| Medal record | ||
|---|---|---|
| Men's Rowing | ||
| Competitor for England | ||
| British Empire Games | ||
| Silver | 1950 Auckland | Single Sculls |
Antony Duncan Rowe (4 August 1924 - 5 December 2003) was an English rower who competed for Great Britain at the 1948 Summer Olympics and won the Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley Royal Regatta in 1950. He was later a printer in a period of significant change and developed a successful model for short-run printing.
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Rowe was born at Cookham Dean, Berkshire the sixth of seven children of George Rowe and his wife Molly Allen. His father had founded a stockbroking firm of Rowe & Pitman and his mother was a violinist. He was educated at Eton College where he was captain of Boats and president of Pop. He left Eton during the Second World War and joined the submarine service in the Royal Navy straight from school. In 1944 he was posted to the Far East, and took part in the Japanese surrender of Hong Kong.[1]
After the war Rowe went to Trinity College, Oxford on a scholarship and read PPE. He started rowing again and was captain of Trinity College Boat Club and was a member of the Oxford crew in the 1948 Boat Race. He excelled in the single sculls participating in the 1948 Summer Olympics in the single sculls event in which he reached the semi-finals with the American Jack Kelly.[2] In 1949 he was president of O.U.B.C and in the Boat Race crew which was narrowly beaten by Cambridge.[1] He was also runner up in the Wingfield Sculls to Farn Carpmael.[3] In 1950 he won the Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley.[4] In the same year, he took part in the 1950 British Empire Games taking silver medal behind the Australian Mervyn Wood, who had won in the 1948 Olympics. Rowe coached the Oxford boat from 1954 to 1956, and in 1963
Rowe started work with the Pitman Press at Bath. In 1954 the firm bought Western Printing Services which had provided typesetting for the trade, and Rowe became manager. During his time at Western Printing Services, the press printed the first unexpurgated Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which other printers had fought shy of. Rowe designed and printed The Western Type Book (1960), with specimen pages of all the many different types held by Western in different sizes which became a bible for publishers' production managers. Rowe returned to the Pitman Press in 1972 . Rowe had identified a market for short-run printing and set out to make runs of 100 or less, possible, when it was generally accepted that 1,000 copies was the minimum economic run. After his retirement from Pitman Press in 1983, he established "Antony Rowe Ltd" using new techniques and equipment to cut costs, which as a result of Rowe's ability to "think small" became a successful business.[1] Antony Rowe Ltd has since become part of the CPI printing group and is now a leading provider of print on demand printing services both to traditional publishers and new self-publishing services such as CompletelyNovel.com which act as an intermediary between the author and the printer.[5]
Rowe died Upper Swainswick, Somerset at the age of 79.
Rowe married 1954 Jennifer Renwick, the daughter of the first Independent TV magnate, Sir Robert Renwick.[6] The marriage was dissolved in 1969, and in 1970 he married Miranda Noel-Buxton (née Chisenhale-Marsh). His third marriage in 1985 was to Charlotte Savage