Eton College Boathouse 20 One-Place Study

We first saw our future home, online of course, during the first lockdown of 2020. In common with many Londoners, Covid led to a re-evaluation of priorities and an ‘escape to the country’, and for us it brought forward the retirement dream of living by a river.

An offer was made even before we’d viewed the house, and we moved in in Autumn 2020, just in time for further lockdowns. All of a sudden there was unexpected time to start to research the history of Boathouse 20 and the study began.

Boathouse 20 is one of the few surviving Eton College boathouses that once stretched westwards, on the North bank of the Thames, from Windsor Bridge to the hay meadow known as The Brocas. Its date of building is uncertain – while the rower George Pocock called it ‘the principal riverfront boating structure which had stood for four hundred years’, this is probably an exaggeration. Earliest documentary evidence is a distant glimpse in a late 1700s painting: most probable written evidence (so far) comes from the major source The Eton Book of the River which states ‘the same solid building that is still there; it dates back to some time previous to the substitution of the existing bridge for the old wooden one’ (1822-24): earliest photographs predate the 1850s.

Although the study focusses on Boathouse 20, it is sometimes difficult to pin down historical accounts to this specific boathouse. The jumble of boathouses, differing in construction method and ownership, are often collectively referred to in the literature as ‘the boathouses’. Sometimes it’s easy to be sure that documents refer to Boathouse 20, for example during the period when it housed ‘The Eight Room’ (the common room for Eton College’s First Eight rowers) – at other times, when the literature is more vague, information for other boathouses makes its way into the study. Or, if there’s a good story definitively linked to an adjacent boathouse, inquisitiveness demands that this will be included!

As a property that was a working boathouse until the latter half of the twentieth century (when it was converted into a family home), and where census records are unclear as to the numbering of Brocas Street, it’s hard to establish if anyone actually lived here before the 1980s. The stories therefore lie in the lives of the people who owned, redeveloped and worked at the boathouses. The joy of studying a property that has, at various times, been in (and out) of the ownership of Eton College is that extensive documentation exists, with whole books having been written about key characters, for example the Old Etonian, subsequent Headteacher and finally provost Edmond Warre whose love for rowing as a pupil lasted into adulthood and led to the development of rowing as a major sport at Eton College.

However, some of the more interesting stories are emerging from studying the ‘incidental characters’ who don’t have whole books about them but crop up in other people’s stories. These include the architect Edmond Lancelot Warre (son of the Headteacher) who was present at the beginning of the relationship between Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, and master boatbuilder Aaron Pocock who might have made his fortune if he’d bought the boathouse when offered the opportunity in 1910 (it’s uncertain at this point in the study why this didn’t happen – College writers and the Pocock family tell opposing versions of the same story!). There’s also a lot to be gained from gathering anecdotes about a very important group of people – the men who maintained boats for Eton boys to practice and race with – but, in books written by Old Etonians, these boatmen are generally only referred to by nicknames such as ‘Froggy’ or ‘Bosh’. Although the men are harder to track down, their appearance in the literature over a period of years indicates a longevity of association with the boathouses that is another theme worth pursuing.

Many of the original boathouses are long-lost, not surprising as they were originally ‘ramshackle wooden structures’, but even Eton College’s series of replacement buildings were mostly removed in 2014 when the majority of rowing was relocated to the Olympic venue of Dorney Lake and a luxury development was built on the site. Boathouses 18,19 and 20 survived due to listing in 1973 – this study has already shown me the inaccuracies in the listing, but that’s another story!

The study so far has mainly used easily-available sources from the internet and libraries, but, as I prepare to delve into documentary archives, this seems a good time to register the story of Boathouse 20 as a One-Place Study.