Notes on the history of Kent Athletics (1908)

This overview of athletics in Kent was included in the 'Victoria History of the County of Kent', edited by William Page (1908). This section was written by Frank Bonnett. At that time, much of what is now South East London - where I live - would have been regarded as Kent. Hence this summary includes mentions of the still very active South London running clubs, Herne Hill Harriers, Cambridge Harriers, Blackheath Harriers  (now Blackheath & Bromley Harriers) and Kent Athletic Club (my club - actually  Lewisham-based, rather than being a 'Kent county' club). The latter evidently  'won the last of the South-of-the-Thames races (1907) with a team of young and promising stayers', and are still running in the same competition more than a hundred years later.

'The historian who sets himself the task of recording the story of Kent athletics finds at once that he has to deal with a county possessing peculiarities of its own with regard to this branch of sport; indeed, in one particular respect, Kent stands almost, if not quite, in a class by itself. Other counties have their amateur and their professional side of athletics, but in Kent the latter feature predominates to a much greater extent than can be found, probably, in any other part of the kingdom. Athletic sports, promoted under the laws and regulations of  the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA), are comparatively few and far between, whereas meetings of the unregistered type are numerous in almost every part of the county.

The athlete who indulges in sport for sport's sake, which, as all must admit, is the healthiest form of recreation for mind and body that can be devised, would expect to find that in this part of England as elsewhere amateur gatherings held under the auspices of the A.A.A. were on the increase; but such unfortunately is not the case. It is to be noticed, indeed, that a number of meetings which were once of the unregistered type, and whose promoters tried the experiment of holding their sports under the aegis of the 'Three A's'  found the cost of the undertaking, including the payment of permit fees and the employment of official handicappers, far greater than they could bear, and they have long since reverted to the old order of things.

The tendency to follow this example still exists. It seems likely that in the near future many more clubs will adopt the unregistered principle, while there appears to be little likelihood of new clubs coming forward to fill the gaps caused by these secessions from the ranks of pure amateurism. One cannot but regret this state of affairs, for strictly amateur athletics should everywhere form a part of the curriculum of the youth of England.

Other meetings of the long ago in the county of Kent, though still promoted under the laws of the Amateur Athletic Association, have either become less exclusive as regards the rules which govern them, or have gradually drifted into the hands of men with good ideas of sport but possessed of broader minds on the subject of amateurism and  more democratic in their views. Belonging to this latter class of sports are those held at Belvedere, which meeting may be regarded as the successor to the old Erith and Belvedere fixture. No more popular gathering than this last within easy reach of London ever existed. In its palmy days in the early 'eighties it was loyally supported by the members of the London Athletic Club and similar bodies ; but the character of the meeting has changed considerably since then, although it is still popular...

Real athletics never flourished to any considerable extent in Kent, albeit as the county in which some important cycling contests have been decided under the auspices of the National Cyclists' Union, it has been rather famous in the past. To find anything of downright historical interest in Kentish field sports, apart from the fact that good men from other districts came to the county meetings, one has to come to the very modern times of 1887 to note that a Lewisham resident (but a Birmingham born man), J. H. Adams, carried off the 50 miles Ordinary Bicycle Championship of the N.C.U. at Birmingham. F. J. Osmond, S. F. Edge, and P. F. Wood, old cycle and tricycle champions, had their Kentish club and residential connexions, and the Crystal Palace itself has long been a home of cycle-racing. In 1892 the Heme Hill track was chosen for the N.C.U.'s chief races, and the Catford ground was used in 1896. A winner of a N.C.U. medal for the tandem championship in 1898 was F. Burnand of Catford, who partnered E. J. Callingham, a Surrey resident.

The Blackheath Harriers and Heme Hill Harriers are chiefly Kentish men, and while the former is rather an exclusive society, the latter can be said to have turned out some very useful runners within the past
decade. For instance the 15 miles amateur record holder, Fred J. Appleby, is a member of the H.H.H., and the ex-Irish mile and four miles champion, J. N. Deakin, bears the ' hoops ' of that club, as does F. H. Hulford, who has won the 4 miles A.A.A. championship. The quarter-mile champion of England in 1903, Chas. McLachlan, wore the colours of  the Heme Hill contingent, which is so well looked after by Mr. Chas. Otway (Camberwell), their honorary secretary. The Blackheath Harriers have boasted a capital half-miler in B. J. Blunden, who has held English honours at that distance, and A. Healey, a fellow member, who ran second in the hurdle race at Athens, has won several Northern Counties championships by reason of his birth qualification.

Another club, the Kent A.C., brought into prominence A. Aldridge, a stayer who won Southern, National, and International honours on the flat and across country, though he always had to play second fiddle, when they met, to the Sussex wonder, Alfred Shrubb.  In the South-of-the-Thames Cross-Country championships Kentish clubs always figure  prominently, and they won the last of the South-of-the-Thames races (1907) with a team of young and promising stayers.

Another club, the Cambridge Harriers, which to all intents and purposes is a London institution, belies its name so far as its membership is concerned, for most of its members are drawn from the county of Kent. The club was established in 1890.

Other athletic clubs within the county which hold their meetings under the laws of the Amateur Athletic Association are the Erith Harriers ; Swanley C.M. and A.C.; Cray Valley C.M. and A.C ; Sittingbourne C.C; Dover CC ; Bexley W.M.C ; and Foots Cray C.C.

In addition to the sports meetings promoted by these clubs, numerous gatherings are held annually, or at irregular intervals, in various parts of the county. Some are unregistered meetings mainly supported by amateur athletes, while others are avowedly of the professional order. Between these two kinds of meetings there is in reality a far greater difference than is recognized by the ruling body of the sport. But that Association tars both with the same brush and looks upon the unregistered meeting as disdainfully as it considers the purely professional undertaking. A hard and fast line must, however, be drawn somewhere, and severe as the regulations of the A.A.A. may appear to be in some instances, there is no doubt that their action is entirely in accordance with the best interests of those amateurs who are loyal to the provisions made by the laws of the predominant body.

Canterbury, Gravesend A.C, Northfleet Institute, Cliffe-at-Hoo, Rainham, Ramsgate, Birchington-on-Sea, Maidstone, Kent County Constabulary, Ashford United, Smeeth, Charing, Headcorn, High Halden, Chatham, Sittingbourne, Bexley Heath, and Orpington all hold sports every year - some of them in connexion with local flower shows - but it is impossible to say which of these are registered, unregistered or professional meetings, even if it were advisable to state the fact.

For a long time past, and indeed through-out the whole of its athletic career, although perhaps never more so than at the present time, Kent has been an unsettled county in the matter of its athletic principles, and the meeting that is registered to-day is more than likely to be unregistered, or even admittedly professional, tomorrow'.

I was  interested in the discussion of amateurism (covered here previously). A lot of athletics history gives the impression that at this time, running was either 'amateur' or 'professional', whereas it seems there was a big grey area in between of  'unregistered' athletics involving people who perhaps just didn't want the cost and hassle of complying with AAA regulations.

Running Books: The Ghost Runner - John Tarrant (1932-1975)

'The Ghost Runner: the Tragedy of the Man they Couldn't Stop' by Bill Jones (Mainstream Publishing, 2011) is the story of English runner John Tarrant.  Fundamentally it is the rather sad tale of a talented and (obsessively) committed long distance runner failing to achieve his potential, at least partly because of class, power and bureaucracy. But it is also about a refusal to submit to other people's rules and to keep on running - whatever the cost.

Tarrant, born in Camberwell in 1932, had a tough childhood marked by the death of his mother from TB and years in a brutal children's home during the Second World War. A spell as a teenage boxer in Derbyshire brought little success and a total of £17 prize money - but under the strict rules on amateurism enforced by the Amateur Athletics Association this was enough to prevent him taking part in any mainstream athletics events. These pernicious rules not only banned runners like Tarrant who had earned pocket money in unrelated events as a young person, but also enforced a boycott of people like him by other athletes. Athletes could lose their amateur status if they were found to have taken part in any competition with somebody who wasn't  an ameteur.

Banned from officially taking part in races, Tarrant started turning up anyway and running without a race number.  Gate crashing events like the 1956 Liverpool marathon and the following year's Doncaster-to-Sheffield Marathon led to him being nick-named 'The Ghost Runner' by the press. Official results left out his name -  the AAA didn't recognise him as a runner - but his cause generated lots of supportive publicity.

John Tarrant running without a number

After a couple of years the AAA appeared to back down and allowed him to run in its events - but his hopes of an international career were dashed when they later announced that he was still banned from taking part in events outside of the UK under IAAF rules. Taking up ultra-distance running, John Tarrant set world records at 40 miles (in 1966) and at 100 miles in 1969, running 400 laps of a track at Walton-on-Thames. Tarrant won the Exeter-to-Plymouth 44-mile-race five years in a row from 1965 to 1969, as well as the London-to-Brighton 54-mile race in 1967 and 1968 (running for Salford Harriers). He had expected that winning the latter would lead to him being sponsored to take part in the Comrades Marathon in South Africa,as had happened to previous winners), a 56-mile road race, but the IAAF ban excluded him from this. Tarrant resumed his ghost runner tactics and turned up anyway to run this 56-mile race between Pietermaritzburg and Durban in 1968. He came 4th but once again was expunged from the official record.

Taking part in this event had unexpected consequences. On the day he wasn't the only unofficial runner - there were several black and Indian runners who ran but who were also denied recognition - this was a Whites Only race at the height of Apartheid in South Africa.  Under the Separate Amenities Act, it was illegal for black and white athletes to even share changing rooms and other facilities.

A Natal Runners Association had been formed in the late 1960s to fight the racist exclusion of black athletes from the Comrades race. In 1970 they decided to put on a non-segregated 50 mile race of their own, and to make it a genuinely multi-racial event they needed to attract white runners. In the 1970 Comrades Marathon, 'scores of white runners had worn black armbands in support of the black athletes competing alongside them as numberless ghosts' (Jones), but only one white runner was prepared to actually run in the non-segregated Goldtop race in 1970 - John Tarrant, who finished first that year and the following year.

Tarrant continued running until his death from late-diagnosed cancer in 1975 at the age of 42.

Tarrant (left) after winning the 1968 London to Brighton run, with runner-up T.R.Baker
(see pathe news reel of this race)

Post-Olympics Coaching Crisis?

Good to see some great performances and a sell out crowd at the Olympic Stadium for the Anniversary Games/Diamond League Athletics, which as Brendan Foster noted may have been the largest ever crowd for an Athletics event in the UK outside of Olympic events (at the 1948 Olympics, Wembley held 85,000 compared with 60,000 last night).

No harm in a bit of wallowing in nostalgia for last year's Olympics either, but it was interesting to hear some of the inflated rhetoric about the Games legacy being punctured by a discussion about coaching in a BBC studio discussion last night involving Gabby Logan, Kelly Holmes, Denise Lewis, and Paula Radcliffe (pictured below, left to right).

Lewis was most outspoken, saying: 'within athletic clubs we are seeing diminishing numbers in coaching and we need to find that incentive and keep them there. And yes the Olympics has its place but lets face it people do need to be incentivised. Its time that there was a better payment structure for coaches that are spending vast amount of hours on the track'. Paula Radcliffe agreed: 'they are the gatekeepers of the sport... and they need to be rewarded'.

Similar comments were made in Sarah Shepherd's interview this week in Sport magazine with Jessica Ennis-Hill's Sheffield coach Toni Minichello. He was paid by British Athletics in lead up to the Olympics before in effect being made redundant and now says:

“Here in Sheffield, the number of youngsters getting involved in the sport has quadrupled... We’ve gone from about 200 people involved in kids’ academies here to 700, plus a small waiting list. The Olympics was a massive stimulus... We do not have enough coaches and we don’t have a professionalism of coaches. There’s always an overreliance on volunteers. I was employed for a while and am now – strictly speaking – a volunteer too. But there’s a limit to what volunteers can do. There should have been a move towards the professionalisation of coaching so that people could actually earn a living from it, or develop a career. There should also have been more of an emphasis on recruiting coaches before the Olympics, so that we could cope with this. These are the same problems we had after we won the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and the Ashes in 2005 – you just couldn’t cope with the influx afterwards. So the lessons were there, but they hadn’t been learned.”

'The man named UK Coach of the Year for overseeing Ennis-Hill’s rise to the top chuckles when asked whether the people with the power to act on his suggestions have ever asked for his views on how to secure a legacy from London 2012: “I’m the son of immigrant workers up north – what do I know? I get no kudos stood next to a minister, but if I’m Jessica Ennis, then I do. What happens in sport is that, politically, they’re obsessed with celebrity. So they’ll ask the people who perform what should happen – never the people behind them.”

Running History (1): Gentleman Amateurs vs. Tradesmen at Crystal Palace 1872

The following is a report of a fascinating London court case from 1873 where a Mr Wheeler took legal action against Crystal Palace Athletics Club. He had  won a race at Crystal Palace but was denied the prize because he was deemed not to be a 'Gentleman Amateur'.

The amateur ethos in Athletics might have sometimes protected it from naked commercialism, but from the start  amateurism was also a means of keeping out people who needed to earn money as opposed to being independently wealthy. One thing I hadn't realized was that the 19th century notion of the 'Gentleman Amateur' was not only used to preserve privilege against people who ran for money but against working class people who worked for a wage ('mechanics and tradesmen' like Wheeler) - even if they were actually amateur athletes.

'WHAT IS A GENTLEMAN AMATEUR? 

On Tuesday, 23rd January, at the Lord Mayor's Court, Guildhall, the case of Wheeler v. Hillier was heard. The plaintiff was an amateur athlete, and the defendant the secretary to the Crystal Palace Athletic Club. The action was brought to recover the value of a certain prize of the value of £10, which plaintiff said he had won at the society's sports held at the Crystal Palace on the 24th of July [1872]. 

The plaintiff was called, and said he was a member of the Victoria Club and several others, and he was in the employment of Messrs. Chaplin and Home as a collector. He saw the advertisement of the race in question in several papers, and he entered his name and paid the entrance fee of 5s. He never ran in races for money, but only for prizes, Mr. Birt was a competitor whom witness distanced and passed in the first 50 yards. After he had won he was objected to, but no ground was given for the objection. He ran in morning costume. Since his employment as a collector be had entered the Barnes Football Club and the Richmond Cricket Club. The prize he won at the Crystal Palace consisted of some fish knives and forks, which were in value about £10. 

He had had considerable experience as an athlete, and had ran several races. Cross-examined: He might have run at Beaufort House five years ago, but not for money, to his knowledge. He never ran for sweepstakes. He had run at Tufnel Park for prizes, and he had won a medal and cups. He never ran against professionals, to his knowledge. He had been objected to in other races, on the ground, he supposed, that he was not a gentleman amateur. Robert Henry Hodgkinson, an athlete, said he was present when the plaintiff won the race. A 'gentleman amateur' was one who did not run for money. 

Mr. Kemp addressed the Jury, and said the question for them to consider was, whether the plaintiff was a gentleman amateur athlete under the rules of the club. This rule was to the effect that any person who had run in a race as a means of livelihood, or who was a mechanic or a tradesman, should not be qualified, &c. The plaintiff being a collector to Messrs. Chaplin & Home, the carriers, he contended, came under this rule. Alfred Walter Hillier, the Secretary of the Crystal Palace Sports, said he was not aware what the plaintiff was when he entered to run for the race. Objection was taken to the plaintiff running. He was not a 'gentleman amateur.' Witness offered the plaintiff his 5s. entrance fee. The Judge of the race decided that he was disqualified and refused him the prize, and Mr. Birt, who ran second, was awarded the prize. In cross-examination the witness said Mr. Rye decided that the plaintiff had not started properly for the race. Before the race Mr. Birt objected to the plaintiff running. 

The advertisement stated that the race was open to 'amateurs.' The word 'gentleman' was omitted by mistake. The Deputy Recorder summed up, and told the Jury be was inclined to rule that the Committee had an absolute and incontrovertible power to decide whether the plaintiff was qualified or not. The Jury found a verdict for the defendant, and Mr.Salter tendered a bill of exceptions to the Deputy Recorder's ruling'.

(report from South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail, 10 May 1873 - the Crystal Palace Athletics Club had been formed in 1868)