Boat Race still takes British sport's venerable cream cracker

Barmy British eccentricity rules the waves once again this Saturday as 16 straining, muscled hearties heave, two tiny coxswains fret and shout and, tradition assures us, Cockney urchins bedecked in blue scuffle alongside on the towpath scragging each other and hollering "C'mon Horx-ferd!" or "C'mon Cym-breege!" It's that time of year and all over the world the most unlikely and diverse of cast lists with no remote tribal connection will nevertheless make sure they're plugged in to watch or hear the live BBC outside broadcasts. So here's to another gleaming fresh English springtime, to old Father Thames and to the Boat Race – and shame on the first man to write oars-de-combat. When it comes to an almost unbroken sequence of team competition between humans, the Boat Race takes the venerable cream cracker. Oxbridge's rowing Blues first raced each other in 1829, decades before football had ever thought of playing a Cup final, aeons before rugby's first international match, or cricket's inaugural Test, or before a high-chaired bewhiskered chap at Wimbers had initially ordered "Quiet, please. Play." A singular beauty of the Boat Race is that although the course between Putney and Mortlake never actually changes, for sure the conditions do. The state of the Tideway is the crucial and decisive demon. I readily acknowledge that, say, seven times out of 10 the race itself turns into a sad, unchallenged "after you, Claude" procession within seconds of the starter's terse demand: "Are you ready? Go." You've heard of the Severn Bore. Well, all too often here is the inner-city metropolitan version. But don't the bores make the occasional great races even greater? The event is as much part of the hallowed English furniture as ancient Punch cartoons – as in proud auntie to stroke of the winning crew: "Well done, my dear, you all rowed fast but none so fast as you", or football fans watching the race from the top of the riverside stand at Craven Cottage: "Dead borin', innit, the same ruddy teams always make the final". I daresay the best joke remains Mr Punch's most venerable, after the dramatic dead heat of 1877 when his headline read: OXFORD WON, CAMBRIDGE TOO. Partying remains very much part of the fabric, fun and laughter on Boat Race day. See it on Saturday. Not just those scuffling Cockney urchins; or the convivial throngs outside the towpath pubs; or the middle classes in their gracious bow-windowed houses and lovely, sloping, riverbank-leaning lawns. I made it to one of the latter VIP parties just once. In 1969, I was briefly walking out with a pretty girl from a well-connected family who took me to the celebrated Boat Race party hosted annually on exclusive Hammersmith Terrace by the famous wit Sir Alan (AP) Herbert. Simply everyone was there, my dears, from Roy Jenkins to Rab Butler, to Robert Morley to Richard Gordon, to Gordon Richards to the onliest distaff stand-up of the time, wonderful Joyce Grenfell, who told how a distant ancestor, Harrovian WH Grenfell, had been in Oxford's No3 seat in that 1877 dead-heat. I looked up his details: Grenfell had become the prodigious Lord Desborough: English amateur punting champion three times, British epee fencing champ four times and first man to stroke an eight across the Channel; he swam the pool beneath Niagara twice, the second time before witnesses because nobody would believe he had done it the first time; and wreaked terrible carnage all his life on anything with horns or wings which moved between Scotland and the Rockies. Ten years later, in 1979, I heard the former prime minister Harold Macmillan propose the traditional PM speech – not to No10's Premier but "Putney to Mortlake" – at the Savoy's post-Race banquet. It was unforgettable, tearfully telling oratory from the theatrical old Edwardian entertainer, and you found yourself almost sobbing on the brown-ale press table as he talked of "the happy world of my youth, when one could go into sports without having first a test to see if you were a man or a woman. "And, oh, glorious, unmatchable Boat Race day: how we all cared, how everyone cared, the whole of London cared, the costermongers, the drivers of four-wheelers, those delicious hansom cabs, everyone cared. "And all wore the colours, light blue or dark blue. Blissful days of youth. In every household great divisions, the housemaid was one side, the butler for the other. As a child I was always Cambridge, like my father, so was the rest of the family – but not Nanny, oh Nanny was always violently for Oxford." Ah the violence of Nanny. C'mon Horx-ferd! C'mon Cym-breege!