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Rowing on Portishead Lake
Summary
Jenny remembers her mother who was a champion rower.
Transcript
As a little side-line she (Jenny’s grandmother Ada) used to run the lake, she had the franchise so her older children could push out the boats or clean out the boats or sweep up the litter from people’s picnics in the area and my mother used to teach people to row when she was 11, 12, 13 14, she was a superb rower and she would take people in fact I have a picture in one of my albums with my grandma having the soldiers in her garden who had been wounded and they were arranged either on trestle seats or standing behind and they would go to the lake and my mother would row them on the lake and they had a lot of fun on the lake and rowing she was a champion rower in fact she was so good at rowing that in 1920 when she would have been about sixteen that she entered for Pill Regatta, which was actually rowing a boat on the river Avon, where the pilots would row out to meet the big sea-going vessels to meet them and bring them up the river to Bristol Docks. She won the ladies champion prize in those days it was a half sovereign, it was an immense amount of money.
