Three Men in a Boat Boat" is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog". The trip is
The Boat Race 1920 (who had rowed in the previous four races). For the twelfth year the umpire was Old Etonian Frederick I. Pitman who rowed for Cambridge in the 1884, 1885 and 1886 races. He was accompanied on his launch by Prince Albert and Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. The Cambridge crew weighed an average of 12 st 9 lb (80.1 kg), per rower more than their opponents. As a result of the six-year hiatus, none of the participants had rowed in the Boat Race prior to this year. Three of the participants in the race were registered as non-British: Oxford's Hugh Cairns