Tribute written by Fred Hall.
It is a cold but bright afternoon in early December on the Carrick Roads. A Devoran crew is pulling away from the slip at Mylor Harbour. Behind them, in the enclosed churchyard of St Mylor Church, six oars with the recognisable burgundy stripes of Flushing and Mylor are raised to honour their coach of 20 years. The coffin is draped in the Union Jack flag and is topped with flowers and a megaphone. The 4 women pallbearing for Penny are World Pilot Gig Champions, a World Championship coastal rower, and an Olympian. As her coffin slowly makes its way through the colonnade of the oars and sculls of multiple clubs, her current and former athletes reflect on her impact on them and the sport of rowing.
Photo credit: Flushing & Mylor Pilot Gig Club
Penelope ‘Penny’ Chuter, formerly Director of International Rowing of the Amateur Rowing Association (now known as British Rowing), advocated for rowing in all its forms. To those who have been in the gig community for a few years, Penny Chuter’s name might be familiar. The coach of multiple high-performing Flushing and Mylor then Falmouth women’s crews; she secured a silver medal with Zawn in 2016, a silver with Arwenack in 2018 and finally Gold with Arwenack in 2019. Penny reached the pinnacle of the sport.
Penny with megaphone in hand astride her RIB ‘Motivator’ was a common sight for crews in the Carrick Roads and Falmouth Bay. Waking up riverbank locals, she imparted legendary anecdotes and managed crews selections to the highest fairness standards, even if that meant trailering gigs to Stithians Reservoir to remove a few more negative variables for seat racing. Her influence will probably survive longest and most obviously in the overhand grips of Flushing and Mylor crews. It was an approach which she argued for fiercely. If you were one of the majority ‘underhanders’ in the gig world, she would instruct you to let go of the handle with your inside hand and row with your outside hand. She would ask, ‘how many strokes can you pull with your outside underhanded hand? Is it strong? Is it sustainable? She would then instruct you to spin your hand to the top of the handle and try it again, asking: What is the more effective grip? Which one do you have to dedicate the least effort to keep it stable? Penny would give a thorough explanation and talk about it for as long as you were prepared to listen.
Early Years
Born in Scotland, Penny grew up on the banks of the Thames at Laleham. She found herself in a punt before age 3, was commuting to primary school by rowing her dinghy across the Thames from age 5, and was introduced to club rowing by age 12 at Laleham Skiff and Punting Club. In 1957, at 15 years old, she had started to find form participating in 27 championships in various skiff types. The following year, she won 21 championships and the title ‘Greatest of Women Punters’ in The Punting magazine.
In 1959 after beating the British Women’s number one in a skiff race, Penny’s coach, Nevill Miroy suggested that if she were to swap into the single scull and beat the same woman, she could make the Rome Olympics the following year in 1960. In October 1959, Penny took her first few strokes in a sliding seat boat. The problem with Milroy’s plan was that women would not be included in Olympic rowing until 1976.
At 17, Penny’s first sculling competition took place at the International Regatta in Macon, France in 1960. Here, she beat the global number 1, Renée Camu, just 8 months after her first strokes in a sliding seat boat. Penny attributed her quick success in the single to her growing up in and around boats every day, rowing different types of craft in diverse conditions. At 17, her parents bought her first boat, a brand new Frank Sims scull costing £95 with additional blades of £15.
Once Penny was training with the United Universities Women’s Boat Club (UUWBC) in 1960, her training was much like you find in gig clubs across the CPGA today. Training involving gym sessions, weight training, starts and circuits were the norm, and a few of the eights they raced were still clinkers (like gigs) with pins, not gates, to pivot the oar around.
Her club mainly focused on extensive, and maybe excessive, low-intensity steady state training with little to no high-intensity work. Penny would, in hindsight, liken it to training ‘dressage champions rather than racehorses’. A friend suggested switching from low-intensity to high-intensity interval training. However, after exclusively following a high-intensity routine, Penny struggled to eat enough to maintain her weight and experienced mild symptoms of overtraining syndrome. Penny was then a pioneer of the unheard of 4 sessions a week training scheme, which some of our A crews exceed these days.
Source: Penny’s Scrapbook
Doping
In 1962 at the peak of her athletic career, Penny won a Silver Medal at the European Championships in East Berlin. This was the second-ever women’s rowing medal for GB and their first ever in the single scull. She trained in East Germany, a teenage girl walking across Checkpoint Charlie, before the Berlin wall came down, with a pair of sculling blades. She was there to take advantage of the cutting-edge sports science of the day. However, she did not take full advantage of East German sports science approaches. As an ardent anti-doping athlete; she objected to drug use and attributed many losses at international level to athletes who were doping. She never lost the drive to stop doping, demonstrated on the 1st of April 2019 on Twitter (now X), where she was a strong supporter of plans to introduce random drug testing by @GigRower. She was disappointed to learn that this was an April Fools joke and replied ‘Well, it should be introduced, & it is not a subject for humour!!’.
Post Competition
After hanging up her oar from her international career, Penny trained as a PE Teacher. She ended up teaching at a handful of schools where she had started watersports programmes and gained many qualifications in varied activities, such as Dance and Trampolining. It was to Dance that she attributed much of her ability to analyse how individuals moved and interacted together as crews. An example of her analysis of athlete interaction is when she advised the swap in position of the now legendary GB Men’s Pair rowers, moving Matthew Pinsent to the stroke seat, and Steve Redgrave to the bow seat.
GB Coach
During her years of teaching, some of the qualifications she completed were from the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA). Penny applied for an ARA vacancy and took up a position as a paid coach for the national squad. Here, she swiftly ascended the ranks and fostered success in the athletes she trained. Where Penny had been unable to compete in the Olympics due to the omission of women’s rowing, she made sure the women she trained were given that opportunity.
Penny Chuter was the ARA’s first paid women’s national coach for the British team, and became the first to invite women for selection for the World Championships in Lucerne 1974, 2 years before the first Olympiad with women’s rowing. Penny had become the difference in these athletes’ lives.
She would go on to be Chief of International Rowing for Great Britain, and later Chief Rowing Coach; the first woman to fill this role in the UK for any sport. Penny played a part in restructuring how the British team worked, firstly by changing how selection worked and focusing on the coaches’ input rather than the boards, which would sometimes have familial links to rowers competing for seats.
The sport had a very small budget for the international squad, especially when compared with the funding support which British Rowing now receives. Penny put a lot of work into funding for the team, with methodical processes for securing grants for different teams. When National Lottery funding arrived, the systems put in place by Penny allowed British Rowing to be one of the first to take advantage of all the newly available funding.During her time as Chief Rowing Coach, Penny dedicated a lot of her work to writing manuals and training courses for other coaches. Despite her monumental effort, her name was not put on the covers, as use of a man’s name was seen as a more appropriate sales approach. Much of her work is still being plagiarised to this day.
After her time coaching and managing the national team, Penny worked with FISA (now World Rowing). In 1984, Penny was part of the women’s commission, presented a paper to equalise the competition distances of male and female athletes. At the time men’s races were the standard 2000m whilst women’s were 1000m, as it was the belief that the ‘weaker’ sex should row an ‘easier’ and shorter distance. Penny stressed that the shorter distance was more stressful physiologically on the human body requiring more explosive strength. Coincidentally 1000m races gave a greater advantage to the doping athletes. Lengthening the race distance reduced the advantage to athletes taking anabolic steroids and gave her clean 60kg British women a better chance against the ‘100kg steroid-inflated women of the Eastern bloc’.
Her pioneering work continued when she was the first female to sit on FISA’s competition commission, where she stayed in various roles until 2006. In these roles, she led the fairness commission that advised World Rowing on whether conditions at events were unfair for athletes, going so far as to judge whether or not they were rowable.
In Cornwall
Despite some continuing work for FISA, Penny officially retired in 2002 and moved to Cornwall. Intent on using her relocation to focus on her love of sailing, she chose the south coast of Cornwall, a paradise for sailors. Cornwall was also where she used to go on her childhood holidays, near Porthleven.
It was not long before she joined her local club, Flushing and Mylor Pilot Gig Club. Competing, coaching and getting involved with the technicalities of oar grip, Penny thrived in a sport that was new to her. At her first World Pilot Gig Championships, she raced and came 103rd.
In 2014, she had to retire from competitive rowing due to an old weightlifting injury which had returned to haunt her. This did not stop her from coaching and Penny’s crews experienced glory under her training; she also devoted countless hours to helping non-competitive crews.
As a born competitor, Penny admitted to not quite understanding why some rowers rowed just for the sake of it, with no aspiration to compete. She learned to live with this element of the gig rowing world and coached regardless. Penny held erg sessions for the Penryn University students and would share her love of rowing with anyone and everyone.
When some of her Olympian colleagues from the 1970s joined her for a World Pilot Gig Championships on the Isles of Scilly, they commented on how you could not go more than a few steps before someone would appear out of nowhere with ‘Hi Penny!’ and then proceed to chat for 10 minutes or more. She enjoyed everything about rowing including its community and variety.
Photo credit: Flushing & Mylor Pilot Gig Club
In her final years, Penny was a founder of Carrick Rowing Club in Falmouth and coached and coxed their crews at regattas across the south coast, travelling as far as Jersey and Pembrokeshire for the Coastal World Championships.
Penny’s final international cap was coxing the Women’s Quad in 2022, which triggered an article in World Rowing lauding the reappearance of a pioneer in their ranks.
Penny was a larger-than-life character and she will be much missed. Her knowledge of the sport will continue to be passed on by those that knew her. Thank you very much Penny.
Beautifully written, thank you x Penny would definitely have approved