Hugh Wardell-Yerburgh

Educated at Eton College where he started rowing, Hugh Wardell-Yerburgh then graduated from Bristol University. He rowed at university and was also a member of the Bristol Rowing Club. He won a silver medal with the coxless fours at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and subsequently went on to be an outstanding sculler and regarded as one of the best in Britain in the second half of the 1960s.

Wardell-Yerburgh, known as “Wobbly”, finished fifth in the single sculls at the 1965 European Rowing Championships at Duisburg and the following year, at the World Championships at Bled, finished fourth with the British eight. Having won the first of two consecutive Scullers Head of the River Races on the River Thames in 1967, Wardell-Yerburgh´s finest moment came in 1968 when he won the Diamond Sculls at Henley to become only the third Englishman in 25 years to win the race. Three years earlier he had lost by three-quarters-of-a-length to the American world champion Don Spero, but still managed to become the fastest-ever Englishman in the race´s history.

After university, Wardell-Yerburgh became an economics master at Eton College and was also coach to the rowing eight. He later worked for the British Aircraft Corporation at Filton, Bristol, before becoming a senior analyst at the Plessey Radar Corporation in Surrey, where he was working when he died in a car accident in January 1970. Wardell-Yerburgh´s wife at the time was Janet, a former Olympic fencer, and just eight weeks before his death she had given birth to their daughter Atlanta Jane.