staff of The Red Rose Crew, a narrative feature that tells the story of the U.S. Women’s National Team eight in 1975 and 1976. For now, Campbell is pleased that St. Paul’s is able to help tell the story of their 1936 predecessors.

“It’s really nice to be able to contribute in a small way to the filming of the movie,” Campbell says. “It’s a great story; it addresses a moment of achievement for these nine athletes, their coaches, their families, and others involved. It reflects a sustained period of persistent work by many to reach this point. To be able to contribute to this project is an honor.”