The Boat Race

A nut-brown little Siamese in a white cap, hunched in the stern of a fragile racing shell on the Thames, barking shrill orders at eight lusty Britons who thrashed the grimy water with long oars, was the cynosure of 500,000 pairs of eyes for a few minutes one afternoon last week. He, Prince Komarakul-Na-Nagara, was coxswain of the Oxford varsity crew and for most of the first quarter of the race, his men held the lead he had shot them away to a few strokes after the start. But Cambridge pulled ahead at the mile and stayed there--one-third of a length at Hammersmith Bridge, a good length at Duke's Meadows, a length and one-half at Barnes Bridge when Oxford made a last forlorn bid to close the open water, two lengths and one-half at the finish at Mortlake, in 20 min. 57 sec., slow time with a sluggish tide.

The Cambridge victory, 13th since the War, made a record: it was the first time in the 104-year history of an event properly and completely described as "The Boat Race" that either crew had won ten times in a row. Last year, in a sporting effort to make the boat race more of a contest, Brigadier J. H. Gibbon, famed oldtime Cambridge "Blue" and amateur rowing coach, went to Oxford to see what was the matter. This year Brigadier Gibbon was helped by W. Palmer Mellen, young New Yorker who stroked the Oxford crew that won in 1923. Puzzled by the continued failure of their boat, old Oxonians last week fell back on the suggestion of feeding the oarsmen more than their usual rations of a pint and a half of ale and a glass of port daily for a month before the race, to reduce their "conviction of inferiority."

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