Andrew Breen: Wallingford Regatta Duck

This is the programme cover for Wallingford Regatta 50 years ago in 1961 was sent to me the other day by one of the chief umpires at the Wallingford Rowing Club events and I thought I would share it with you.

There seems to be quite a few "assistants" and the committee room seems to be the place to be!!

We have had our first two regatta meetings for this years event at Dorney in May and one of the discussion points is the duck. What do I mean by duck? In 1999 (a few years before Wallingford Regatta moved to Dorney) one of our club rowers took over the production of the programme. It had up until that point been a A3 cardboard fold out type of programme and we decided that we wanted to improve it. It is especially relevant as we were moving to a 2 day event and the amount of information was increasing. He owned a publishing company (that I incidentally joined in 2000 as Software Development Manager!) and the art and design manager (who was also a rower and cox) put a duck on the front of the programme. It was quite distinctive.

Ever since then myself (who was entries secretary at the time - and thus responsible for the timetable and draw information), the event secretary and the staffing manager (aka the Haycocks) thought about a themed duck. Here are some of them (there is also a "winter" duck that we used for one of the heads). We generally try to theme it about something happening (e.g. Olympic announcement, Queen's diamond jubilee or the election), but also things around our own lives (e.g. it was snowing in February 2008 when we were thinking about that years duck, or how people grow up and families come along!).This years duck has been decided and is being designed this week. It will be revealed just before the regatta (but shouldn't be that hard to guess).: