All over the country last weekend, sailing clubs, rowing club, motor cruising clubs and all kinds of other water users came together in a pre-Olympic celebration called ‘Push the Boat Out’ to indicate their support for our Olympic sailors, rowers and kayakers.
As regular readers of this column will doubtless have gathered by now, I’m a keen student of the history of the Thames in these parts and I love reading accounts of life on the river from days gone by.
I’ve always loved the pleasure boats that carry passengers up and down the Thames and I wrote in a recent column that as a youngster in the 1950s I used to enjoy watching the steamers coming and going from the pier at Richmond as they carried passengers upstream to Hampton Court or downstream to Westminster.
