A Brief History of the Trinity Boat Clubs, 1825-2025

Sum pius Aeneas, raptos qui ex hoste Peates
classe veho mecum, fama super aethera notus.
(Virgil, Aeneid, 1.378–9)

A Prologue

As our motto reads: fama super aethera notus – so claims Aeneas of himself, invoking his loyalty to gods and family in a bid to win the favour of a goddess he does not yet recognise as his mother, Venus. He is stranded on the coast of Africa, his men scattered, and yet it is he who will father the Romans, a people to whom Jupiter did promise: imperium sine fine dedi.

How apt, then, that this same wanderer, between trials, organises a boat race in Sicilian waters on the anniversary of his father’s death. Not grief, but the pursuit of glory, as four galleys of men strain, watching the sign to start:
Then, at the trumpet’s piercing sound, All from their barriers onward bound: Upsoars to heaven the oarsman’s shout: The upturned billows froth and spout.

Virgil’s account swells with violence and ambition. A ship wrecks. Oars shatter. One helmsman is thrown overboard. Victory goes to Cloanthus of the Scylla, not by strength and wit alone, but by prayer – as the hidden hand of Portunus carries his crew to triumph, and Aeneas proclaims the result.

The centuries roll on; the oar remains. In the wake of another great European war of land and sea, a nameless boy enters Westminster School. It is 1815. Napoleon is defeated. The navy is diminished. Now the Thames is newly cluttered with gigs and cutters, in the height of post-war naval enthusiasm. Boating thrives, and the eight-oar begins to dominate the tidal waters. Glory in battle now turns to sport. Bell’s Life in August 1824 reads:
Never was there a time when so many pleasure-boats were to be seen upon the river. This circumstance has led to frequent wagers, and those wagers have increased the number of vessels calculated to contend for the various prizes.

This boy, watching from Westminster, matures. In time – now man – he comes up to Trinity College, bringing the Thames with him. J. J. Smith’s Cambridge Portfolio records him with reverence, noting his rare gift to ‘so far abstract his mind as to invest the waters of the Cam with the qualities and capabilities of the mighty Thames’. And so, from a tradition of slow voyages to Ditton in canoes and funnies, there rises a new form of rowing on the Cam.

It is this history I attempt to tell – from the makeshift fours of 1825 to the bicentenary of their successors in 2025. To recount it in brief is to fail its richness; but the thread of contest, glory, loss, and camaraderie is unbroken, and runs still in our time.

The Early Clubs

The first strokes of Trinity rowing are half-veiled in mist, glimpsed only through memory and fragmentary record. Yet one truth is certain: by the spring of 1825, a recognisable Trinity boat club was afloat – the oldest at Cambridge.

Much of what we know rests on the recollection of C.F.R. Baylay, who, writing in The Field in January 1882, casts his mind back more than half a century:
In the spring of 1825, four Trinity men, of whom I was one, used very frequently to hire a four-oar when we felt inclined for a row. Sometimes, finding the boat we liked best engaged, we formed ourselves into a club, and hired a four-oar called the Shannon by the term. This was the first Cambridge Boat Club.

So it began: not with statutes or committees, but with four young men and a hired boat. Yet their example was quickly answered. From the following October, Johnians launched their own eight-oar, christened the Lady Margaret – the first of its kind upon the Cam. Trinity could not stand idle. The Shannon men purchased an eight-oar named the King Edward to rival her. Soon after, further craft appeared upon the water: the ten-oared Monarch and the six-oared Westminster, both of Trinity. In 1827, these three Trinity clubs, alongside boats of other colleges, contested the first organised bumps races.

The contest was fierce, the survival uneven. The Westminster vanished almost at once; the Monarch laid aside its ten-oar and embraced the eight. By the year’s end, two Trinity eights – the King Edward and the Monarch – remained, and by early 1828 they had merged as a single Trinity Boat Club. Yet unity was short-lived. A second crew broke away, starting afresh at the bottom of the charts in 1829 under the name Second Trinity, the only Trinity crew to begin the 1829 bumps with First Trinity rejoining two races later. In the Mays returning as the Privateer, Second Trinity rowed until 1830. In 1831, a further Trinity crew arose – the Nautilus, later called Queen Bess. Its separate minutes and accounts mark it as more than a subsidiary crew: the true beginning of what endured as the Second Trinity Boat Club, broken up in 1838 but returning in 1840 and still active until 1876 (with a short revival in 1894–95 owing to political disputes).

Meanwhile, in October 1832, another fraternity took shape. Old Westminsters and Etonians, long accustomed to rivalry at school, combined their strength as the Third Trinity Boat Club. Their first years were inauspicious – a six-oar, middling results – until, in 1834, they turned to the eight. Then came glory. In nine races they rose eight places to seize the Headship. That year’s charts closed with Third first, First second, and Second third – the river crowned by Trinity alone.

By now the three clubs of Trinity were firmly established, each with its own colours and its own pride. Yet they were not always divided. In 1839, when the first Henley Regatta was called, Trinity sent not one club but all three together. Rowing as a single crew in the Black Prince, they won the Grand Challenge Cup, the prow of their victorious boat preserved to this day – a relic of unity, and of triumph. The First Trinity minutes record the Final Grand Heat between Trinity and the Etonian Club (Oxford), around 7 o’clock on Friday 14 June:
At starting the Etonian boat drew a little ahead, which advantage they continued to keep for about a quarter of a mile, when the T.B.C. recovered their lost ground. The 2 boats continued oar and oar till within a quarter of a mile of the end, when the T.B.C. drew a little ahead, & finally were declared the victors by exactly a boat length.

Floreat Prima, Floreat Tertia

The year 1849 found Trinity men at the forefront of Cambridge rowing. That spring, the Light Blue eight was composed entirely of Trinity oarsmen – men of First, Second and Third alike. It was Trinity against Oxford, and victory was emphatic: the Light Blues came home a full minute clear. Indeed, the history of the Boat Race is awash with Trinity men. Not a single contest from the inaugural race of 1829 until the wartime merger was without a Trinity man aboard, and more often than not there were several. By the eve of the Second World War, two in every five Light Blues had been from Trinity.

This dominance – in particular of First and Third – was not confined to the Thames. On the Cam, the Bumps charts stand as testimony to Trinity’s long mastery. Before the Lents and Mays were divided in 1887, Trinity crews were Head of the River in more than half the years. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the Second World War, they claimed the Lents Headship almost a third of the time, and the Mays Headship nearly as often – some thirty-eight per cent of all Headships in that long century of racing.

Nor was Henley spared. From the triumph of the Black Prince in 1839, Trinity colours became a familiar sight upon the regatta course. One century later, the tally of victories stood at eighty-one, a roll-call unmatched by any other club. The old song of C. Q. Knowles rang true:

At Henley e’er since the days of Black Prince,
her vict’ries have been not a few.
And full often I ween have her colours been seen
triumphant on home waters too.
Of the river she’s often been head,
And the pathways of honour to tread:
Her members full oft the dark blue have doff’d and adopted the light blue instead!

Nor was Trinity’s reach confined to English waters. In July 1876, a Trinity crew crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, only for their prospects to be undone by an untimely bout of malaria in their Captain. Yet most resplendent of all were the Olympic Regattas of the interwar years. In Paris, 1924, the gold medal in the coxless four went to a crew of Third Trinity; four years later in Amsterdam, First Trinity repeated the feat. Thus, within the space of two Olympiads, both of Trinity’s clubs had carried Britain to glory – triumphs that crowned a century of supremacy.