BY JOHN JACKLIN
PAINTER and decorator John Hooper is in big demand from the US Ivy League universities when the crews fly across the pond for the Henley Royal Regatta. Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale – they have all called on John’s skills with a paint brush.
Demand for his time has grown over the past 20 years to the point that last year he lost count of how many oars he completed, but says it was well over 100. That adds up to a lot of man hours when, as he says, “one oar can take 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes longer, with preparation”.
John, 81, says: “If it’s a new oar I just like to give them a light rub neutralise it with white spirit because they’re made with a different type of resin these days and it reacts against paint, so that’s the problem and it has happened for the past two years. Then you’ve got to tape up for the lines of course if it is a design, and it has to be exact measurements. Then it is an undercoat and a gloss finish, sometimes it has to be two gloss finishes. The worst one I ever had was five colours but you could do only one colour at a time and it was for a quad and that took ages. But it looked good in the end I must admit, really good. Obviously I do take pride in my work.
“It takes a steady hand believe you me and sometimes you know I’ve been down there from eight in the morning till nine at night.”
At one stage, John says, the crews “used to bring their oars over with them, but then security measures restricted what they could bring across, so they would buy them in this country every year. Some stick vinyl covers on them but then word got around about me in the states and elsewhere and a lot of them now want their oars painted.”
He says: “Sometimes I get asked to paint oars and say, okay fine, thinking it’s an eight or four could be a pair but it’s usually a four and eight or quad. Last year I thought I was doing an eight but in fact they had 24 oars and I ended up doing that lot for Princeton.”
John, who although an oar painter, says his “actual trade was painter, decorator, paper hanger” but has been involved with the regatta and the boats in one form or another since he was 14 years old. The family boat hire and moorings business is on the river at the bottom of New Street in Henley — opposite the Leander Club, the crew tents and the regatta finishing line — and has been in the family for centuries.
He attended what is now Gillotts school, has been chairman of Henley Town Football Club and used to row for Henley Rowing Club and Upper Thames, but threw in the oars when he was 60
“Rowing is in the blood, I used to go to all the world championships and all over the world watching rowing and that.”
The regatta is his chance to catch up with old friends, although John says. “For a lot of them now it’s getting too expensive and they have got accommodation to pay for as well. Some of the guys I know from the different universities sometimes I won’t see them for three, four maybe five years.
“Some I see every year because even if they haven’t got a crew here, Henley is kind of a pilgrimage for them, so we meet up every year and we spend a week together you know passing time and some of them drop in and give me a hand. It’s like meeting old pals.
“Other times people that I have dealt with donkey’s years ago will say ‘oh nice to see you, you’re still here John’ and — don’t think that I am being rude — I haven’t got a clue who they are because of the number of people I speak to and come through the tents like, I just can’t always remember who everybody is.”
As his talent and reputation have spread, he does not have a clue what his work load will be. “Word passed on to other colleges and universities and schools in America and of course it gets around and when they come over they know I’m here.
“I won’t really know how many oars I will have to do, to tell you the truth, not until they get here. It has to do with the qualifying races, who gets through.
“I might get an email or something you know sometimes a phone call even from the states but mainly it’s that they now know I’m here so they just take it for granted half the time that you know if they want them done I’m on hand.
“With the men’s they don’t usually come every year, every two years but some of the women they they can only come every three years yeah so it all depends really who’s coming over it could be any of the crews.”
‘The family boat hire and moorings business is on the river at the bottom of New Street in Henley — opposite Leander Club — and has been in the family for centuries’
John explains that one of the reasons that the crews prefer oars being painted is that the vinyls/decals [decorative stickers], despite being quick and easy to apply, are “troublesome to work with to be honest”. “Sometimes they go on very easy other times you get these blisters in some designs and then you’ve got a hell of a job to get it out and a lot of the times it reacts with the oar — it might be this resin they use.
“So they go out on the river with these decals on and everything else and when they come in there’s no decals. The water has got underneath them and took them off like. You’re hoping they are going to stay there but a lot of times they do come off.”
John smiles and says: “Then it’s a case of ‘oh John, look, you know it’s not working, can you paint our oars?’.”
More British crews have got cottoned on to his service, he says, partly as a result of his fame spreading via social media. “I had a lot of people come along and say ‘oh yeah, I saw you on YouTube’ or something, ‘can we take a picture?’ ‘can we do this?’ ‘can we do that?’,” says John.
Despite the hard work, the long hours and acting as boatman to some crews and the social media, John cherishes the regatta and what it stands for: “I just love it,” he says.