Canada

Canada enters the book as both a hard-won refuge and a workshop: after emigrating from England, George Pocock and Dick Pocock arrived in Vancouver nearly broke, endured dangerous work and improvised living conditions, and began building racing shells. Later, the forests of Canada supplied the western red cedar that George Pocock shaped into lighter, faster boats, linking the brothers’ uncertain start in the country to a major development in American rowing.

Emigration and Arrival

In late 1910, the Pocock brothers left England after their father lost his job at Eton College. George was preparing for another attempt at the Doggett’s Coat and Badge, but the family’s sudden loss of income changed their immediate prospects. Unwilling to burden their father, George and Dick decided to seek work in western Canada, where they had heard that logging could pay as much as ten pounds a week. They packed clothes and a few boatbuilding tools, used their race winnings to buy steerage passage aboard the steamship Tunisian, and sailed from Liverpool to Halifax.

After crossing Canada by rail, they reached Vancouver on March 11, 1911, with forty Canadian dollars between them. It was George’s twentieth birthday. In cold rain, the brothers walked from the station into the city, which felt to them like a primitive frontier far removed from the familiar surroundings of Eton. They rented a dingy downtown room for eighteen dollars a week, leaving them only two weeks’ rent money, and immediately searched for work.

Work and Precarious Living in Vancouver

The brothers initially took different jobs. Dick worked as a carpenter at a mental hospital in nearby Coquitlam. George went to a logging camp on the Adams River, where he struggled to keep a steam donkey supplied with firewood and water. After a month of sawing timber and hauling water up from the river, he quit and returned to Vancouver. A less punishing job in the shipyards still exposed him to dangerous conditions and cost him two fingers.

The turning point came in 1912, when the Vancouver Rowing Club commissioned the brothers to build two single sculls for one hundred dollars each. They established their shop in a derelict shed floating on timbers fifty yards offshore in Coal Harbour. They worked below and slept in an unheated room above, with daylight showing through the roof and wind and rain passing through gaps in the walls. Bathing meant diving from their bedroom window into the harbor; for drinking water they rowed to a public fountain in Stanley Park.

The shed itself made work dependent on the tide. At low water it listed on the mud, while the incoming tide held its waterlogged timbers fast. The brothers had to retreat upstairs as water rose in the shop; when the structure finally broke free of the mud, water rushed out through its doors and they could return to work. They completed the commission despite these conditions, and new orders followed as word of their craftsmanship spread across Canada. By the middle of 1912, George and Dick, then twenty and twenty-one, were beginning to establish themselves.

Canadian Cedar and the Racing Shell

Canada later mattered to George Pocock not only as the place where he resumed his trade, but also as a source of the material that transformed it. In 1927, after years of making shells in the traditional manner he had learned from his father, he began experimenting with western red cedar, encouraged by suggestions from Washington crew coach Ed Leader. Spanish cedar had to be imported from South America and was brittle; the durability and lightness of cedar canoes on the waters of the Pacific Northwest had already caught George Pocock’s attention. Earlier resistance from head coach Rusty Callow, a former logger who considered cedar suitable mainly for shakes and shingles, had delayed the experiment.

George Pocock searched sawmills and forests for exceptional stock, finding long, straight, tight-grained cedar in the woods around Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island. From massive old trees he obtained planks more than twenty inches wide and sixty feet long, which could be divided into thin, matching sheets. Their low density made them easy to shape and buoyant; their even grain combined strength with flexibility, while natural preservatives helped resist rot. Placing matched sheets on either side of a shell’s keel also gave the finished boat visual and structural symmetry.

The cedar changed how the shells could be built. Instead of laboriously nailing planks to the frame, George Pocock could strap the thin sheets over it, use steam beneath heavy blankets to soften them into shape, then let them cool before drying and gluing them in place. The method drew on a technique Coast Salish peoples had used for centuries to bend cedar into boxes. Harvard University ordered one of the early cedar shells as an experiment and reported that it had cut several full seconds from the crew’s best times.

A Canadian Foundation for a Wider Legacy

The book presents Canada’s significance through connected forms of labor and material: Vancouver gave the Pococks a place to restart, the Coal Harbour shed became their first Canadian workshop, and cedar from the region made possible a distinctive advance in shell construction. In George Pocock’s later explanation of the boats’ behavior, wet cedar expanded slightly along its grain while the ash frame remained rigid. The resulting compression raised the ends of the hull into a slight camber and held the shell under tension, giving it a springing responsiveness at the catch of the oars.

That account makes the finished racing shell more than an export from a Canadian workshop. Its performance depended on the qualities of the wood, the process used to shape it, and the craft knowledge George Pocock brought from England and developed in the Pacific Northwest. Canada thus stands at the beginning of the brothers’ working lives in the West and within the material history of boats that competed far beyond Vancouver.