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Tom Balm began as apprentice to master Thames
boat builder Mark Edwards at his yard near
Hampton Court – Edwards is the chap who built the
million pound rowing barge Gloriana, the Queen’s
Rowing Barge for the Thames Diamond Jubilee
Pageant. Owing to health and safety concerns Her
Majesty wasn’t allowed to travel in Gloriana on the
tidal Thames on that awfully rainy day but in July
this year, the week before Swan Upping on a
glorious summer’s day, the Queen was taken for a
private picnic on Gloriana, from the riverbank of
Home Park, Windsor with Prince Andrew, Prince
Edward and the Countess of Wessex. Gloriana was
rowed by eighteen Royal Watermen in splendid
crimson livery while Lord Sterling who had
commissioned Gloriana for the River Pageant as a
gift for the Queen travelled behind the Royal Barge
with Sir Steve Redgrave in the Edwardian
gentleman’s launch Verity. They were joined by
a whole flotilla of traditional and vintage wooden
boats to give Her Majesty the impression of the
Thames in 1953. The little flotilla came beneath the
Victoria Bridge from the Home Park (above), under
Black Potts Railway Bridge and instead of heading
up through Romney Lock and into Windsor proper
the floating picnic party veered right up the Eton
Creek where, on Founders Day each June the Eton
wet bobs
enjoy their own bit of messing about in
boats as shown to the left.
A lesser-known classic of boating on the Thames
and homage to the traditional Thames punt is called
Our River
published in 1888 by the painter and Royal
Academician George Dunlop Leslie who lived by the
Thames at Wallingford. Although he is adamant that
the best way to enjoy the Thames is in a punt he is
respectful of all other form of craft except the steam
launch about which he is quite vicious in his scorn.
Leslie is also ruthless in his condemnation of the
Hooray Henrys who have by the 1880s begun to
infest his beloved river and whom he calls “ Arrys.
Leslie was a terrific snob and a man of very strong
opinions recommending that holiday makers arrive at
the Thames by Second Class train:
“
First-class passengers appear to me generally too
much impressed with the sense of their greatness; little
or no conversation have they for strangers, and of
late years on the Henley journey in the first-class
compartments the travellers consist chiefly of young
well-to-do Philistines, ‘oiled and curled Assyrian
bulls’ with faultless dress and supercilious manners,
who smoke cigars, read all manner of sporting papers,
and whose talk to one another generally relates to
horses. “But on the Henley line I never go third-class,
as apart from the inferior accommodation, in the
summer months the carriages are often filled with
parties of rough London bean-feasters and pot-hunting
bank fishermen, whose conversation mainly consists
of vulgar chaff, and whose beer jugs, ground-bait
bags, and macintoshes smell abominably.”