Title: Edward Hanlan - World Rowing Champion
Place: Montréal, Quebec. Date: ca. 1878.
PHOTOGRAPHER: Notman & Sandham
National Archives of Canada, negative no. C-025318

On his death, Canadian sculler Edward "Ned" Hanlan (1855-1908) was called "the most famous oarsman of not only his own time, but undoubtedly of the nineteenth century." In 1879, Hanlan stunned the British when he handily defeated William Elliott, the champion of England, and did so in the fastest time ever clocked over the Tyne racecourse. The following year, the 5'8" Hanlan met 6'4" Australian great Edward Trickett over the Thames World Championship course. In Hanlan's day, sculling was a professional sport with all the attendant betting, boasting and publicity. Hanlan's victory not only cost Australian bettors thousands of dollars; it also made him Canada's first great international sports personality.

Hanlan grew up on Toronto Island and it was there, in 1873, that he became amateur champion oarsman of Toronto Bay. The next year, at the age of nineteen, he won the Ontario title for the first time. Hanlan turned professional in 1876 and on May 30 of that year swept to victory in the great Philadelphia Centennial three-mile singles race. Hanlan's single shell, The Cigarette, was equipped with a seat on rollers to increase speed. The contraption revolutionised sculling, and Hanlan has been referred to as "the father of the sliding seat." He won the Canadian Championship in 1878, before taking on the best Britain and Australia had to offer. He defended his world championship six times before losing to William Beach of Australia in 1884.

Josiah Bruce's full-length cabinet portrait of a youthful Hanlan was taken in 1876, and Bruce was quick to deposit it with the Canadian Copyright Office. In 1878, another Toronto professional, W. Williamson, produced two cabinets of a moustachioed Hanlan posed in sculling attire and seated in his famous sliding-seat racing shell.

On October 3 of that year, Hanlan defeated American sculler Charles E. Courtney for the Championship of America, by completing the five-mile course at Lachine, Quebec, in just over thirty-six minutes. A week after Hanlan's victory over Courtney, yet another Notman and Sandham photograph provided the basis for the full-page engraving on the front cover of the Canadian Illustrated News.

Canada, and especially Toronto, has never forgotten the great sculler. A statue of Hanlan erected on the Toronto waterfront in 1926 overlooks the bay where he learned to row. And the western end of Toronto Island is still called Hanlan's Point. In 1980, the Canadian government issued a postage stamp to commemorate the centenary of Hanlan's world championship; the design was based on yet another of the many portraits of Hanlan bought at the end of the last century by an awed and adoring Canadian public.