L is for Letterpress

What’s ‘letterpress’? It’s printing using inked, raised metal type, which is ‘pressed’ onto paper, a skilled and physically demanding process. The official rules restricting when working-class ‘professionals’ and wealthier ‘amateurs’ could compete together (see A for Amateurs) led to separate clubs for each group. In 1868, the Glasgow Rowing Club became the city’s first specifically ‘artisan’ rower’s association. In 1871, the Regatta Club, sensing growing workers’ resentment at being excluded, introduced a ‘£25 prize to promote rowing among tradesmen’.  

Special races were insufficient, and the Regatta Club’s monopoly on staging the city’s main annual races was broken in 1872, when the first Letterpress Printers’ Regatta was held. Glasgow held many educational institutions, and thousands of industrial firms and shops, most of which required printed adverts, instruction booklets and packaging, hence the number of printers and publishers. The printers were the first specialist trades association to organise their own regatta, and the longest-lasting. Many workplaces had their own rowing clubs, although from the 1870s onwards, football proved an increasing rival attraction. The earliest racing jollyboats were named after firms, like McCorquodale’s or Blackie’s and newspapers (‘The Sentinel’), and the contests ran over two weekends.

By the late 1870s, now the ‘Daily and Letterpress Printers’, crowds of about 7,000 turned out, and ‘open’ races were contested in ‘Clear Well’, and ‘Royal Blue’. The Letterpress Printers’ Challenge Cup, ‘in specie; only for bona fide employees in other than daily newspapers’, for 1878 ‘was disregarded – the competition was miserable in both heats’! Disappointments aside, by the early 1880s it was ‘now the most important fixture on the Clyde’s upper reaches’, obviously outshining the old Regatta Club fixtures. Over 1,000 watching from the Albert Bridge saw the Evening Times’ 4-man crew beat The Citizen for the Daily Press Challenge Cup and £8 cash prize (1880).

By the 1890s, the Trades Rowing Club held annual scratch races and its own regatta, as did the Calendermen (textile workers), while the Glasgow Telegraphists awarded their own captaincy to a winning stroke and vice-captaincy to his team-mate. The Police ARC Regatta excited humour, miscalculating the tide and showing all the style of ‘the fishermen of the Western Highlands’ (where many of them came from, anyway!). So numerous were the multiple artisan’s events, that they clashed, with many anxious to avoid the Fair Holiday. However, ‘Trades rowers cannot be considered professional until they have paid all their training and competing expenses’, a constant struggle. 

Glasgow Printing Trades Amateur Rowing Club was founded in 1914, and had their own premises on Glasgow Green in the 1920s, which formed the hub of an active sports and de facto social club. It was open to non-printers, and competitors wore the printer’s white shirts with blue chevron (‘V’ shape). The Scottish Trades Amateur Rowing Association (1920), which included Printers’, Co-operative and Paisley rowers, emphasised that workers’ clubs were really self-funding amateurs, in the modern sense, and not full-time sportsmen. Female members didn’t row competitively but, as in the 19th century, ensured the catering was always available. The adverts for the 1954 GPTARC regatta illustrated a coxed quad, or sculling boat, in front of the East Boathouse, with the McAllister’s and Licensed Victuallers’ Trophies on offer. As in the 19th century, there were also ‘in kind’ goods on offer, such as furniture and towels, so winners might end up with multiple sets of crockery!  

Fundraising dances, wedding receptions and transporting boats to regattas on makeshift trailers and lorries – all formed part of the rich oral history of the GPTARC. They competed against other regional and national clubs, from Dumbarton, Greenock, Loch Lomond and further afield, continuing the tradition of inter-trades contests. Printing firms increasingly left the city from the 1960s onwards, loosening rowers’ links to the trade. GPTARC merged with Glasgow Argonauts in 1983, creating the more inclusive Glasgow Rowing Club, who opened their new boathouse in Silverfir Street in 1997, on the south bank of the Clyde facing the Green, where their predecessors began their regattas in 1872.