My friend and colleague Jim Railton, who has died aged 81, was a talented rowing coach and a sharply perceptive rowing correspondent who had a searing sense of humour that he applied to both activities.
Born in Liverpool to Robert, a Royal Navy officer, and his wife Florence (nee Holland), who ran an ironmongery business, James was a fleet-footed sprinter while attending Liverpool Collegiate school, setting the British junior 100 yards record in 1954 with a time of 9.9 seconds. After graduating with a degree in modern jazz from Loughborough College, he became a PE teacher in London before joining the Amateur Rowing Association as a trainer during the 1960s.
The association refused to designate him as a coach because he had no rowing experience, so he answered an advert for an unpaid coach at Thames Tradesmen’s Rowing Club in Chiswick, west London, to learn the rudiments. There he assembled a four (Bill Mason, Lennie Robertson, Jim Clark and Fred Smallbone) that not only rowed with fluidity but became one of Britain’s leading crews in the 1970s. They were the rebels of the day, challenging conventions and rubbing team managers up the wrong way with their long hair and cocky, no-nonsense approach. In 1973 they were absorbed into the GB squad and went on to win silver medals at the 1974 World Rowing Championships and 1976 Olympics, putting Britain back on to the Olympic podium after many barren years.
By then Jim had been appointed rowing correspondent of the Times, bringing insight, constructive criticism and some coruscating prose to the sports pages. I was his opposite number at the Guardian and we became friends and occasional collaborators. He had more than 1,500 reports published in the Times between 1970 and 1990. For a few years he was also a television commentator on the annual Boat Race between Cambridge and Oxford university teams on the Thames. That job finished in 1978 after he described the Cambridge sinking as “leading to a dolphin effect, which could yet cause a possible drowning situation”.
Jim and I travelled the international regatta circuit and there was seldom a dull moment in his company. One fabulous incident in Switzerland occurred at a reception at the Ritz-Carlton in Lucerne, where Jim began playing jazz classics on the lobby grand piano, eventually – and to the chagrin of the hotel manager – attracting a larger audience than the inferior resident pianist in the main bar. By 1990 Jim had regressed from being a benevolent inebriate to a belligerent imbiber who couldn’t hold his drink, and the Times dropped him. He continued in his day job as director of PE at Oxford University’s Iffley Road sports centre before upping sticks to Thailand, where he found a new life teaching English in Bangkok. He married Atinee Frikoe in 1994.
After he contracted Alzheimer’s, Jim and Atinee and their son, James, who both survive him, moved from Thailand to Wallingford, in Oxfordshire, in 2016.
