The Leander Club has been a practical reality once more for nearly twenty years ; it has competed periodically for the Grand Challenge and Stewards’ Cups, and has twice won the Grand, but its composition is now widely different from what it was in the palmy ‘Brilliant’ days of fifty years ago. In those times it represented the rowing talent of the metropolitan element; it filled the same position that the London and Thames Clubs now jointly occupy. In these days it is almost entirely composed of University men, past and present. Having vacated its old functions, it has in turn filled those formerly performed by the ‘Subscription Rooms’ of the Universities, which in the ‘forties’ used to hail from Stangate. There is but little junior rowing done or taught in Leander ; most of its recruits are already more or less proficient before they join it. It is not a nursery of oarsmanship, but a colony, to which rowing men from the Universities resort. It is of value in promoting sport and competition, but it does not, from the very nature of its elements, fill the same sort of position that the London and Thames Clubs hold in the rowing world—as nurseries af junior talent on the tideway. On the upper ‘Thames, Kingston holds a position of much the same nature as London and Thames. Twickenham are an old club, but it is only of late years that they have aspired to Grand Challenge form ; they owe this aspiration to a.reinforcement from Hertford College, Oxon. Besides these leading clubs there are sundry smaller bodies, which content themselves chiefly with junior rowing. Such are the ‘West Jondon’ and ‘Grove Park,’! the ‘East Sheen,’ and others of this class. Fiye-and-thirty years ago it was a rarity to see cyen a scratch amateur cight on the tideway, so much had London rowing gone downhill. In the present day, ona June or July evening, especially on Saturday, half-a-dozen or more may be seen between Wandsworth and Richmond.
Provincial oarsmanship has made considerable advance during the last thirty years. The Chester Club was the first to make
1 Sinee the above was written, West London and Grove Park Clubs have ‘become extinet,
