Downstream

was agreed Oxford needed ‘a
tepid swimming-bath’ and a
rule that no one who ‘did not
possess a swimming
certificate should row in any
University race’.
In 1870 the press reported
on the ‘first’ Oxford
swimming races, which took
place on the ‘Isis between
Harvey’s Barge and Iffley’,
but spectators were ‘scanty’
and the race ‘seemed little
known to the Undergraduate