Vancouver

Vancouver was the place where George Pocock and Dick Pocock, newly arrived from England and short of money, began building racing shells and found the opportunity that connected their craft to the University of Washington rowing program. Their years there joined precarious work and improvised living conditions to the beginnings of a lasting boatbuilding enterprise.

Arrival and Early Work

On March 11, 1911, after crossing Canada by rail, the brothers reached Vancouver with forty Canadian dollars between them. They were hungry, exhausted, and unsure what came next; on George’s twentieth birthday, the city seemed a primitive frontier far removed from the familiar world of Eton College. They rented a downtown room for eighteen dollars a week, leaving them only two weeks’ rent in hand, and immediately looked for work.

Dick found work 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-powered logging donkey supplied with firewood and water. After a month, he returned to Vancouver and took a shipyard job. The work was less relentlessly paced than the logging camp, but it was dangerous and cost him two fingers.

The Coal Harbour Workshop

In 1912, the Vancouver Rowing Club commissioned George and Dick to build two single sculls, paying one hundred dollars for each. The order gave the brothers a way back to the boatbuilding craft they had learned in England. They established their shop in a derelict shed floating on timbers fifty yards offshore in Coal Harbour, working downstairs and sleeping in an unheated room above.

The workshop was makeshift in nearly every respect. Daylight showed through the roof, and wind and rain entered through gaps in the walls. The brothers bathed by diving from their bedroom window into the harbor; for drinking water, they rowed to a public fountain in Stanley Park. At times the shed broke free of its anchor and drifted among ocean liners while they slept. At low tide it tilted on a sloping mud bank; when the tide returned, waterlogged timbers held it down until rising water lifted the building free. The brothers resumed work after each interruption and, as word of their craftsmanship spread across Canada, received further commissions. By mid-1912, they were beginning to feel established.

Conibear’s Visit

One blustery day, George saw Hiram Conibear approaching the floating shop in a boat. Conibear rowed so awkwardly that the brothers at first thought he might be drunk. They snagged his boat with a boathook and helped him aboard, where he introduced himself as the rowing coach at the University of Washington.

Conibear had gone looking for the brothers after learning that English boatbuilders had settled in Vancouver. He wanted long, sleek, fast shells to replace the tubby and unreliable boats used by the University of Washington crew. At the workshop, he described an ambitious plan for a rowing fleet: perhaps fifty shells, and no fewer than twelve eight-oared boats. He proposed that the Pococks move to Seattle and build them in a dry shop on campus.

An Ambitious Order, Reduced

The prospect delighted the brothers. After visiting Seattle, they wired their father in England to hurry across the Atlantic because they believed there was work enough for all three of them. But Conibear’s proposal had outrun his available funds. Only after their father was already on his way did George and Dick learn that Conibear could afford to buy one shell, not twelve.

The reduced order did not erase what Vancouver had made possible. The city had given the Pococks a first commission, a place to resume boatbuilding, and a meeting with the coach seeking the kind of shells they could make. Their floating shop in Coal Harbour thus stood at the beginning of a consequential link between their craftsmanship and the University of Washington’s rowing program.