Sport & games

Two centuries on the water, never once Head of the River

A club that was rowing before it existed — a Jesus College boat raced Brasenose in 1815, twenty years before anyone got around to founding the club — and which has still never taken the top prize at Oxford's Eights Week with either its men's or women's first crew. What it has produced instead is a strange spread of people: an Olympic silver medallist, a Lord Chancellor, a Bishop of Durham, and a man who coached both Oxford and Cambridge. The story of the boathouse is its own small history of how spectating used to work, back when a college watched from a barge rather than a building.

The club's last college barge, bought from a City of London livery company in 1911, ended up as a floating restaurant at Richmond — painted for years in the college's green and white.

Read the whole of Jesus College Boat Club (Oxford) on Wikipedia

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