Chris Kenyon: A lifetime on the River Tees

Chris explains the secret to staying engaged in the sport for over 70 years

We caught up with Chris a couple of weeks ago following a tip-off that, at the age of 84, he was one of the oldest competitors to compete in the British Rowing Masters Championships.

One of the main lines of enquiry was attaining from the Tees Rowing Club member what it is that has kept him engaged in the sport for so long and ultimately the answer to this came at the end of our conversation.

During an anecdote about his first race, a tale we’ll return to in due course, Chris revealed some words of wisdom from his late coach Tom de Winton that have stuck with him ever since.

“Gentlemen, rowing should be fun. Make it fun and you’ll really enjoy it.”

“I often say, the problem was, for all of us, that his great fault as a coach was that he never taught us how to stop so we’ve just kept going ever since.”

Having started rowing in school 70 years ago at Durham School, Chris has seen the rowing in the north east transform immeasurably before his eyes, and often because of his hard work. After leaving school and starting an apprenticeship, Chris joined the club that would serve him for life.

“The club is now unrecognisable.  We had the great fortune in the Teesside area to be part of a plan to improve various towns which were granted development area status and one of the things that they did was to build a tidal barrage on our river which up until then was very tidal and dirty.”

“It wasn’t even a resource; it wouldn’t be going too far to say that in many respects it was almost an open sewer. When this barrage went in, we went from having a five-metre rise and fall in tide to no rise and fall at all, to fresh water. Which is no longer filthy and it’s now such a resource. The transformation is incredible.”

Following this redevelopment the whole town has changed to be built around the river, having the body of water at the beating heart of the community. Recent work has seen shopping centres replaced with parks, ensuring a vibrant and active community all within a stone’s throw of the water.

“When I joined the club, the boathouse was a former wooden army but in the 60s we built a very simple brick building with a tin roof. Then the major change came when we secured land just further along the river, got a grant of nearly a million pounds from sport England and built a super new water sports centre with dragon boaters and various other water sports organisations”

“We’ve gone from a wooden hut to real super-duper, facilities and I was particularly proud to play a leading part in that development in the early years,” continued Chris.

Much like a lot of clubs, Tees has a thriving masters scene and much like a lot of Chris’ stories, there’s an anecdote as to why rowing is so popular within the masters community.

“There is a live and active veterans’ scene. I don’t like the word ‘masters’. Master would suggest to me that you are extremely good at one thing, someone who has successfully refined their craft…Steve Redgrave is a master rower!”

“There’s a friend of mine who used to live in the states, had a wonderful description of a crew going rowing and these eight elderly gentlemen were standing around on the landing stage with these eight, bronzed, six foot two men emerged from the boat house with an eight. They put the boat on the water and then the elderly men, who were hobbling around with sticks got into the boat and took off like swans. They had difficulty walking but put them in a boat and off they went!”

“Like golf, the handicap system enables you to compete against younger people on a fair basis and that’s one of the attractions of it.”

As someone who has previously sat on the Amateur Rowing Association Council for 16 years, Chris has a full set of almanacks that date back to 1954. However, he’s keen to set the record straight about the result of his first race.

“My first race that I won was at the age of 18 and that was back when the statuses were prejudicial to progress” he explained.

“As a novice if you rowed in a crew that raced at a higher status, then you had to take that status permanently, end of. You could go from novice to senior in one race in those days and find yourself marooned!”

“My first race was as a novice and despite, ironically, what the British Rowing Almanack says about that result we actually won it, the result is written the wrong way round so that was that will always stay with me!”

Chris returns to the Masters Champs for the same reason as every year that he’s raced, because he enjoys the competition.

“I suppose if you’ve trained specifically for something it’s good to see if it’s going to work in practice, and if it doesn’t work in practice then it’s about succeeding in what I suppose these days would be referred to as a journey but in my case the journey has covered many decades”

Chris will travel to Nottingham as part of one of Tees Rowing Club’s largest entries for the championships which will take place 14-15 June at the National Water Sports Centre.