Row, Row, Row Your Boat

At the boathouse, one of many dotting the river – most are emblazoned with the coats of arms  of various colleges and the Cambridge University – Tom Hoier, a third-year student of chemical  engineering, keeps a sharp eye on his mate Will Yasher slicing through the river in a white canoe.  This is Yasher’s first year as a rower and he is “novicing”. He picked up the sport after coming to  Cambridge as an exchange student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. “It’s such a  Cambridge thing to do,” he says.

It’s just days after the 160th edition of the fiercely competitive annual Boat Race between Oxford and  Cambridge held on the Thames in London. Despite starting well, Cambridge lost woefully (by 11  lengths) after a clash of oars caused one of their rowers to briefly fall from his seat. The star-studded  Oxford team, including three Olympians, never let their arch rivals recover. There’s some consolation,  though: Oxford still trails 78-81 in the overall tally of the races that started in 1829.

A few hundred metres down the river from the Pembroke boat club, Dan Richards has no time for such  heartburn. A trainer with the Scudamore Punting Company, the 24-year-old is busy preparing a training  module for new chauffers before the tourist season starts on Easter. Punts are flat-bottomed boats with  square prows originally used to carry cargo up the shallow river; chauffers propel them by driving long  poles into the riverbed. The colleges along the river still maintain their own punts and have private  mooring areas.

As commercial traffic declined and the river cleaned up after a modern sewage network was built in the  1880s, the trend of punting for pleasure took off around the turn of the 20th century. Punting companies  were set up and chauffers doubled up as tourist guides. Richards, who grew up in Cambridge and  started punting as a teenager, has tried his hands at various other professions, even interning at a stock  broker in London. But having grown up on the river, he soon realized that city life was not for him. “I  wanted to be outdoors,” he says. And so he returned as a trainer to Scudamores, where he had begun  his career as a chauffer.

Punting and rowing are traditions anchored in the “watery” past that has shaped the town’s history,  even giving it its name. Lying at the tip of the Fens, a roughly inverted triangle-shaped, floodprone, marshy tract stretching to the North Sea, Cambridge owes much of its historic grandeur to its  geography. There had been human habitation in and around Cambridge since pre-historic times –  Fitzwilliam College (one of the newer colleges founded in 1869) stands atop the remains of a 3,500- year-old farm – but the Romans first realised its strategic and commercial potential. The Cam, a  tributary of Great Ouse, opens up a direct channel from the North Sea into the heart of England, with  London just 80km away. “A defendable fort beside a crossing point of a river navigable to the North  Sea was particularly attractive to the Romans (and to subsequent invaders of eastern England),” writes  local historian Nicholas Chrimes in Cambridge: Treasure Island in the Fens. It was the Saxons who  gave Cambridge its name, though in those days it was called “Grantabrycge” or the bridge over river  Granta, as the Cam was then known in its upper course.

The prosperity of Cambridge and the tranquility of the fens drew another group of settlers. Since the  Romans, monks of various orders found retreat in the isolation of the fens. After the Norman conquest  of 1066 they started acquiring land and established monasteries. Into this milieu, in 1209, stepped a  group of scholars from Oxford, fleeing persecution at the hands of the townsfolk. And thereby set the  foundation of a new university and changed the course of the town’s history for ever. It would take  several centuries and unprecedented royal patronage before the fledgling university would outshine  older rivals like Stamford and Northampton, and seal its repute alongside Oxford. However, as the university grew in power and prestige – it was awarded the authority to monitor weights and measures  and levy various duties and in 1827 the vice-chancellor was named one of the river commissioners  alongside the mayor – a rift grew between the town and the scholars.

The one Cambridge tradition that bridges that divide is punting. Floating down the river on a balmy  summer evening with a cooling can of beer in hand is something collegiates and non-collegiates  participate in equally enthusiastically. The popularity of punting is thanks to a Boer War veteran, Jack  Scudamore. A boat builder’s apprentice, he returned home from war in the early 1900s, set up his own  business and started hiring out punts for trips. The remnants of an underwater raised walkway, built for  horses towing cargo punts through the middle of the river, makes the Cam particularly punt-friendly.

Another group of soldiers, the American and European servicemen stationed around Cambridge  during the Second World War, would do their bit to popularise punting. Richards recounts a popular  anecdote: during the War, punts had to be paddled due to a shortage of poles. A sign saying, “Sorry,  no poles”, put up by Scudamores had to be taken down when the Polish soldiers flooded its office with  complaints.

It remains a popular pastime as millions of tourists sail in their wake each year. It helps that the best  views of the iconic Cambridge architecture are to be had from the river as it meanders down from the  historic Quayside opposite Magdalene College, under the Bridge of Sighs at St John’s College and past  the King’s College chapel through the picturesque Backs down to the ancient Silver Street. For 40-year-old sessions musician Neil Waters, the summer months are of much less concern. Living  on a floating home on the river, it’s the winter that he is wary of. Despite the wood-burning stove, the  windows had frozen over a few years ago. But the winter just past was mild and on this balmy spring  day, as he practices on his trumpet with his two dogs for company inside his cosy “drawing room”  on a Dutch barge, moored on a particularly picturesque stretch of the river along the Midsummer  Common, he looks at peace with the world. Waters had not considered living on a houseboat till he and  his partner started looking for a house to buy. Stumped by the prohibitive prices in Cambridge, they  had been faced with the prospect of continuing to rent for ever when a friend who lived on a houseboat  suggested they buy one too. The hull of their home, named Djovaki, came from a commercial barge  built in 1902; the cabins were built in 1972 by the previous owner. With a bedroom, a fully fitted  kitchen and a drawing room, it cost £40,000 – or approximately the deposit he would have had to put  down to get a mortgage for a three-bed property on the outskirts of Cambridge Now he lives in the  heart of the town.

Six and half years later, Waters says he doesn’t miss living in a house. Life on the water is more  relaxed, and that suits his artist’s temperament. He could do with a garden though, he says. And then  as his eyes sweep over the treelined expanse of the Midsummer Common dotting with early spring  blooms, he adds as an afterthought, “But then what garden could match this.”

Amrita Roy is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, London