George Pocock

George Pocock’s work in rowing extends beyond the shells he built. At the University of Washington, he shaped the boats that carried crews into competition, helped Joe Rantz confront the limits of rowing as an individual effort, and gave language to the elusive “swing” that can make a crew seem greater than the sum of its parts. His career joins exacting craftsmanship to a belief that both a boat and its rowers must answer resistance with resilience.

Identity and Place in Rowing

In an era when collegiate rowing drew crowds and national press, western programs were still fighting for recognition and resources. The annual rivalry between the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley drew tens of thousands, but western crews had long faced the eastern colleges’ greater prestige. The Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s regatta at Poughkeepsie embodied that history: eastern schools dominated for much of the early twentieth century, while western entries gradually made their presence felt. Pocock’s work placed a Seattle boatbuilder at the center of a sport whose most established traditions lay elsewhere.

His influence was material as well as symbolic. By the time of the 1936 regatta, seventeen of the eighteen boats on the river had come out of his shop. The number conveys the breadth of his reach: he made shells not only for Washington, but for crews it had to beat. His work connected competing programs through a shared dependence on the boats he designed and maintained.

The Craft and Character of His Shells

Pocock did not regard a racing shell as merely a container for rowers. He sculpted boats, and western red cedar was central to his practice. The wood was light and buoyant, strong but flexible, and resistant to rot; its grain could be polished to provide the smooth underside a fast shell required. Those qualities mattered in the water, but for Pocock they also gave the material a character. Cedar could bend without losing its integrity, joining delicacy to endurance.

His construction method made that resilience active. The compressed cedar skin and rigid framework placed the finished shell under continual tension, with its ends lifted slightly into what boatbuilders called camber. Pocock likened the stored force to a drawn bow: at the catch of the oars, the shell could spring forward. He understood this liveliness as the result of the wood’s capacity to recover and persist under pressure. A shell without that quality, in his view, was unworthy of the young men who put their hearts into propelling it.

The workshop was a place where that philosophy could be seen taking form. Joe Rantz, who often lingered in the shell house after practice, was drawn toward the stairs to Pocock’s loft but would not go up without an invitation. The boys treated the builder with reverence, though he did not encourage their deference. One September morning, finding Joe doing sit-ups on a bench, Pocock invited him into the shop. Joe bounded upstairs. The invitation turned a distant authority into a mentor and opened the craft itself as a subject of conversation.

Mentorship of Joe Rantz

Pocock’s intervention came after Al Ulbrickson asked him to help understand Joe’s uneven rowing. Tom Bolles had described a rower who could be fluid and powerful one day and poor the next; Ulbrickson had tried scolding, encouragement, demotion, and promotion without solving the problem. Pocock was asked to talk with Joe and, if possible, set him right. Rather than offer another simple judgment of his performance, he drew Joe into a way of thinking about the wood, survival, adversity, and the larger purposes that make endurance meaningful.

The relationship deepened in the shell house loft. On a stormy afternoon in early March, Pocock asked Joe to join him while he varnished a new shell. His advice addressed a problem that technique alone could not fix: “If you don’t like some fellow in the boat, Joe, you have to learn to like him. It has to matter to you whether he wins the race, not just whether you do.” The counsel defines Pocock’s understanding of crew rowing. Success requires more than an individual’s strength or desire to win; each rower must care about the fate of his teammates.

The advice also makes the shell and crew parallel figures in Pocock’s thought. A cedar boat gives under stress but springs back; a crew becomes effective when its members yield some private impulse to a shared effort. His influence on Joe therefore involved more than helping him become a steadier oarsman. It challenged him to treat another rower’s success as part of his own responsibility.

Competition, Cooperation, and the “Swing”

Pocock’s work placed him inside the competitive relationships of rowing without confining him to one crew. He maintained boats for Washington’s opponents, beginning his visits at the California boathouse to work on Ky Ebright’s shells. He adjusted riggers, repaired damage, and renewed varnish, unwilling to see shabby boats bearing his name on the river. The service also sustained customer relations, but its significance is not only commercial: his craft traveled through the same network of rivals that made the sport matter.

The distinction between rivalry and common purpose appears in the book’s account of the Washington crew’s growing fluency. Ulbrickson followed the boys upriver in his launch one summer night and saw them pulling with unusual precision. He called out that they should have rowed that way in the race; the boys exchanged nervous grins, unsure whether he was joking. A chapter epigraph attributed to Pocock describes the crew’s “swing” as a fourth dimension of rowing, perceptible to someone who has rowed in a swinging crew. The term names a coordination that cannot be reduced to any one oarsman’s action: the shell’s run becomes uncannily smooth because the separate efforts arrive together.

As the 1936 Olympic campaign took shape, Ulbrickson recognized that the right oarsmen, boat, strategy, and coxswain had converged into something beyond their individual parts. He knew whom to thank. Walking with Pocock toward the Princeton Inn, he stopped and thanked him for his help. Pocock later recalled that, coming from Ulbrickson, the gesture was the equivalent of fireworks and a brass band. The moment registers both the reserve between the two men and the importance Ulbrickson attached to Pocock’s contribution.

Berlin and the Olympic Shell

Pocock’s care continued on the journey to Germany. On July 13, he supervised the crew as it loaded the sixty-two-foot Husky Clipper onto a truck and took it, under police escort, through New York City to Pier 60 on the Hudson River. Before departure, he had worked at Travers Island, sanding the hull and applying and buffing coat after coat of marine varnish. The finish was not simply decorative: he wanted the shell’s racing bottom to be as fast as he could make it, because fractions of a second might decide the outcome in Berlin. On the eve of the final, he applied sperm whale oil to the underside of the boat.

The Olympic setting sharpened the contrast between rowing’s inherited social codes and the Washington crew’s working backgrounds. At the Henley Royal Regatta, Australian policemen were excluded under a rule barring people who had worked for wages as mechanics, artisans, or laborers. The British Olympic crew, drawn from Oxford and Cambridge and associated with the Leander Club, represented the sport’s most established traditions. Pocock worked on shells across the competitive field, including Ebright’s California boats, while preparing the Husky Clipper for the race that would test his craft against the world’s best crews.

After the Washington boys had won, they rowed slowly past the grandstands to applause. Ulbrickson and Pocock hurried down from their balcony and through the crowd toward them, as cameras continued recording the scene. The victory brought the crew, its coach, and its boatbuilder together in public view; Pocock’s long attention to the shell had reached its most consequential test.

Later Life and Legacy

On the way home, Pocock stopped in England with Frances Pocock and Al Ulbrickson and saw his father for the first time in twenty-three years. At Eton College, he also found Froggy Windsor and Bosh Barrett, men with whom he had worked as a boy in the old boat shop. They showed him the first shell he had built, a Norwegian pine and mahogany single in which he had won fifty pounds at Putney twenty-seven years earlier. Still in good condition and then a favorite of Eton boys, it carried his work from its beginnings into the present. Pocock took it onto the Thames and sculled beneath Windsor Castle while Frances filmed him.

After the war, he continued refining his craft for another twenty-five years. American oarsmen and coaches sought out his shells and his knowledge, but his central pleasure remained the shaping of cedar into delicate racing boats. An order for a western red cedar shell to be delivered to Oxford University for its Boat Race against Cambridge became one of his personal triumphs: the material and craft he had developed in the West had found a place in the heart of British rowing tradition.

Pocock was inducted into the Helms Rowing Hall of Fame in 1969. His son Stan was by then mostly running the shop, and fiberglass and carbon-fiber composites began to displace wood in competitive shells over the following decade. The change altered the material landscape of rowing, but it did not erase the principles embodied in Pocock’s cedar boats: lightness joined to strength, flexibility joined to balance, and movement made possible by a capacity to recover. He died on March 19, 1976, before cedar shells had almost disappeared from American regattas. His legacy endures in the boats he built and in the idea that rowing’s fullest achievement is collective: the individual loses himself in the crew’s cooperative effort.