LRC Colours
LLandaff Rowing Club
LRC Logo

LLandaff Rowing Club History

Rowing History

History has many important examples of our ancestors as rowers - Roman warships, Viking longboats and Venetian galleys - but the first recorded boat with oars is on an Egyptian wall relief dated about 3300BC.

With each new form of transportation there came a desire to race - and rowing boats were no exception. In Britain, racing developed on the Thames from the time when only two bridges existed, so that crossing was largely by rowing boats. The watermen who rowed these boats competed against each other often for large stakes placed by their upper-class clientelle.

The most famous race, which took place for the first time in 1716, is the Doggett coat and Badge race for single scullers.


This race is the oldest in the world and, largely unchanged, still takes place today between apprentice watermen on the Thames.

By 1811, Eton boys were competing in England in eights. Rowing was supposed to debut in the first modern Games in Athens in 1896. Unfortunately, rough weather caused a change of plan and the event was postponed until the 1900 Paris Games, which featured five events for male crews only.

Today, the two best known rowing occasions are the University Boat Race, rowed annually from Putney to Mortlake, and Henley Royal Regatta. The latter, although an event which attracts many crews of international standard, is the pinnacle of the regatta calendar for the club oarsman, to whom the opportunity to compete there is everything.

Rowing became an Olympic sport in 1900, since when British crews have consistently won medals, making rowing one of Britain's most successful sports. The achievements of Steve Redgrave, one of the most distinguished Olympians of all time in any sport, are well known even to the non-rowing public - but many other athletes continue to bring sporting prestige to Britain in Olympic and World Championship competition. This success has lead to an upsurge of interest in our sport. With many fine young rowers, both male and female, achieving at club, school and university level, rowing in Britain has a healthy future.

Club History

After World War Two, returning members of Taff (1879) and Cardiff (1884) Rowing Clubs found their boathouses burnt-out, or collapsed through wood rot, and their boats and memorabilia missing.

Members joined forces to form Llandaff Rowing Club, rebuilding the old Taff Clubhouse and using the Cardiff Boathouse for temporary storage. At first, progress was very difficult because of problems in obtaining building materials in the post-war period and the absence of boats and the silt which had filled the river in places. As luck would have it, the Clubs' own boats, which had been washed up on the estuary mud flats had been rescued by residents of the lower part of Cardiff and protected under tarpaulins. After restoration work, rowing restarted at the end of 1946 and the first regatta was held in 1947.


In the 1950's the club blossomed and became a force on the regatta circuit. The Welsh National Rowing Club was formed in 1958 to represent Wales at the Empire Games, at which many of Llandaff's senior members officiated.

Jeremy and Timothy Luke began to compete at the top level in pair oared events reaching the trials for the 1960 Olympic Games, with the Edwards brothers winning the silver medal for coxless fours at the 1962 Empire Games in Australia.

Further international success in coxless pairs was achieved by Charlie Wiggin winning the Silver Goblets at Henley Royal Regatta and a bronze medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.

More recently, David and Robert Luke have won at Henley and represented Great Britain in World Championship events.

In 1993, a veteran squad was formed with the object of competing internationally. The squad has won regularly at National and World Championship, 1996 being an especially successful year with six gold medals at the World Masters Regatta.


Feedback