Harry Clasper

Henry (Harry) Clasper (5 July 1812 – 12 July 1870) was a professional rower and boat builder from Tyneside in England. He was an innovative boat designer who pioneered the development of the racing shell and the use of outriggers. He is said to have invented spoon-shaped oars.

He was the first of three well-known Tyneside oarsmen, the other two being Robert Chambers and James Renforth.

Early history Harry Clasper was born in Dunston, now part of the Metropolitan Borough of Gateshead, but then an independent village on the south bank of the River Tyne, a mile upriver from Gateshead. Later his family moved to Jarrow,

After a while, his family moved back to Dunston and Clasper became employed as a coke burner and wherryman for the Garesfield Coke Company at nearby Derwenthaugh. His work as a wherryman would also serve him well in later life. Clasper then worked for a while at Hawks, Crawshay, and Sons Ironworks around the mid-1830s.

In 1836 he married his cousin Susannah Hawks, a member of a wealthy family. Their wedding certificate shows Clasper signing with a cross, as he could not read or write, whilst Susannah signed her name.

Racing Clasper formed a racing crew with his brother William and two other men. Harry rowed as stroke (the oarsman who sits nearest the stern, opposite the cox and who sets the stroke rate) and another brother, Robert, acted as cox. The boat was named "Swalwell". The crew started well, winning several races and became known as the Derwenthaugh crew.

Clasper took over the tenancy of the Skiff Inn, Derwenthaugh, and in addition to being a pub landlord, he began to build boats on the same site. He built two skiffs for himself, the Hawk in 1840 and the Young Hawk in 1841. With the latter he won the Durham Regatta Single Sculls race in 1842.

During his time racing and coaching he continued to be a pub landlord, and ran a succession of pubs, including the Skiff pub in Gateshead and the Clasper Hotel on Scotswood Road, Newcastle. He moved on from there and finally settled at the Tunnel Inn, Ouseburn. He ran this until his death in 1870.

Death

He died on 12 July 1870, probably of a stroke. For his funeral, the coffin was transported from the Tunnel Inn, Ouseburn to St Mary's Church, Whickham. Part of the journey was by paddle tug on the river, travelling over part of the course that had seen so many of his triumphs. Many thousands watched the funeral procession and burial.

Effect on boat design

Outriggers Clasper realised early in his rowing career that, to produce faster racing boats, it was necessary to reduce the area of the hull in contact with the water, so as to produce less drag. At the time, boats were wide in the beam because the oar was attached to the gunwales, and the oarsman needed sufficient leverage. Wide boats had a large surface area in contact with the water. A way of getting round this problem was to attach outriggers to the side of the boat and attach the oars to the outer ends of the outriggers. This meant that the boat could be made as narrow as possible, thus reducing surface area, without affecting the leverage exerted by the oarsmen.

Wooden outriggers had first been tried out on the Tyne in 1828, fitted to a sculling boat. Two years later, iron outriggers were fitted to a boat. It cannot be claimed that Clasper originated the idea of the outrigger, but he saw its potential in allowing the boat designer to produce a slimmer faster boat. In the early years, when the Derwenthaugh crew was racing against crews from the Thames, it was doing so in narrow-beamed boats with outriggers whereas the Thames crews were in wide beamed boats. The sight of Claspers boats winning races helped to establish the use of outriggers as a standard in rowing.

Shell hulls At the time when Clasper was starting to design racing boats, the standard boat hull was constructed of a number of strakes (or planks), with a keel projecting from bottom of the hull. Together with Matthew Taylor, another Tyneside boat-builder, he worked to reduce the surface area and drag. They did this by placing the keel inside the hull of the boat and constructing the hull with a single strake on each side. The surface would then be given several coats of varnish to give as smooth a finish as possible.

It is difficult to say who was the first to initiate the idea of a single-strake hull. Robert Jewitt a boat-builder of Dunston on Tyne claimed that Clasper had copied the idea from him, a claim that Clasper denied. It was, perhaps, unfortunate for Jewit that Claspers fame meant that he received the credit.

Sliding seats John C. Babcock, of the Nassau Rowing Club of New York, is credited with inventing the sliding seat, which allowed oarsmen to add the power of their legs to the stroke. There were several attempts to develop one without success until Babcock showed that it could be used successfully in 1870.

Prior to that, Clasper's crews, and other Tyneside oarsmen had developed a technique of sliding on their fixed seats so as to make some use of their legs in producing a longer more powerful stroke. This became known as the "traditional Tyne stroke".