Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Woodgate, Walter Bradford
WOODGATE, WALTER BRADFORD (1840–1920), oarsman, was born at Belbroughton rectory, Worcestershire, 20 September 1840, the eldest son of the Rev. Henry Arthur Woodgate, rector of Belbroughton and canon of Worcester, by his wife, Maria Bradford. His younger brother was Major-General Sir Edward Woodgate [q.v.]. He entered Radley College in 1850, matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, as a scholar in 1859, graduated in 1863, and was called to the bar (Inner Temple) in 1872. For more than half a century Woodgate was the outstanding figure on the upper Thames. He rowed his first race in 1858 for Radley against Eton over the Henley course; he rowed his last race at Henley in 1868. His racing record is amazing: he was in the Oxford winning crews of 1862 and 1863, and won the university pairs three times and the sculls twice; at Henley he won the Grand Challenge cup in 1865, the Stewards' cup in 1862, the Diamond sculls in 1864, the Goblets in 1861, 1862, 1863, 1866, and 1868. He also held the Wingfield sculls in 1862, 1864, and 1867. Woodgate was not only a great oar, but his knowledge of oarsmanship was unsurpassed and it covered almost a century of rowing. He entered the rowing world soon enough to meet the giants of its early days; he had known Thomas Staniforth, Oxford stroke in the first university boat race in 1829, and he was present at Henley regatta in 1920. As a judge of pace he was unequalled, and his text-book, Oars and Sculls, and how to use them (1875), is a classic.
Woodgate's life, however, was full of other interests, and his full-blooded activities and mental versatility were as remarkable as his rowing. His varied interests jostle one another in the pages of his Reminiscences of an Old Sportsman (1909), where he writes of country life, steeplechasing, school and college life (he was the founder of Vincent's Club at Oxford), of the parentage of James I, the inner history of the search for Dr. Livingstone by the Royal Geographical Society, his own indirect share in Pasteur's researches, of politics, and police morality. The law he never took too seriously. As a journalist he assisted at the birth of Vanity Fair and Land and Water; he was associated with the Pall Mall Gazette in its early days, and contributed to the Field for half a century. He wrote a few novels under the pseudonym of ‘Wat Bradwood’, and in 1893 he published A Modern Layman's Faith.
The question why, with his undoubted ability, Woodgate did not go further, may perhaps be answered in his own words: ‘I am who and what I am, and my best and truest friends (of both worlds) have been just who and what they are and beyond price. If one shift of the helm had steered my bark into some other channel wherein I should have failed to know and revere any single one of those elect, I should feel myself the poorer, even if that course had led me to a coronet.’ Woodgate fashioned his life, as he chose his clothes, for his own use and satisfaction, and was careless of the world's ways. He was a man of unflinching rectitude, of decided opinions, but of great kindliness, and an excellent raconteur. As a young man he was strikingly handsome; in later years his fine, stern face and stalwart figure made him a typical John Bull, an effect accentuated by a low-crowned top hat. He died 1 November 1920, in his sister's house at Southampton, of heart weakness brought on by bronchial trouble. He never married.
[The Times, 2 November 1920; The Field, 6 and 13 November 1920; personal knowledge. ]