The History Press, 2017
£20.00, 255pp, 6 appendices and index.
ISBN: 978–075–096–771–6
[This review by Martin Cross first appeared in the June/July 2017 edition of Stand To!]
Hear the Boat Sing is a worthy, if formulaic, addition to the series of books that Nigel McCrery has produced chronicling the lives of sportsmen who died as a result of their involvement in the Great War.
Unfortunately, for this reviewer the numerous errors in this volume provided a significant distraction from the stories the author was seeking to tell. Starting in 2014, McCrery has focussed on the fallen from the sports of: football, rugby and cricket. Last year, as the world’s attention switched to the Rio Olympics the writer of the TV series Silent Witness added Olympians to that list. This year, as the title suggests, McCrery has switched his attention to the sport of rowing.
Many British rowing clubs throughout the country have plaques honouring their members who died during the Great War. On Trent Bridge is a striking memorial to the Nottingham oarsmen who fell. Amongst the 55 names is Albert Ball, the Royal Flying Corps ace. The Nottingham Rowing Club man, credited with over 40 ‘kills’, was awarded a posthumous VC in June 1917. But rather than delve into Ball’s story and the tales of hundreds of other oarsmen who died in the Great War, McCrery has perhaps wisely chosen to limit his focus. Instead his gaze has come to rest on the 42 rowers who featured in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and who died between 1914 and 1919.
Even this undertaking has clearly involved a good deal of research, in addition to trawling the web for material initially researched and published by others, and the author is to be congratulated at least on his work in assembling the stories of these oarsmen. Hear the Boat Sing comes to life when McCrery includes letters and accounts, from the life and death of men such as Arthur Hales, the Radley school teacher, who enlisted in August 1914, rather than wait for a commission. He won ‘Blues’ in both the 1905 and 1905 Boat Races. A sniper on the Somme killed the Dark Blue in 1916 – while he was trying to save others. The Light Blue doctor, Hugh Shields was also killed in the open while tending wounded men, this time near Ypres in October 1914. McCrery’s moving accounts of these two men’s lives not only include letters from the front and obituaries but also a detailed account of the Boat Races that these men and the 40 others featured in the book participated in.
McCrery’s research has brought to light some interesting details. Unsurprisingly, the campaigns of Ypres and the Battle of the Somme account for over half of the deaths in Hear the Boat Sing. Thirteen of the Blues lost their lives in the Ypres Salient between 1914 and 1918, while nine of the oarsmen were killed during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Another seven died fighting in theatres such as Gallipoli, or Mesopotamia. Somewhat surprisingly, six Blues were buried in the UK, including the 1905 Blue Bernard Winthrop–Smith. In November 1914, his parents had travelled back from the hospital in Boulogne with the body of their son, who had died without regaining consciousness.
Out of the 42 men, 14 (some 33 percent) have no known grave.
But where McCrery’s book disappoints is in the quality of his research. For example, his entry on the 1908 Olympic rowing champion, Frederick Kelly, who died on the Somme in November 1916, is littered with errors which were entirely avoidable if he had really read some of the works he lists in his bibliography, works such as Australian academic Therese Radic’s Race Against Time (2004), her collection of Kelly’s earlier diary entries. Some of these errors, such as the assertion that Kelly beat the famous British Olympian Jack Beresford at Henley in 1904, might be explained away by the author having mistaken the five time Olympic medallist for his father Julius – who did race Kelly, when Jack was just five years old.
Others are not so easily excused. Kelly’s friend, the war poet Rupert Brooke is listed as having died on 28 February 1915. In fact Brooke and those to of the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division, in which both he and Kelly were officers, had not even set sail from England on that day. McCrery asserts that as Brooke lay dying in the next room on board ship in late April 1915 Kelly began to compose his famous Elegy in Memoriam to his friend. Kelly’s own diary entries confirm this as a McCrery fantasy; the inspiration for the Elegy being the later burial of Brooke on Skyros – one can hear the wind in the olive tree which bowed over Brooke’s grave and which made such an impact on Kelly that he included the motif in his final score. Further, McCrery states that after being wounded once on Gallipoli – and McCrery gets the dates of the battles of 2nd and 3rd Krithia wrong – Kelly was ‘wounded again’ on 29 June 1915, when in fact the Australian– born pianist and composer was recovering in Alexandria’s Hotel Majestic and adding to his Elegy in Memoriam to Brooke. Furthermore, Kelly was killed during the assault on Beacourt–sur–Ancre (as it appeared on British trench maps), not ‘Beaumont–sur–l’Ancre’, as the author informs us – a compound village that doesn’t actually exist formed from the conflation of the real neighbouring villages of Beaumont Hamel and Beacourt–sur–l’Ancre.
The mistakes don’t end there.
At the present count there seem to be at least ten significant errors in McCrery’s account of Kelly’s life, his war service and death. The errors in Kelly’s war service could perhaps have been avoided had the author cared to glance at Kelly’s War: his edited diaries, first published in 2015 – nearly two years before Hear the Boat Sing.
Elsewhere there are other seemingly minor, but still irritating, mistakes or typos – Alexandria becomes ‘Alexander’ for example – which reveals an alarming absence of high quality copy editing, fact checking and final proofreading.
And all this appears in the section on just one oarsman out of the 42.
Although seemingly inconsequential these things matter and hardly fill the reader with confidence.
There are other ‘quirks’, which the reader may find irritating, or formulaic. Rather than include accounts of the relevant Boat Races in a separate section – thus avoiding repetition – the author has included them in the chapters on each individual oarsman. Thus there are seven similar accounts of the 1910 Boat Race throughout the book.
However, if one can get past the errors and quirks contained in Hear the Boat Sing, there is still much that will both inform and delight dedicated readers but those same readers should also be aware that in some cases they may have to re–learn some of the ‘alternative facts’ purveyed here by referring to other, more deeply researched and thoroughly fact–checked works.
The book, published by the History Press, also features stories of the 1913 race, when Cambridge sank, and the one in 1914, before the event was suspended for the duration of the war.
Nigel McCrery is the creator and writer of TV series Silent Witness, New Tricks, Born and Bread, All the King’s Men, Touching Evil, Impact and Back-Up. He has written numerous books including The Final Wicket.Test and First-Class Cricketers killed in the Great War, and The Extinguished Flame: Olympians Killed in the Great War.