As many will know, Ken Drake is making an archive ken-drake-archive and in the process he was looking for a 1979 BCD menu. Neil Gardner (1977) tried to help:
Apologies on taking so long to getting round to looking out my old boat club dinner menus. I knew I had religiously kept every menu over my college rowing career, and yesterday I unearthed them and dusted them down looking for the Lents 1979 edition. And guess what? It is the only one missing. This got me thinking and and after consulting Riyad Insanally and Roly Beevor, the Captain of Boats at the time, we have pieced together our collective memories of those times and I can exclusively reveal that there is no Lents 1979 dinner menu because the dinner never took place. But I do have the CUBC crew list and some photographs.
But for the record, the dinner could not take place because FCBC were punished and barred from holding the dinner in February 1979 due to some ungentlemanly behaviour during the preceding 1978 Fairbairns Dinner in college. Riyad has a clearer recollection than I do about the events that led to this unfortunate situation, but I understand that some of the members of one crew drank to excess, leading to laddish behaviour and material damage to a door on the main building. Not to mention some unpleasant issues related to regurgitation of the dinner in the wrong places by some individuals. Students never change.
So we could not hold that Lents dinner in college. New Hall BC next door (who shared our boat house at the time) took pity on us and invited us to join them for their dinner. If there was a menu, our crews were not listed on it!
But I can provide you with the below pictures and scans of the FCBC crew lists from the CUBC program. We are sure of the crew names of the 1st and 2nd boats due to the pictures, but I don’t have a picture of the 3rd boat yet to confirm. There were only 3 Fitz crews entered. Roly Beevor was Captain and I was Vice Captain.
Neil Gardner
FCBC 1st VIII Lents 1979
Bow: Simon Clephan, 2 Clive Woodman, 3 Steve Owen, 4 Andy Procter, 5 Onno Wieringa, 6 Roly Beevor, 7 Neil Gardner, Str Ben Booth, Cox Steve Lees
FCBC 2nd VIII Lents 1979
Bow: Chris Macdonnell, 2 Nick Bevan, 3 Paul Flood, 4 Simon Cole, 5 Nick Francis, 6 Trevor Still, 7 Mike Cowie, Str Neil Wharmby, Cox David Williams
FCBC 3rd VIII Lents 1979 (order to be confirmed if a photo appears)
Bow: Tim Ladbrooke, 2 G Price, 3 P Duquemin, 4 M Chālons-Browne, 5 Jerry Leary, 6 John Wells, 7 Pete Hale, Str Arthur Cooke, Cox Guy Thorpe-Beeston, Coach: Nick Tittle
