... someone swam the Hellespont in an hour and ten minutes. The swim is not over a mile but the tidal current is very strong. He was reprising the swim by the mythical Leander, who swam it nightly to be with his lover, the priestess Hero. One night Leander drowned, and Hero dived in, committing suicide. The more modern swimmer later wrote a poem about it. Who was the poet?

Byron. Incidentally, does anyone here know why the Thames rowing club Leander is so called? The man drowned (and wasn't in a boat either) It's like calling a flying club Icarus

I have been trying to find this out Fred but to no avail. Put us out of our misery will you.

quote:

Originally posted by Jenny Roberts:
I have been trying to find this out Fred but to no avail. Put us out of our misery will you.

Why do you think I asked? Perhaps we should ask them. Unfortunately, there may be little hope of getting a sensible answer from a place where the club arms are headed by a pink hippo and whose members delight in wearing pink blazers at Henley

quote:

does anyone here know why the Thames rowing club Leander is so called?

One more example of that famous British ironic humo(u)r?

quote:

Originally posted by juanruiz:

quote:

does anyone here know why the Thames rowing club Leander is so called?

One more example of that famous British ironic humo(u)r?

Well, I've now emailed the Club. Does the Club historian know? In the email I did say that I'd assumed that this name was an example of our sense of humour, something that is plain to us but lost on mystified foreigners

I have several British colleagues with whom I communicate who manage to keep me in stitches. But one of the greatest lines of all--not directed at me--was "That, sir, depends on whether I embrace your politics, or your mistress." I imagine most know the declaration which generated it.

Wasn't it Disraeli responding to an insult on the floor of the house of parliament, when his nemesis Gladstone had said he'd either die of the pox or on the gallows?

That's sometimes the irony of a personal insult. Sometimes the insulted one comes out better than the insultor.

By the way, Fred, I already got this e-mail from the club:

quote:

It really was the name of a 'cutter' in the boatyard where they first formed the Club.
Good luck
best wishes
JA
Leander Club
Judi-Ann Roscoe

I assume they mean something like this 28-footer? But it's a sailor, not a rower!

Fred, I thought that you knew the answer and was asking us as a trivia question.

A cutter is a ship's boat rowed by sailors. It has an auxiliary sail on a mast which can be folded flat. It was used to ferry passengers and cargo to and from the ship. Even today, cadets at Dartmouth Naval College are expected to row one in the course of their early training. The term is still used for its modern motorized equivalent.(I can see that, inexpertly handled by its crew, a cutter could overturn or throw them into the water , hence the jokey name, perhaps.)

quote:

Originally posted by juanruiz:
But one of the greatest lines of all--not directed at me--was "That, sir, depends on whether I embrace your politics, or your mistress." I imagine most know the declaration which generated it.

This is usually attributed to John Wilkes. Lord Sandwich said to him that Wilkes would be certain to die "either of the pox or on the gallows" to which Wilkes replied that that "depends on whether I embrace your Lordship's mistress or your Lordship's principles"

Leander? Here's the answer, edited, from Dr Robert Trehame Jones, Press and Publicity Officer, Leander Club:

"The original Leander swam the Hellespont every night to visit his lover Hero. She guided him by lighting a lamp at the top of the tower where she lived, but one stormy night the wind blew out the lamp and Leander lost his way and was drowned.

It's because Leander was a swimmer that so many swimming clubs in Britain are known as [name of town] Leander Swimming Club.This is not particularly ironic. It was not his failings as a swimmer but the conditions and the lack of guidance that caused his death.

However this is not the origin of our club's name, which originates from 'The Leander', the name of the six-oared cutter which the founding members of the club took out from Searle's Boatyard, London (the site of the present St Thomas' Hospital ) in 1818. It was in 1896 that the club built its own premises many miles upstream at Henley, where we have been ever since."

Fine, and repeating, eventually, what we'd been told already. Still doesn't explain the name of the cutter though, does it? Bet it was so named because it was so unstable when manned by novices that many of them got to swim for their lives

Thanks, Fred, your Club source says the same thing as mine. There was a cutter named 'Leander'.

The term 'cutter' had confused me because I thought a cutter was a decent-sized sailboat, not a Sabot that you can sail or row. Thanks for clearing it up.

JR, I hate it when I do that! I attributed a quotation to someone who might or probably said it, or someone who was quite capable of saying it, instead of checking!

Fred, you're quite right, of course. My Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which was at arms-length when I posted the mis-attribution, says:

E. of S.: " 'Pon my soul, Wilkes, I don't know whether you'll die upon the gallows or of the pox!"

John Wilkes (parliamentary reformer): "That depends, my Lord, whether I first embrace your Lordship's principles, or your Lordship's mistresses."

The source is the historian Charles Petrie, in The Four Georges, pubished in 1935, and we are warned it is probably apocryphal. But it's such a gem, I am so hoping that it's true!

p.s. I worked with a lovely man once, an English geologist, who was always quoting witticisms, and attributing them either to (a) Oscar Wilde or (b) Winston Churchill. Needless to say, he was wrong with most of them. But when I caught him in an error, which I sometimes did, I couldn't bring myself to correct him, because he was so sweet, and took such simple and heartfelt delight in repeating them!