1952 - Helsinki

EARLY DAYS

We canoed when we were kids and we were building canoes just after we left school. My mother took us to Lyme Regis with a canoe on top of a car and we paddled from there to Eastbourne, which is 180 miles of the south coast. So we were quite experienced canoeists. My brother and I were in double and dad was in a single canoe.

In the year that I was married in 1948, my wife – who had done a little canoeing – so I took her to Eastbourne with the canoe and we paddled from Eastbourne to Canvey island which was 140 miles. Imagine, just married and she was introduced to sea canoeing then!

So the canoeing thing was pretty much ingrained into me and in my brother’s as well. Anyway we did that 140 miles, and she was really brilliant. Braver than I was in some of the rough water we had to go through

Anyway one year when my brother and I were coming down the Thames on a week’s holiday, we came across a regatta. We thought we would stop and watch this and one of the officials came and said, “Why don’t you join in one of the races? We’re short of entries.” We said that we were only in touring canoes and you’ve got those slim racing ones.” So he said, “We’ll lend you one – there’s an old Austrian double design one – you and your brother can use that one.” It was a 1000 metre race and we won it! And they said, “Crikey you’re not bad paddlers, you paddle quite well!”

Of course the kayak is quite a long boat and you are paddling with a double paddle. Then he said, “Well we’ve got a single here.” So I went in it and I beat this chap and he’d been a National Champion! So that really started us off. So the Royal Canoe Club said why don’t we join one of the canoe clubs and actually do some canoe racing? We were quite intrigued with this. We did train in the river Thames but did most of our training in the sea and they did all their training in the river. Anyway the National Championships came along and they loaned us boats and my brother and I won the 500, 1000 and 10,00 metres. Nobody seemed to be able to keep with us. Having paddled in the sea where there are waves, so when the river got churned up at starts some people were put off their balance. The boats are very narrow – only 14” wide.

TRAINING & EQUIPMENT

The paddles have hollow shafts to make them very light and they have a shaped blade that you can twist so that one feathers at it goes through the air while you’re paddling – it’s a double paddle. It’s quite a technique and you can go quite fast with them, sprint up to 9 mph. The kayak, you have a single seater, which is 17 feet long, and 14”, then the double and then there’s the K4 which is for four paddlers. We paddled that as well with some teammates. John Dudderidge was our manager and Eric Farnham was our coach.

Going to the club and running a business at the same time was a bit tough but we did manage quite a lot of training. I remember in those days they didn’t have a firing gun, they used to say “Are you ready?” and if you weren’t ready you signalled. Then it was “Go”. My brother and I realised that a good start is everything because as soon as you get paddling you create a little wave behind you. If there’s anyone behind you, they’ve got to climb over this wave. Well the 10,000 metres. Well we never got caught for starting early but they tagged us with the name “ready, Steady, Gone!” because we were just a fraction better. So once we’d got the lead we’d got smooth water in front of us and all the others had our paddle wash. Every time we saw a bow wave come to overtake us we gave a little spurt. We were pretty crafty like that and we found the long distance races were fairly easy to win. The 1000 metres was a real sprint. It’s very hard racing.

When we were training for the Olympics, we were training every day and after work we’d go down to the river and we’d paddle at least 10,000 metres, doing sprints and stuff like that. So we became quite super fit.

We had a Harley street doctor – Dr Woodard and he put us on a strict diet, which was supposed to take every bit of fat off your body. To be honest, I think it weakened us. But we obeyed it because this was the time when you had to queue up for a little bit of meat each week because rationing was on and we used to eat reindeer steaks – which we hated – and all sorts of meats that my wife used to manage to get to feed us because that was what Dr Woodard said we had to eat. Proteins. We had to do all sorts of things! We had to always sleep slightly cold, all sorts of funny things!

SELECTION

This letter is from the British Canoe Union. “Dear Francis, I am glad to be able to inform you that you have been selected to represent Great Britain in the 1952 Olympic games regatta at Helsinki. You have been entered into K2 1000metres and K2 10,000 metres reserves. The BCU Council and all members wish you well and have confidence that you will give a good account of yourself.

It is possible that you may be approached by representatives of the press and I suggest that you exercise caution in any interviews you may give. It would be unwise to raise hopes and expectations, which might prove to be unjustified. Forecasting results in our sport is made difficult by the water factor, which is not easy to assess, and by your lack of foreign competition experience. I am confident that the team is the best trained and equipped that we have ever sent overseas.

There will be a reception at Buckingham Palace for all members of the team on Wednesday July 9th at 6.30 p.m. The dress will be Olympic blazer with grey flannel – your own, dark shoes, white shirt and Olympic tie. You will be expected to collect your hat from the hatters but wait until you have heard from them that the hats have arrived.

You will need some spending money in Helsinki and in order that this shall not come out of your £25 foreign currency allowance, you may pay this in English money into the British Olympic association who will act as bankers and pay out daily amounts in Helsinki. Any not used will be refunded on return. You will be there for about one week and as the maximum allowance is £1 per day I suggest that you deposit £5 in this BOA bank. For this purpose you must send me your cheque this week, as I have to pay it in before the end of the month. Make your cheque out to me personally as I will pay it in a lump sum to cover the whole team. Also send any other facts that might be interesting to the press should I be assailed by them for interesting snippets about members of the team. I shall be seeing you in due course. You should have now have received your parcel from "Horlicks!”

HELSINKI OLYMPICS 1952

First of all we arranged to do some training with the Swedish team in Stockholm. So we went to Sweden first and they were jolly good. We found that they were better than we were and that this was their number one sport. We did get a third in the 10,000 metres in their club racing but we thought we are out of our league here!

So anyway when we got to Helsinki, we had to race for real and would you believe our heat – which was 9 boats – had Finland and Sweden in it, and they were the gold and silver medallists. So you had to be third just to get to the final. Well, we paddled our guts out of course and we were fourth so we didn’t make the final.

It was a tremendous experience because we were living in the Olympic village and we were rubbing shoulders with all sorts of people like Chris Brasher and Cassius Clay were there. And it was a great experience. Because we weren’t in the finals our games were fairly short lived but we had special rights to watch the athletics.

In 1954 there were the World Championships in Macon. We got a sixth in the 10,000 metres out of 27 racers, so we were doing pretty well but not to medal standard. We didn’t do much after that except the national Championships in which my brother and I were never beaten in the doubles for any distance and I won a singles 100m and he won a 500m. So on the whole we had a fairly good career as kayak racers.

One day my brother came to me and said, “Suppose we joined our two kayaks together and put a sail on it. Made it like a catamaran like the south sea islanders?” So we did this and it went so darned fast – this was 1954 – so we designed a proper one and built it. We went to Burnham week and joined the handicap race and won every race by hours! I mean it was very fast. We could do 20 knots in this boat.

We won this Havolin Trophy and the following year we built a better boat – an 18 foot, tremendously fast and modern looking. And we sent our entry in and we got a letter back from the Royal Burnham Yacht Club saying they couldn’t accept our entry because we don’t consider it a proper boat! And that was the beginning of catamarans. We knew about the south sea catamarans but in this country, catamarans were not considered as proper boats.

However there was a yachting magazine called Yachts & Yachting and we knew the editor and his wife and they gave us publicity – the only magazine to do so because it was an outstanding sailing boat. All the other sailors were a bit miffed because we were so much faster than they were. Anyway we stuck to our guns and we designed and built a boat called the Shearwater 3, which was the very first catamaran class racing boat in the world. It became quite famous and the RYA adopted it as a national class and it’s still going today. That was from 1954 and we’ve still got an association with the Shearwater 3 – a 16 foot 6 inch racing catamaran.

FUNDING

I don’t know if it was a free blazer – from Buck or some firm – but we did get a tube of Horlicks tablets presented to us! No sponsorship in those days. You were on your own. But we trained quite hard to get there and I have a feeling that we did get our fares paid to go out to Helsinki but we paid our own way to Sweden because we trained with them for a couple of weeks. They treated us very, very well and then we all went to Helsinki for the beginning of the Games.