A is for amateurs

Interest in competitive rowing in Glasgow began in the 1820s, and records of regattas date from 1829 onwards. Like many sports at the time, club membership rules enforced strict social divisions. However, the main annual day-long rowing competitions, or 'regattas', were all organised by the same Glasgow Regatta Club, formed around 1832-3 by prominent merchants and local gentry. They managed these events until smaller, rival sets of races were founded by other rowing clubs, starting with the Clydesdale Amateur Regatta in 1865 whose lacklustre crews suffered 'easy exhaustion'! Fortunately, the event rapidly improved.

The various rowing clubs considered themselves to be either 'professionals' (also known as 'trades'), or 'amateur', being for 'gentlemen', the distinction depending on whether members received cash prizes, and how they made their living. The clubs had separate governing bodies and competitions. Inevitably, there was no general agreement on exactly how to define amateur and professional status. – and whether you could transfer from one to another. 

Members of amateur clubs were forbidden to receive any income from their winnings. This attracted wealthier participants who had the luxury of leisure time to indulge in sports and could meet the costs themselves. Amateurs were also encouraged to uphold the ideals of 'sports for sport's sake' - any financial reward was seen as corrupting the purity of the art of rowing. This claim was not entirely unfounded - professional rowers had been known to 'throw' a race, and one American sculler was even poisoned before his race.  

The Scottish Amateur Rowing Association (SARA), founded in 1881, barred anyone who 'had been by trade or employment, for wages, a mechanic, artisan or labourer, or engaged in any menial duty.' This division was allegedly justified because 'professional' rowers employed in physical labour, were believed to have an unfair advantage over white-collar amateurs with sedentary office jobs. In reality, it merely excluded the working classes from joining amateur clubs and reinforced class divisions. 

Professional rowing clubs emerged as access to the sport began to open up to the working classes from the mid-1850s onwards. The 1853 Factory Act gave all working men a half-day off per week, allowing some time for leisure activities. Because he competed under the existing professional rules, world champion Canadian sculler Ned Hanlan won £1,000 at the World and English Sculling Championship in 1882. At a time when the average wage for an unskilled labourer was around £45 per year, this was a small fortune. 

Prize money was never as significant in Scotland - the top prize at the 1883 Glasgow Letterpress Printers Regatta was £5 - not quite in the same league as the international competitions - but still worth the equivalent of over a month's wages. Professional regattas also attracted huge crowds, with thousands of spectators lining the river banks, eager to take a bet on the winning team.  

But the prize-money usually didn't meet the ongoing expenses of competing. In 1891, a fan pointed out tradesmen spent their winnings on 'Carriage of boat, railway and steamboat fares, training, loss of work'. Even overhauling the boats cost about £15! Aquatics were 'a glorious opportunity to throw away money … [artisans] suffered under a misnomer when called 'professionals', because they made no personal profit. Other mass-participatory sports, like cricket or football, subsidised players from their gate money, but watching rowing was free.

Professional rowing clubs, and temporary crews specially recruited for one-off races, often comprised members of particular trades, some surprisingly specific. In Glasgow, we find teams of iron-moulders, stage-carpenters, blacksmiths and policemen. The printing trades, in particular, had a longstanding link with rowing, lasting from at least the early 1870s, until the 1960s. Crews were fielded by printing houses such as Blackie & Sons, McCorquodale, and Maclehose & Co. Printing. Although the professional/trades clubs are long gone, Glasgow Rowing Club (based in the Gorbals), still retains some inky, printers' DNA. The club's roots are in the Glasgow Printing Trade Amateur Rowing Club, formed in 1914. 

Two separate associations oversaw the sport - SARA (Scottish Amateur Rowing Association) was responsible for the amateur clubs, and STARA (Scottish Trades Amateur Rowing Clubs) was for the professionals. They amalgamated in 1947 to form the Scottish Amateur Rowing Association (now known as Scottish Rowing). The new organisation's constitution did not exclude blue-collar workers, finally eradicating an increasingly unpopular rift in the discipline. 

However, the question of payment for rowers, coaches, umpires and others who volunteered their time in high-level competition rumbled on for another fifty years. Rules defining 'amateur status' broadened gradually, but progress was slow. For example, in 1958, FISA, the world rowing governing body, barred any person engaged as 'trainers, instructors, and coaches teaching sport for gain or profit' from competing or umpiring. It wasn't until 1998 that British Rowing finally dropped the amateur requirement from their rules. Today, most full-time, elite rowers are funded by sponsorship, donations and bodies such as the National Lottery.