Frank Willan (rower)

He was also a yachtsman and one of the founders of the Royal Yachting Association, an alderman, a Deputy Lieutenant for Hampshire, an early motorist, and a military historian.

During the First World War, when aged nearly seventy, he drove military lorries on the Western Front in France.

[9] In the same year, 1867, he gave evidence in a legal dispute over the starting of a sculls race on the Thames.

[14] In 1888, following the death of an oarsman, Willan wrote to The Times to propose that in bumping races a leather pad should be fixed to the nose of eight-oared boats.

[15] Willan was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Oxfordshire Militia on 26 April 1873,[16] and was promoted to captain on 23 June 1875.

[32] Willan married Louisa Margaret Anne Douglas, daughter of Captain C. R. G. Douglas, late the 32nd Bengal Light Infantry,[2] and stepdaughter of John Prideaux Lightfoot, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, in the college chapel on 14 January 1875.

During the First World War, when aged nearly 70, Willan drove military lorries for the British Expeditionary Force in France.

[28] He was later appointed to the local appeal tribunal, created on the introduction of conscription under the Military Service Act 1916.