Bull in a Bumping Race

On the River Cam at Cambridge the Americans did badly, but they made history. They made it by picking a girl to cox them for the Lenten bumping races.*

The girl was an Oklahoma farmer's daughter, WAC T/4 Connie Grayson, 23, who was picked mostly because she was the lightest (106 lbs.) of all the G.I.s at Cambridge. The Americans called themselves "Bull College," after their billets in the famed Bull Hotel. They practiced three times a week for four weeks, trying to learn the mysteries of bumping races. The boats line up one after another, two lengths apart, and each tries to catch the shell ahead. Once the prow of the overtaking boat actually touches the other's stern, the overtaken boat loses one place. (The best place to bump is in a narrow part of the river called the Gut, which gives rise to such odd reports in English sporting pages as "Jesus Bumps St. John's in the Gut.")

As always, the crews lined up for the first day's race in the order they finished the previous year (Jesus has been "Head of the River" for nine of the past twelve years). So Bull College was put near the tail end, in 59th place out of 60 crews (Trinity Seventh was 60th). When Corpus' Third, King's Third, and Saint Catharine's Fourth, the other tail-enders, got snarled in each other's oars, the coaches began firing pistol shots and Connie began to scream. Her G.I.s, who took her shrieks for exhortations, plowed ahead--and neatly split Saint Catharine's shell in two. Tactful judges looked the other way, marked Bull as "rowed over" (neither bumped nor bumping). At the end of four days' racing, Bull was still 59th.

* The winter races at Oxford, officially called "Torpids," are invariably referred to as "Toggers."

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