Downstream

years later; ‘we got a grant of
£500 a year from Thames
Water Board, we wanted to
go back to the Thames and
they wanted us to, to show it
was cleaner’.
But while Otters were once
the top men’s club and
national champions, in the
1970s they went into decline,
coinciding with a general
view that river racing was
dangerous. In the 1990s,
when the club celebrated 125