2 September 2024
By Tim Koch
Tom Weil, rowing historian, collector and philanthropist, has died aged 75. He occupied a unique and irreplaceable place in the world of those concerned with preserving the heritage of rowing. Tim Koch is one of many who will be attempting to do justice to a great life that was driven by passion and generosity.
“Would you like me to sign that for you?” asked the stranger shyly. It was 2006, the first HTBS post was still three years away and my curiosity about rowing history was in its early stages. However, it was clearly advanced enough for me to have gone to Richard Way’s bookshop in Henley to buy a copy of Beauty and the Boats: Art and artistry in early British Rowing illustrated from the Thomas E. Weil Collection – only to discover that the author himself was present, fastidiously cataloguing books in a corner of Diana and Richard’s wonderful little shop.
I was delighted to find myself talking to an erudite and charming man who was not only an Anglophile (always flattering for a Brit though Tom’s New Zealander mother did mean that he was part Commonwealth subject) but was also the most knowledgeable rowing historian that I had ever met – then or since. Tom was, I suspect, just happy to meet someone under 50 who had an interest in rowing heritage. During our (sadly few) future meetings, Tom’s constant theme was, where is the next generation of rowing historians, who in the future is going to both take over the collecting, preservation and display of aquatic artefacts and also continue research into a much under-researched subject?
In a 2008 row.2k interview, he said:
From the beginning of my interest in collecting, I was troubled by the relative lack of rowing histories, the extent of ignorance among rowers and non-rowers alike about rowing’s past, the absence of scholarship on rowing artefacts, the lack of any infrastructure or network for rowing history and memorabilia scholars, collectors and dealers, and the dearth of any major public rowing collections. I wanted to make a difference in these areas by putting together a collection that could begin to tell the story, joining in efforts to create a rowing museum and identifying others who might share the same interests… I never collected for myself.
When Tom had to retire from the board of Henley’s River & Rowing Museum on reaching the age of 70, the museum’s chairman, David Worthington said of him:
His generosity is not just limited to objects; as a fount of knowledge he has supported the curatorial team for two decades and as a foundation trustee, has provided wise advice, challenging questions and supportive actions in equal measure. He won’t necessarily realise this, but every time we speak, he always finishes with the words “What can I do to help?”
For those who do not know, Tom had the world’s largest collection of rowing artefacts – but he had easy access to very few of them. He told the row.2k website in 2008:
My collection is now somewhere between 5,000-10,000 items, which may or may not include a substantial donation of rowing artefacts to the British American Arts Association, which is now in the River and Rowing Museum in Henley, and a smaller gift of rowing artefacts to Mystic Seaport. The book collection is tracked in a 463 page bibliography. The artefacts and archives collection catalogues total 788 pages.
Tom had got the collecting bug early. Referring to his time in the US Navy, he told row.2k:
(On receiving) a Vietnam deployment… others spent their combat pay on the latest Japanese electronic marvel, which was then reel-to-reel tape recorders, I spent mine on (rowing) prints and books offered by dealers in London and Boston.
In 2018, I posted a piece on HTBS titled Tom’s Treasures, a tiny selection of some of Tom’s collection held by Henley’s River and Rowing Museum. Take a short visit here.
In the introduction to his 2005 book, Beauty and the Boats (one of the first River and Rowing Museum publications), Tom wrote about what rowing and collecting had done for him:
For most of the last 40 years, rowing has held me in thrall, alternatively as a metaphor for life, or as life itself. I was in the boats long ago, for a few years, between my first visit to Henley in 1963 and my rowing for Yale in the 1970 Regatta. I loved the training, the feel of an eight at full power, the pleasure of victories, and the value of defeats. For almost four decades since, lessons learned on the water have shaped my life. My fondness for rowing fused with passions for history and art, an acquisitive mania, and a sense of mission to preserve and honour the too little appreciated story of the first modern sport.
In 2005, Tom wrote his own “Biographical Notes” in Beauty and the Boats:
Born at the British Embassy clinic in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1948, to an American diplomat and his New Zealand wife, Thomas E. Weil was raised on Enid Blyton, Rudyard Kipling and Marmite at postings in Washington DC, Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul and London.
Schooled at Phillips Academy, Andover, and Yale, he rowed on Yale’s lightweight crew, which came second in the 1970 Eastern Sprints to Steve Gladstone’s Harvard “Superboat” (carrying two future Olympians), then defeated heavyweight crews Liverpool Victoria and Garda Síochana (the powerful Irish police crew; ‘Guardians of the Peace’) in the Thames Cup at Henley Royal Regatta before falling to the Leander Cadet Eight, the eventual champions, in the semi-finals.
Weil concluded his rowing career with a silver medal in the lightweight double sculls at the US National Championships that summer. The last time he was in an eight, at a Yale crew reunion in 1995, he promised God that if he lived through the experience, he would never tempt fate again. He has since kept his part of the bargain.
After receiving a US Navy commission in 1970, Weil served, including a Vietnam deployment, on a destroyer escort based in Pearl Harbor, and then, following training in Turkish, was assigned as the admiral’s aid at the military mission in Ankara during the Cyprus crisis.
Since finishing law school at the University of Virginia in 1978, Weil has been practicing in the fields of domestic and international corporate and energy project development and finance in Washington, DC, and Houston, Texas…
After his time in Washington and Houston with the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, Tom retired to Woodbridge, Connecticut, a town next to New Haven, home of Yale, his alma mater. The Weil family tree is online.
Returning to Tom’s very early years, there is a delightful picture of it drawn by the man himself. In 2020, I posted a piece on two photographs showing European women rowing on a lake in the North Indian town of Nainital in 1867. I claimed that these were the oldest known photographs of women engaged in rowing for sport. Tom confirmed to me that he did not know of any photographs of rowing women prior to 1870 but also added a very Weilesque postscript:
This brings back 65-year-old memories of our summers in Ranikhet, as we escaped from New Delhi, where my father worked at the US Embassy from 1953 to 1956, when ceiling fans were inadequate in Delhi’s summer heat (and air conditioning non-existent). Ranikhet had no electricity, so our evenings were lit by little gas lanterns that hissed as they burned. No running water, so the paniwallahs (water carriers) would heat bath water in a central facility and carry it to our cabins. Monkeys hurled pine cones at us as the horse handlers led our ponies along the heavily treed hill trails.
We were quite impressed when the German military attache, who was also staying at the camp, shot a leopard, particularly since he had only one arm, having lost the other in the war.
My one memory of Nainital itself was being introduced to golf there by my father, and watching delightedly as my ball, quite inadequately struck by a five year-old, kept rolling down the manicured hillside, drawn much more by gravity than propelled by my swing (it was a very odd location for a golf course). All very Raj (that was only a few years after independence in 1947) and Kiplingesque.
Ooty, another hill station mentioned in your piece, is where I was conceived on my parents’ honeymoon during an earlier India posting.
So, we now know not only where Tom was born (Kabul, Afghanistan) but also where he was conceived (Ooty, “the Queen of Hill Stations”, then Madras, now Tamil Nadu, India). The very precise linguist, lawyer and cataloguer would have liked this attention to detail.
This attention to the small stuff was sometimes directed towards me as Tom occasionally and gently corrected my worst grammatical mistakes. One that always stays with me is when I used the expression “the hoi poli”, something that I thought that clever people said when referring to “the people” or “the many.” As Tom pointed out, “hoi” means “the” so I was saying “the the people.”
Americans commonly hold military veterans such as Tom in high regard and frequently tell such ex-servicemen and women of their admiration. However, we in the rowing world can also say with equal regard and admiration, Thomas Eliot Weil – thank you for your service.
Thomas Eliot Weil, Attorney, Collector, Philanthropist, 19 October 1948 – 1 September 2024.