11 December 2023
By Tim Koch
Tim Koch takes a last drag on his recent tobacco story.
Last week’s piece on tobacco advertising and rowing (Rowing With Camels) included the above picture and noted that the British tobacco company, John Player & Sons, sponsored Tideway Scullers in the 1960s, donating boats to the Scullers eight that raced as Great Britain in the 1966 World Championships and the 1969 European Championships. It produced a response from a member of that crew, Chris Harris:
So far as I can remember it was shot by John Player for publicity purposes which is why we’re wearing our singlets back to front so that their logo shows. Shot on the Leander raft of course. I think we were up there for a training camp.
In those days TSS was operating on a shoestring and when one of the crew announced that he had connections with John Player, (coach) Lou Barry was very quick to follow it up.
The consequence was that in 1966 they gave us enough for Bill Sims to build us a boat. Up until then we had been using what we could beg, borrow or steal from other clubs. He built us a fantastic boat. Short sterned and built around the crew that was going to use it.
We had a Christening ceremony at Putney where champagne flowed freely and everyone was showered with cigarettes. As we didn’t smoke, of course, Lou was the recipient of all that we were given. It kept him going for about a year I would guess. What we did appreciate though were the publicity girls who came down to dish out the drink and cigarettes and to offset the grubby oarsmen in the photos.
The first boat was used in the 1966 World Championships and the 1967 European Championships. Bill then built John Player II which was used subsequently. A very good boat but I always thought the first one was better…
It might have been a good idea if Players had presented us with shorts as well as singlets. Scruffy lot.
In 2016, Lionel Bailey, also a part of Tideway Scullers in that era, wrote on HTBS about the John Player II boat:
(Above) is a photograph from 1969 of a crew from the Tideway Scullers, from left to right: me, David Redwood, Rooney Massara, Willy Almand, Guy Greaves (cox), Wayne Smith, Chris Pierce, Mike Tebay and Pat Barry (stroke).
We are standing around our new George Sims boat John Player II, which was presented to us by the tobacco firm of the same name. George Sims (Racing Boats) Eel Pie Island was the premier British sweep and sculling boat manufacturer of the day. The crew went on to represent Great Britain at that year’s European Championships, finishing fifth.
The caption for the photo, which was published in the October/November 1969 issue of Rowing magazine, reads:
Handing Over: Tideway scullers rowed at Klagenfurt (in the 1969 European Rowing Championships) in John Player II, a lightweight shell built for them in a fortnight by George Sims and presented in August at a Putney ceremony by the tobacco firm, whose generosity towards British rowing is all too little realised.
This was the second boat Player’s had bought for the club, the first one being the John Player, presented in 1966 to the Scullers crew that came fourth in the World Championship of that year, at championships held in Bled, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia).
As I have written in the past, the Tideway Scullers School, coached by Lou Barry, were the de facto British National Squad of the 1960s, run on a shoestring and gifts such as the two mentioned above kept the whole enterprise afloat in more ways than one.
Pictured above from left to right: Mike Sweeney, Ray Tollman, Mike Muir Smith, Andy Kapica, Dave Gramolt, Rooney Massara, Mike Tebay, Chris Harris, Nick Cooper, Lionel Bailey, Willy Almand, John Russell, Arnold Cooke, Rhona MacCallum (Captain), Bill Barry, Dave Redwood, Ken Dwan and Pat Barry. Guy Greaves (President) in blazer with the bust of Lou Barry (Coach) on the table.
Unedited pathe newsreel footage of some members of Tideway Scullers involved in weight training and circuits in February 1968 is on YouTube. The only two people whose names are recorded are Michael Muir Smith and Wayne Smith.
For the benefit of some non-UK readers, in British slang, “fag” is a cigarette and “fag end” is the last part or very end of something.