Rhubarb December 2025

broke his leg in the first match of the season so I took over having played in the XV the year before. Paul Kitovitz was the 1st XV coach the first year and was a huge influence on us all. Pre-season training running up Shotover Hill until you were sick ensured a pretty decent season.We would have beat Wellington were it not for a clear try by Ed Lonsdale being disallowed because the move confused the referee as much as the opposition! As for rowing my career struggled initially. I was a fraction too old for my year

INTERVIEW

Teddies 1st XV 1993.

group so had to break into the year above. My intake went on to an outstanding, unbeaten season while I had to largely train by myself which was hard. It wasn’t helped by the year above also being exceptionally strong. Graham Wells was the coach and put me in the J15 crew for the last regatta of the season at Reading Town.We just beat the national champions in the final to win the regatta.There is a clear thread between that race, my joining the Army and therefore doing what I do now.

After Teddies, you went on to row for Great Britain – what was that experience like, and how did it build on the foundations you’d laid at School? Hamish Floyd and I made the Great Britain Junior Eight in 1992 (with still another year at school) and went to the World Championships in Montreal. Mixing with the best from all the other schools in the country, not to mention in the world, was extraordinary. At this point Teddies was a major force in Junior rowing and the training at School was fundamental to my development, physically and mentally. I made the senior squad in ’97 with another Teddies boy, Dave Burton, but then the Army beckoned. Dave and I actually joined the Army at the same time and went to Sandhurst in the same Company.

U23 World Championships, Belgium, 1997.

Championship Winners 4+,1992.

Your military career took you to some of the most complex and high-pressure environments in the world. Did anything from your school days prepare you – even in unexpected ways – for those experiences? I deployed on my first military tour almost immediately on joining the Battalion.We were tasked as part of the UK Lead Armoured Brigade to ‘enforce the peace,’ in Kosovo.While there was little ‘kinetic’ fighting clearing up the genocide committed

There is a clear thread between that race, my joining the Army and therefore doing what I do now.

Iraq War 2003.

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