1, when the crew that was behind at
Barnes Bridge passed the other crew at the bend of the river and won.
Of other historic races, perhaps the wins of the two crews in which a
Goldie turned the fortunes of his University will always possess
peculiar glories. The first Goldie, in 1870, ended a series of nine
Oxford wins. Another Goldie, in 1899, helped Cambridge to end another
series, also of nine. The name and the two nines in the date surely made
the feat inevitable.

The river water does not change, but the banks have altered from grass
and reeds to concrete and stone. It was a mile or so from Barnes Bridge,
in a field near Barn Elms (but who could guess where?) that the second
Duke of Buckingham fought and shot Lord Shrewsbury. The Duke left behind
him one of the wickedest lives of the most dissolute Courts of English
history; but he left nothing viler than the name of Lord Shrewsbury's
Countess, who rode in boy's clothes as a page to the duelling ground,
and then held her seducer's horse while he shot her husband. They left
him dying and rode back together. That was in 1667; an earlier and a
kindlier association of Barn Elms is a resident who afterwards died at
Chertsey, Abraham Cowley; later came Jacob Tonson, bibliophile and
publisher of Pope and Dryden. And it was at Barn Elms, too, that the
Kit-Kat Club, the thirty who dined at Christopher Kat's in the Strand,
and bound themselves to uphold the Protestant succession, met and dined
and looked at their portraits painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller. The
Kit-Kat portraits are now at Bayfordbury, near Hertford, and for the
last fifteen years Barn Elms has housed, not publishers or painters, but
polo players. The Ranelagh Club was born to help Hurlingham over the
water provide grounds for the youngest of the great games naturalised in
England. Nine years later Barnes welcomed another club, Roehampton,
which added three more grounds to the four of Hurlingham and Ranelagh.

The Boat-race finishes at Mortlake; it starts at Putney, and Putney is
the headquarters and the rendezvous of many clubs and rowing men. The
Surrey bank from Putney Bridge up stream is a string of club houses,
boat houses, and little wooden buildings that do duty for both, and
here, on sloping banks sometimes washed by brimming tides, sometimes
broad and flat by a shrunken stream on which no racing boat will set its
dainty keel, London gathers on March afternoons to wait for the return
of the practising