12 September 2024
By Göran R Buckhorn
HTBS editor Göran R Buckhorn remembers his friend Tom Weil.
The first time I met Thomas E. Weil – Tom – was at a Rowing History Forum at Mystic Seaport Museum in 2004, the year after the Forum was organised for the first time by the National Rowing Foundation’s Bill Miller, Hart Perry and Tom.
While I said hello to Tom at that occasion, I never had in depth conversations with him or the other historians who gave lectures and talks that year; honestly, I was too timid to approach any of them. The following year, the Forum was cancelled due to blizzard conditions in Connecticut, though Tom, Hart, Bill, Chris Dodd and Peter Mallory met up for an informal meeting.
In 2006, the NRF and Mystic Seaport Museum again invited rowing enthusiasts to a new Forum. The previous year, Tom had published his grand Beauty and the Boats – art & artistry in early British rowing, a catalogue of his collection which was on display at the River and Rowing Museum in Henley in 2005. At the Forum, Tom graced my copy of the book with his signature and wrote some nice words to me, a rowing fan with a poor track record on the rowing course and, in the true sense of the word, was a minor historian in the field.
And that was just it, however “minor” I was, and in a certain sense still regard myself to be as a historian, Tom showed his support then and onwards in whatever endevour I plunged headfirst into, especially when, out of boredom, I launched Hear The Boat Sing (HTBS) in March 2009. He wrote encouraging emails and later sent articles to HTBS. Sometimes Tom sent an email to correct a factual mistake or amend my English language mishaps in my articles. (Despite being plagued with his illness, he sent a correction in early June this year when I had messed up something with the regatta course for the Yale-Harvard Boat Race).
There was no end to Tom’s kindness and assistance regarding HTBS or any questions I had related to the sport we love.
In our conversations in person, over the phone or in emails, he was entertaining, humorous and, furthermore, extremely witty. In one of his first articles for HTBS, published in March 2014, titled “Was the First Wanker a Belgian Oarsman?”, Tom writes that “’Wanker’ is a disparaging term, used widely throughout the Commonwealth countries, which has been ‘ranked as the fourth most severe pejorative in English’.”
Tom’s hypothesis in his article that “the origin of the term points directly to the results of the Grand Challenge Cup event at Henley Royal Regatta in 1906, 1907 and 1909, when, to the shock and horror of the English rowing world, the premier eights prize of the kingdom was won by non-English crews” is a theory that only Tom would be able to get away with.
When Tom suggested that he could write a series for HTBS called “The Other Parts of Rowing”, I of course immediately jumped on the idea. Soon the pieces started to trickle in and all together six brilliant TOPOR articles were published in spring 2020. The basis for Tom’s articles was fetched from his enormous collection of news photographs. In an introduction to these articles, Tom wrote:
Rowing qua rowing is to most HTBS Types the act of attempting to achieve symphony in motion in a competitive context. But even that core act takes place within a smorgasbord of other activities. This […] is the first in a mini-series illustrating some of those other elements of rowing, as depicted by several decades of randomly collected news photos, images that demonstrate the insatiable appetite of the popular press at a time when journalism was interested not just in the act of rowing itself, but also in the bits and pieces that make up the greater tapestry of the sport.
These entertaining TOPOR articles can be read here. For those interested in articles by Tom or pieces where he is mentioned, put “Weil” in the search box and you will be well rewarded.
Tom also liked to craft doggerels. While he never claimed that his interest in verse came from his first cousin twice removed, T. S. Eliot, and he never bragged about his connection to the Nobel laureate, it was clear that he was proud of this ancestry.
I vividly remember when I was invited to Tom’s home in Woodbridge here in Connecticut. Mrs. B. was driving me as she had some errands to run in nearby New Haven. Tom greeted us at the front door with a silly freshman hat, a beanie, from Bowdoin, a college which is affiliated to Mrs, B.’s family. Coming into Tom’s house was like stepping into a rowing museum with trophies, pots, medals, plaques, prints, posters and much more. His study had bookshelves filled to the brim with books, pamphlets, magazines, programmes and whatever was printed about rowing. Tom showed me a narrow corridor where his duplets were stacked against the wall and said: “Take whatever you want!” I brought home five big boxes of books that day.
And that was Tom: kind, generous, helpful and a true gentleman.
When he heard that I had never been to Yale’s camp at Gales Ferry for the annual Yale-Harvard Regatta, in 2017, he invited Mrs B. and me as his guests to the Regatta Brunch from where we looked out at the crews fighting it out on the Thames River. It was a joyful event where the Bulldogs made a clean sweep, the first one since 1996.
Two years earlier, in 2015, Tom delivered an entertaining but also a somewhat serious speech at the 150th Yale-Havard Boat Race Dinner – as a Yalie, for Tom it was the Yale-Harvard Race, not the other way around – where Tom brought up that rowing was the only sport, while other so-called sports were actually just games derived from children’s plays. The otherwise positive Tom gave a gloomy view of the future of rowing history. In 2014, the National Rowing Foundation’s National Rowing Hall of Fame and the connected rowing exhibit “Let Her Run” at Mystic Seaport Museum had closed after the museum decided to demolish The G. W. Blunt White Building that housed “the Hall” and the collections of rowing memorabilia to make room for a new 14,000 square-foot exhibit building. After that, the artefacts in the exhibit were scattered in different storage facilities around New England, where they are still to this day.
Several attempts, especially by Tom and Bill, to find a new, permanent exhibition space and a physical Hall of Fame for rowing have so far been fruitless. Tom and the small group of rowing historians on American soil have been sorrowful for a long time by the lack of interest among rowers for the history of their sport. It is sad that Tom never lived to see a new exhibit place open on this side of the pond.
Besides Tom’s vast collection of “rowing stuff” in his home, throughout the years he big-heartedly donated artefacts to the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, where he had been a trustee for twenty years, the National Rowing Foundation (NRF), Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and lately Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
There are many of us in the rowing community, authors, writers, historians and rowers, who were supported, benefited and helped by Tom who so generously shared his knowledge of rowing. When I was asked to be the editor of the anthology The Greatest Rowing Stories Ever Told, it felt reassuring that I had a group of rowing historians, including Tom, in the editorial committee behind me. For the anthology, Tom selected an article that he had had published on Row2k in 2012, “A Memorable Race at Henley Women’s Regatta”. In a launch, he followed the race between two junior eights from Phillips Exeter Academy and Mount Saint Joseph Academy. Exeter won by two feet. Tom wrapped up the article with: “Now that was racing, and that Sunday, on the River Thames in Henley, every woman in each of those two boats earned the title of champion.”
While Tom had done research on different areas of rowing, close to his heart was the history of women’s rowing. In his collection were early prints of women rowing and he did extensive research on the subject which he published in several articles.
Tom will be greatly missed by us all. In his name, let us continue working on spreading the good word and information about the sport of rowing. We owe that to Tom.
Anyone who has some memories of Tom that they would like to share are welcome to publish it on this website. Please contact HTBS editor Göran Buckhorn at: gbuckhorn – at – gmail – dot – com