Husky crew fever is everywhere with the worldwide release of The Boys in the Boat, the film adaptation of Daniel James Brown’s bestselling book about the University of Washington rowing team that competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics.
In the 1920s, UW was considered an upstart West Coast college as it began to challenge the Eastern universities in the ancient sport of crew racing. Sportswriters scoffed at the “crude western boats” and their crews. But for the next forty years, UW dominated rowing around the world.
The secret of the Huskies’ success was George Pocock, a soft-spoken English immigrant raised on the banks of the Thames and the subject of the late Gordon Newell’s book, Ready All! George Yeoman Pocock and Crew Racing, first published by UW Press in 1987.
“As a youth in Britain, Pocock learned the rudiments of boat building from his father, who crafted boats for young Etonians. Forced to emigrate by straitened economic conditions, he journeyed to the Pacific Northwest intending to find work as a lumberjack. Fortunately for the University of Washington in Seattle, he was persuaded to establish shop there and began making shells of outstanding quality” (Publishers Weekly).
Pocock combined perfectionism with innovation to make the lightest, best-balanced, fastest shells the world had ever seen. After studying the magnificent canoes built by Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, he broke with tradition and began to make shells of native cedar.
Pocock, who had been a champion sculler in his youth, never credited his boats for the accomplishments of a crew. He wanted every rower to share his vision of discipline and teamwork. As rowers from the UW went on to become coaches at major universities across the country, Pocock’s philosophy—and his shells—became nationally famous in the world of crew.
Excerpt from Ready All!
George Pocock’s loyalty to the sport of rowing in general was his hallmark throughout his life but following the Husky crew’s surprise victory at Poughkeepsie in 1923, he found that he must assess his loyalties to the University of Washington and to his staunch friend, [head crew coach] Rusty Callow. He found himself wooed by a number of prestigious universities around the nation.
Harvard made the most pressing overtures. Three members of its rowing committee journeyed to Seattle to offer him many inducements, including a new fully equipped and rent-free boatshop, and a generous salary to maintain the shells and assist the coaching staff.
“I still could not see my way clear to accept,” Pocock recorded, “although their offer was quite magnificent compared to what I was getting at Washington, which was only the use of the garret workshop.”
Delighted, and perhaps surprised, that George had declined Harvard’s generous offer, Callow undertook a campaign on his friend’s behalf. He arranged, through the Alumni Association, the purchase of $1,500 worth of power machinery for more efficient and less laborious production, and boatbuilding space was expanded to the ground floor area below the original shop. The additional space was needed, for Pocock shells had gained overnight fame in rowing circles, and George was well on the way to a virtual monopoly of his highly specialized trade in the United States. The eight shells ordered in the fall of 1923 following the Poughkeepsie triumph were only the beginning. Five of that first big order were for East Coast schools, including Harvard. The others went to Wisconsin, California, and Washington.
Harvard also took delivery of an English-built shell, and George was delighted to receive a clipping from the Boston Globe describing the trial runs of his shell and the one imported from England. As a result of the trials, the Pocock-built shell was chosen to compete in the traditional Yale-Harvard race.
Orders kept coming in, and George and his three-man crew soon formed a highly efficient working team, although none of his employees had any previous experience in boatbuilding. They had, however, worked under George’s supervision at Boeing, and like most of the wartime work force, had been laid off. He was thus able to pick from the best of his former craftsmen, and they quickly mastered their new trade.
Once the University of Washington won the U.S. intercollegiate rowing championship, the crew quarters swarmed with budding oarsmen. The turnout was so great that many youngsters had to be cut from the squad to reduce it to a size the coaching staff could cope with.
The cuts were an aspect of rowing that never failed to sadden George. “Cutting a squad is a heartbreaking thing, because the virtues of rowing have to be denied to so many fine young men,” he wrote. “It grieved me to wonder how many careers had been frustrated and weakened. lt seemed to me ironic that the outstanding success of Washington crew, which we had worked so hard to attain, was resulting in the denial of rowing’s benefits to many through the sheer number of applicants.”
George was closely involved on a very personal basis with the generations of young oarsmen who came under his benign influence. Every coach during George’s half century on the campus was wise enough to assemble each new squad to listen to the Pocock litany of praise for the spiritual and physical benefits of rowing. Delivered in his gentle, cultured voice, it was far more effective than any loud, impassioned pep talk.
It was a source of great satisfaction to him that many of the crewmen snatched moments from their usually crammed schedules to come to his shop for counsel. He knew that many of them were rowing their hearts out in the little time left from demanding academic schedules. If the annual cutting of crew hopefuls was heartbreaking to him, this informal friendship with those who made it was deeply heartwarming: “I so admired all the oarsmen, and since my shop was right at the boathouse, I got to know many of them well. I dare not name any of the hundreds of young men who came to the shop during my fifty years of service to Washington rowing, for fear I would leave some out. But, generalizing, I can say there were all kindred souls, sincerely interested in painstaking work; fashioning natural material into the rowing shells of great beauty.”
Such was the force of tradition in rowing that nothing but Spanish cedar had been considered. But I found the native red cedar to be marvelous material, ideal for the skin of racing shells; impervious to rot and light in weight.
George Pocock
In 1924, the boats were still built with much the same materials George had learned to work with as an apprentice at Eton: “We continued to use Spanish cedar for the skin of the boats, which we obtained in New York in the log, having it sawn into thick planks there, and shipped via steamer to Seattle. The shipping charge from New York to Seattle was $50 for a single log in plank form, and getting them from dockside to the boathouse cost another $50. That was a lot of money in 1924, and it worried me. I knew many schools had only very limited funds to support rowing, and I cried to keep the costs to them of racing shells as low as possible.”
Eventually, George found a better and less costly wood with which to sheath his boats: western red cedar, which he henceforth referred to as “the wood eternal.” George had demonstrated the virtues of Northwest cedar back in 1918, when the U.S. Navy Department conceded that the Boeing-built World War I flying boats planked with cedar were superior to the Eastern-built versions using white pine—and considerably less costly. Tradition, however, is firmly embedded in rowing and shellbuilding, and it was nearly a decade before George ventured to replace the Spanish cedar which had been the accepted material for sheathing the boats over many generations.
“Nineteen twenty-seven was the first year I began using our Pacific Northwest lumber—western red cedar—for planking the boats,” he wrote. “Such was the force of tradition in rowing that nothing but Spanish cedar had been considered. But I found the native red cedar to be marvelous material, ideal for the skin of racing shells; impervious to rot and light in weight. It swells and shrinks very little when seasoned three years, air-dried, as we do. Its cells are complete, each containing trapped air. It is the wood eternal. Some of the first shells we built with it are still in regular use forty-five years later . . . nearly twice the useful life of the Spanish cedar boats.” It was typical of George to be pleased that the use of this amazingly durable material “cut the cost of rowing equipment in half.” This would promote the sport he loved, and for him that was the important thing. “Built-in obsolescence” was not a part of George’s business philosophy.
The western red cedar shells were dubbed “banana boats” in rowing circles. The term was not derisive, for they proved to be faster as well as far more durable than the earlier ones, as George explained:
“The name banana came from the fact that the western red cedar boats had an unusual amount of camber, which curved them like a banana. This feature was not built into them. As in the past, they were built on an I-beam which was perfectly straight. The camber appears after they are built and when they are being used for their intended purpose, carrying a crew on water, and is caused by a strange characteristic of this wood. While it shrinks or swells very little across the grain, lengthwise it will swell or extend as much as an inch in the sixty-foot length of an eight-oared shell. During construction, the cedar skin or planking is attached to the framework in a very dry condition, therefore its shortest natural state. When completed and in use, the woodwork naturally takes in some moisture and the cedar wants to swell lengthwise, but the frame work will not let it. So compression builds in the skin and the ends of the shell come up, hence your ‘banana boat.’ We like it, because when you have that compression in the shell, it makes it very lively to row.”
“Our banana boats,” he recalled, “being very successful, were copied by other builders who were ignorant of the qualities and virtues of the western red cedar and constructed them of plywood or mahogany or Spanish cedar. These materials, not being able to swell or extend lengthwise, could not put compression in the boat as ours had. These copies were dead, no life, no spring on the catch of the oars. They might just as well have been constructed of metal!”
George was reluctant to talk of “fast shells.” Only the crews who manned them made them fast or slow. He expressed his opinion this way:
I cannot help saying right here, not having publicly or in advertisements boosted our boats, which gives me a right to say it: whenever a foreign boat wins a race or foreign oars are used, the makers crow about it from the rooftops as though the boat won the race and not the crew. We have always revered the crew. They and they alone are responsible. We try to give them a boat that will do them justice.
The late Gordon Newell was the author of several books on maritime history, including Pacific Tugboats and Mighty Mo, The U.S.S. Missouri: A Biography of the Last Battleship.
University of Washington Press Blog 