Row360's Head of the Charles coverage brought to you by SparksSixty-one years ago, on 16 October 1965, 237 rowers set off one after another up the Charles River in a race format nobody in the United States had tried before.
"The first year, nobody came to watch the regatta. Absolutely nobody," D'Arcy MacMahon, one of three Cambridge Boat Club members who ran that first Head of the Charles, told Dartmouth Week in 2020. Afterwards he wrote in a rowing magazine, tongue firmly in cheek, that "countless thousands lined the shores".
"We didn't count them, because there was nobody. Most rowers are used to rowing in front of no crowds at all."
The idea for the race came from a Henley-on-Thames professional sculler in his early fifties named George Ernest Arlett. Ernie to everyone, he was then coaching a Northeastern University crew that hadn't existed two years earlier. Northeastern's rowing association still calls him ‘The Father of the Head of the Charles’. The regatta now runs over three days, with more than 12,000 athletes in 74 events and around 2,400 volunteers.
Born in an oar box
The legend, as Yankee magazine told it, is that Arlett was born in an oar box on the working side of Henley. He was born in 1912 into a boatman family that ran a livery. The Arletts had long coached and rowed in the town. His father, Jack, was a professional oarsman who raced the leading pros of the 1910s. His elder brother Harry coached the Canadian Jack Guest to the 1930 Diamond Sculls and prepared a Czech crew for the 1936 Olympics, rowing historian Göran R Buckhorn has recorded.
Ernie was a fine sculler himself, but in interwar England that counted against him. At 17 he was taken on as boathouse supervisor at one of the private Thames clubs, whose membership was restricted to gentlemen amateurs. He could repair their shells but never row with them.
He coached instead. He had been at it since 1932, with Oxford college crews and Henley club crews. In 1948 he coached Finland's Olympic crew, and he prepared Philadelphia's Jack Kelly Jr. for the Diamonds.
In between came the war. During the Dunkirk evacuation, Northeastern's rowing association recounts, Arlett commandeered a boat and used it to ferry fellow "Tommies" to the destroyers waiting there.
"If my daughter can do it, I can"
About a dozen years after the war he left for America. He gave the reason to Sports Illustrated in 1967:
"I ought to first tell you how I came to America, shouldn't I? It was a boyhood ambition of mine, but I never had the get-up-and-go, as you say, to do it. I did talk to Jack Kelly—you know, the brother of Grace—and I was always impressed by the attitude, the desire to win, of American oarsmen I had met at Henley. At last my daughter decided to come as a secretary and I thought, by gosh, if my daughter can do it, I can."
He started at Lower Merion High School outside Philadelphia. From 1959 he coached the Rutgers freshmen, and in spring 1962 his son Bob stroked the freshman eight. That July, The Harvard Crimson announced that the 49-year-old had been named Harvard's coach of sculling, succeeding K. Blake Dennison after 39 years. Harry Parker was already coaching Harvard's freshmen. Arlett called sculling "me top love".
A crew from nothing
Northeastern was then Boston's working "factory school", and it had no rowing at all. A petition circulated by senior Harry Paulsen gathered 1,666 student signatures. With backing from university president Asa Knowles and athletic director Herb Gallagher, the programme and its coach were announced on 23 May 1964. There was no boathouse, so he took his crews first to Union Boat Club and then to Riverside, which stayed Northeastern's home for the next 25 years.
Recruitment meant walking the campus looking for anyone close to six feet who looked athletic. None of them had rowed. On their first outing they wrecked a borrowed shell, an episode remembered as the Wreck of the Hecht. Northeastern's co-op students worked in industry until 5pm or later, so practice never started before 6pm. Arlett used hard interval work, and by the Sprints his crews had logged 500 to 600 miles.
"I just worked them, and if anybody was off color, we sent him off to student health," he told Sports Illustrated. On the founding squad, he said:
"If this hadn't been a good group of boys not afraid of my bark and growl—of which I've got plenty—one or the other of us would have been long gone by now. But they've been all I hoped for. Those who had thought it was going to be a boating party drifted away directly as I put them to work. Despite my grunts and groans the stayers are a pretty happy lot."
The novices beat 33 of their 34 opponents in 1965. The only defeat was by a deck length to Brown, who went on to finish third at the Eastern Sprints. At the Dad Vail in Philadelphia they swept the freshman, junior varsity and varsity eights. According to the programme's 50th anniversary film, no other college has ever done that. One of the freshmen, whose eight raced first, remembered spotting his coach up on the bridge beyond the finish:
"There's Ernie up there in his little tweed coat and the guy was throwing kisses to us. He was just so happy that we set the tone for the day by winning that first race."
Another of that first intake said in the film: "Ernie was a great confidence builder and we went into every race believing that if we rowed well we had a chance to win because that's what he told us, and he was right because we did."
Bill Miller arrived in year two, captained Northeastern in 1969 and rowed the coxless four at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He told the Boston Herald in 2015:
"Basically, and essentially, it was Ernie Arlett who really understood the game. He understood rowers. He knew how to coach. He knew how to lead people. He knew how to get the best out of people. He took a lot of novice rowers in that first year and they won all their races, including the Dad Vail. They had a spirit that we called 'The spirit of '65.' That spread to the crews in 1972 and 1973 and onward, and that spirit has never been dissipated."
The results brought an invitation to the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) and a journey to Henley Royal Regatta on Arlett's home river. Yankee recounts how his former employers welcomed the Northeastern students to their gentlemen's club, but required the coach to use the rear entrance, as he had before.
A head race for Boston
Early in Arlett's time at Northeastern, three members of Cambridge Boat Club approached him: MacMahon, Howard McIntyre and Jack Vincent. They wanted to start a new regatta. Arlett suggested a head race of the kind common on England's narrow, winding rivers, with crews starting at intervals and racing the clock as well as each other. He wanted it in the autumn, to give his students more racing.
The club men were sceptical, Yankee reports. Nobody had run a head race in the United States, and nobody raced that close to the season when the water turned cold. They came round, and the regatta they built was open to all comers, with no invitations, qualifiers or social restrictions. Arlett had imagined "a humble regatta".
MacMahon told Dartmouth Week what it became: "We built the regatta into the largest rowing event in the world run entirely with volunteers. So our little regatta, which lost [money] in the first year, now has millions of dollars."
"I liked the regatta when it was mostly for fun, and not taken quite so seriously," he said. "We took the regatta seriously, but we didn't take ourselves seriously."
Starting a new tradition
By 1967 Harvard had been unbeaten in college racing since May 1963, and Parker was being hailed as the best thing to happen to the Crimson in generations. Northeastern had rowed for three years. Early that season the Huskies lost to Harvard by a single second, and they went into the Sprints seeded second.
"We understand that the traditional crews win this race," Arlett said at a crew luncheon. "But we plan to start a new tradition."
He gave Sports Illustrated his reading of the early-season race: "We had open water with 20 strokes to go against Harvard. Then there was that unfortunate crab. They still beat us by only one second. Now, Harvard have improved, but they'll have to have improved by three lengths, won't they, because we've improved by two?"
A fluorescent green sign in the locker room said "Kill Harvard". Harvard won the final by two lengths. Northeastern were a distant fifth with 200 feet to go and sprinted through to third, almost catching Penn.
The new tradition came five years later. Northeastern went into the 1972 Sprints unbeaten and won by 4.5 seconds. In 1973 nobody got within five seconds of them all regular season, and they took the Sprints again.
Back to Henley
Both seasons ended in the final of the Grand Challenge Cup, and both times Northeastern lost to a Soviet crew. In 1973 the varsity eight was Geoffery Marshall at bow, captain William Backman, John Irving, Chris Meehan, Peter Karassik, John Maslowski, Brian O'Connor and stroke Calvin Coffey, coxed by Frank Leahy. They won at Nottingham on the way to Henley, then met Wisconsin in the Grand semi-final. The winner would be the top crew in the United States.
Arlett followed the race by bicycle, steering round spectators on the towpath while shouting through a hand-held megaphone. Leahy recalled a winning margin of three or four seconds. As they crossed the line, the crew could be heard shouting "We're No. 1!"
Meehan, now president of the Northeastern University Rowing Association, described his coach's method to Northeastern Global News:
"He was quite interesting because he wasn't a coach that was on you. In coaching sessions he would point out only a few things from time to time to correct. He would expect a lot of self-discipline to make things happen. If something wasn't going right he would say so. He commanded a lot of respect from us as a result of his style and that he was able to do it the way he did.
"He would have a smile or chuckle with his British accent, which gave him this air of having the knowledge of the sport in such a way that you just knew he knew what he was doing."
The Soviets took the final. "Maybe we were spent a bit from the day before," Meehan said. "We never quit on the race. But we were just trying to hang in there with them. We were there but we just couldn't pull it out."
That same regatta, Northeastern won a trophy anyway. In autumn 1972 Arlett had suggested forming an alumni crew for Henley, Miller recalled. Eight graduates started training, and the crew eventually became a coxed four. It won the 1973 Prince Philip Cup and set records at both intermediate timing points and at the finish.
After the Grand final, Maslowski snatched the helmet off a Henley traffic constable and was tackled by a passer-by. Arlett had to go to the police station. "I suddenly realised this was serious," Maslowski told the Henley Standard in 2016. "Here I was being arrested in a foreign country and in my coach's home town, which he took a lot of pride in." The sergeant recognised him and laughed, and sent him off with an old, unwanted helmet in a brown paper bag.
Montreal and after
In 1976 Arlett was inducted into Northeastern's Hall of Fame and appointed US Olympic sculling coach for Montreal, where three of his athletes competed. Jim Dietz, his former pupil, raced the single at his second Games. Coffey, stroke of the 1973 eight, won silver in the coxless pair.
Arlett turned 65 in 1977 and retired. His Northeastern crews had won a Dad Vail title and two Eastern Sprints, with a regular-season record of 70 wins and 27 losses. Several of his athletes went on to Olympic and world championship medals. His successor, Buzz Congram, said in the anniversary film that he felt he was "inheriting an established program". Arlett took up coaching again at Connecticut College in 1982. He died in Atlanta on 11 February 1997.
The winner of the annual Northeastern-Boston University race receives the Arlett Cup. This year, alumni who rowed in the 1970s have been restoring the wooden Donoratico Corsair, which Arlett arranged to buy from BU in 1969.
In July 2023 his 1973 eight went back to Henley for a 50th-anniversary row-past. Over dinner, two of Arlett's grand-nephews told them something he had never mentioned: he had been a prisoner of war.
"It was nothing we had ever heard," Meehan said. "When he was released at the end of the war in the southeast of England, it took him three days to walk home to Henley. It showed some of the toughness and the grit of who Ernie was, and yet he was still the gentleman."
