Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.
Awayday at Henley by Ian Walker
Young boys in boaters stare lustfully at future wives now covered in pastel silks and cottons. Old boys dressed as schoolboys in caps and blazers stagger along the meadow like sick jokes in search of a punch-line. “So typically English,” recite the Americans and Australians who’ve made it past the blue-uniformed security guards into the steward’s enclosure here at the Henley Regatta last week.
The Grenadier Guards play Day Tripper and the race commentator drones on, "St Joseph’s Preparatory School striking 41.” But only a handful of hard-core rowing fanatics pay any attention. The real sport, this morning in the sun, is to be had promenading the wide green avenues between the river, the grandstand and the three bars.
“What’s it made of?” one schoolboy inquires of another, pushing the foliage in his glass with a Pimms plastic agitator. “Gin?” replies his friend, studying a Greta Garbo lookalike, black veil pendant from box hat, who sweeps past. Another woman loses her hat in the wind so a gallant can retrieve it before it blows into the Thames.
Intruding upon the discreet sexuality of the occasion is a model, here with a photographer to do some glamour shots, wearing a black satin skirt slit to the top of her thigh. “Shouldn’t be allowed,” grunts one of the blazer brigade. The model is being followed around by a gaggle of schoolboys. One of them wins out. She poses in his boater and he gets to put his arm round her.
“We don’t get to see too much of it,” says a Grenadier Guard saxophonist when he’s finished playing Hey Jude. “Just sit here all day.” Underneath the bandstand, Which like all the marquees and stands is candy-striped in blue and white, the Guards will provide the cabaret till eight tonight.
An 18 year old security guard keeping watch over museum pieces in an adjacent marquee earns around £50 a week, depending on how much overtime he does. His firm specialises in keeping yahoos out of the upmarket enclosures at events like the South of England Show and Brands Hatch. “It used to be really nice,” says a middle- aged man inside this makeshift museum, examining an 1877 oil painting of the regatta. “Everyone out on their boats and punts.” His companion sighs wistfully.
One foursome on a punt attempt to recreate this spirit of ’77: champagne in an ice bucket, strawberries and cream, the art deco trumpet on their antique record player blaring out old 78s. There is a part of England will be forever twee. An awayday from modernism to a toytown by a river framed in champagne-blurred soft-focus, all greenness and white, sweet smelling and so polite.
I saw one black woman in the Steward’s Enclosure, accompanied by a white man. It’s a hard place to break into, even if you have got the five quid admission charge. For those without the contacts, the money, or the inclination, there is the Regatta Enclosure (entrance fee, £2) downriver.
Here you can buy hamburgers and hot dogs. Women can wear trousers and men can take their jackets off. Rows of OAPs sit on foldaway chairs, families eat cheese sandwiches from Tupperware containers, young couples sunbathe on the grass. The security man guarding the gate between the Steward’s and Regatta Enclosures wipes some sweat from the back of his neck and asks me what time the last race is on? 7.45pm. Six hours to go. Jesus.
Past another heavily guarded boatclub, the Remenham, I walk down the river to the starting line. Old boys on bicycles bellow, “towpath,” out of loud hailers. A black steel band entertains the white guests aboard the Pink Champagne, moored the other side of the river. Steel band rhythms, the calypso cliche, are in tune with the day, jolly and lightweight. No reggae at the Regatta.
Back in the Steward’s Enclosure at four, the guardstands are packed. The six-deep rows of deckchairs next to the Thames are full of people sleeping off the lunchtime wine, the women’s bare shoulders burning in the sun. Four schoolboys standing in the Fawley Bar are trying to get a good angle on the two drunk women sitting in front of them, trying to look up their pink frocks. “I’ve been seeing her every night this week and she’s not easy,” another teenager confides in his friend, over a Pimms. “I respect her for that,” he says, as an afterthought.
In the Champagne Bar (cheapest bottle £12.50, dearest £16.50) five men slumped round a table, which supports them and the four bottles they’ve got through since lunch slur “cheerzz” ritualistically. One of them has a sneezing bout, spattering lines of snot down his light blue blazer. An American sings God bless America. “I like big whites in black,” says another drunk, pointing at a fat waitress collecting glasses.
“I chat a bit, but you get no response whatsoever,” says Louise, one of the waitresses. “Blank faces I get. We’re just servants.” Louise is 20, she hopes to go to art college in Edinburgh if her A level grades are good enough. Working for Bear Catering all summer, she’s done Oxford college balls and lunch at Blenheim Palace. She gets £1 an hour. “Great, eh?” she grins. “I started at seven, and I’ll finish at eight. At least, we were supposed to finish at eight, but I don't think there’s much chance.”
Louise says she’s never seen anything like this, “Hundreds and hundreds of bottle's of champagne drunk today . . . In Edinburgh we’ve got the festival, but nothing as decadent as this.” Chairs knocked over, glasses smashed, she shakes her head. One couple fall over and decide to stay there, locked in an eye-closed kiss on the grass littered with fag ends and Pimms stirrers,
At five to eight the grandstands are deserted. Green canvas on long rows of deckchairs billows in the wind. One of the last to leave the Champagne Bar picks up an empty bottle and stares down its nozzle. The Grenadiers sign off with The Queen . . . In the town a long queue stretches back from the chip shop.
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