by Tom McNab
The park bench provided no such solace. The west of Scotland, warmed by the sea, is rarely bitterly cold, but its winter wetness chills the bones. Similarly, there was comradeship but little solace for those small groups who would stand hunched at street corners all over the grimy city, moving their weight from foot to foot.
The betting shop, like the pub, offered warmth, companionship and hope: when you are at the bottom of the heap the only way is up. That at least was the theory, as men placed their sixpences and shillings on drugged greyhounds at massive odds, or on long-odds horses from lush stables somewhere in southern England. The regularity of their losses did not deter them, for there was always the hope of the “big one” that would change their luck.
Glasgow was a wasteland. Its main industry, shipbuilding, had virtually closed down, and with it the small industries which supported it. The cranes lay still, like frozen prehistoric animals waiting for a breath of life. The great steel mills at Dixons Blazes were silent.
Hugh McPhail was simply one of thousands, a legion of the lost containing some of the world’s most skilled craftsmen, men denied the opportunity to express their unique and subtle skills. At first it was believed that the lay-offs would be short, but as time wore on men began to rot. Deprived of work, the spine of their life had vanished, and with it the core of their belief in themselves. These men were what they worked at. Nothing in their recreation or their family life could ever make up for that loss.
Hugh had started as a shipyard riveter, ten hours a day on a narrow scaffold, his arms shuddering as he drilled five thousand holes a day; even at weekends his hands still shook. Laid off in 1927, he had spent two hard years in the mines at Shotts, south of Glasgow.
There even his fitness had not saved him. Each day, after stumbling through the early morning mists, he and the others had crawled two miles underground to the coal face. For most of the time he had been in agony, for his thighs, unused to the cramped movements imposed by the narrow tunnels, were in constant spasm. Even his best friend, Stevie McFarlane, who had hardly taken exercise in his life, had found it easier. The other miners were sympathetic, waiting for Hugh and massaging his legs until he was ready to continue.
Then there was the work itself, ten hours in semi-darkness, hacking at the coal face. Much of the time the men worked naked, the sweat streaming in white rivulets down their black bodies. It was no wonder that miners were lean-waisted; all day long they pumped into the face with bellies of steel. Food was taken on the job – sandwiches and cold tea, with the men crouching together in crevices, mice scuttling between their legs. Then the return, three agonizing miles bent double, back to the lift.
Hugh dreaded each morning. The only saving grace was the miners themselves. They had been born to it, to accept scarred backs, skins veined like Stilton cheese, crippling injury and death. However, they accepted him, knowing that it was barely possible that he could condition himself to the work, and respecting his painful attempts to do so. To begin with his work-rate was dismal, but eventually he came to accept the pain. It took him longer to adapt to the walks.
It was not only Hugh who was cheered by the presence of wee Stevie. The miners had taken to the little man instantly. Even in the worst times his quick and ready wit had lifted their spirits. A product of the worst slums of Glasgow, he had somehow managed to rise above the stinking squalor of the “single end” which had been his home and the rickets which had put his legs in irons until his early teens. Working at the coal face was particularly hard for him, for he was not built for such toil. But Stevie McFarlane was invincible. He had already seen the worst, and it had not been that bad.
Then, after two years at the mine, came “the visit”. In the winter of 1928 the Shotts mine was visited by Lord Featherstone, M.P., and a member of the British Olympic team soon to travel to Amsterdam. McPhail was immediately sought out by the mine’s manager, Fallon.
“We hear you’ve done a bit of running in your time,” opened Fallon.
“A bit,” Hugh replied guardedly.
“Then you’ve heard tell of Lord Featherstone?”
“The Olympic athlete?”
“The pit’s due for a visit to open the new pithead baths. The usual thing – Lord Featherstone, a fella from the Scottish Amateur Athletic Association and a clanjamfray of local bigwigs. The Tories have heard you’ve run at the big professional races at Powderhall and they think it might make a nice touch if you and Lord Featherstone had a wee race. What d’you think?”
For a moment Hugh looked straight ahead. Then he said: “Featherstone’s a quarter-miler. My top distance is what we run at the Powderhall handicap. One hundred and thirty yards.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll race him, all right, but over a hundred yards.”
Fallon nodded, and went off to convey Hugh’s views to his masters. Two days later news came through that the race was on.
It soon became the talk of Shotts, but even Lord Featherstone had to secure clearance from the SAAA to run against McPhail, for three years a “pro”. The race was therefore required to be billed as an “exhibition”, to avoid breaching amateur rules.
That night, Lang, the shop steward, broached Hugh in the Miner’s Arms, nodding to the barman to set up two pints.
Lang was direct. “What are your chances?”
Hugh shrugged. “Six weeks to go. I reckon the mining has taken about six yards out of my legs. That puts me back around ten point six. Featherstone runs about ten point one. So I’ve got just six weeks to find six yards.”
“Jesus Christ! Some of the boys are laying their wages on you already. They’re getting terrific odds.”
“I’m not surprised. The bookies’ve got it right as usual. As things stand, I haven’t got a snowball in hell’s chance. Man, Featherstone eats steaks seven days a week! He’s got his own track in his father’s grounds, his personal professional trainer. His running shoes are handmade by some guy in Bond Street. Me, I spend all week doubled up two miles underground, drinking cold tea and eating bread and butter. Who the hell’s the amateur?”
Lang put both hands on Hugh’s shoulders. “There’s a bit more to it than that, son,” he said. “There’s an election coming up soon. Featherstone only has a couple of thousand votes in hand. McNair, the Labour agent, says that a win in the sprint could come in very handy. Man, the national press is coming up to cover it.”
Hugh exploded. “What is this, a bloody three-ring circus? I agreed to run this little race; okay. But I didn’t think it was going to be built up into the bloody Olympics.”
“Calm down, lad,” said Lang. He puckered his lips in thought, then sipped his beer. “You said six yards. Jesus, we know here what professional runners have to do if anybody does. You said steaks. Then you’ll get steaks, the best. We don’t have a trainer, but Dad McPherson’s got the best hands in the business. We don’t have a track, but there’s the hundred and fifty yards of cinders down by the railway line. We’ll get it rolled as flat and hard as Powderhall. What d’ye say?”
“It’s no good,” said Hugh. “Four miles walking underground and ten hours a day at the face is no way to prepare for a sprint match.”
“We’ll get you work above ground,” said Lang. “The lads’ll club together to make up your wages.”
“Then you’re on,” said Hugh, nodding.
The next night, after work, Hugh and Stevie met at the pub for a council of war.
“Six yards,” said the wee man, gulping down his McEwans, the foam staying on his lips.
“Six weeks,” said Hugh.
They took physical inventory.
“How’s your weight?”
“About a hundred and fifty-five pounds.”
“Too light.”
“Lost a hell of a lot of muscle underground,” Hugh explained.
“Your legs?”
Hugh grimaced. “The mines again – all that walking doubled up. I’ll pull a muscle just thinking about sprinting.”
St
evie made some notes. “The steaks’ll take care of your weight. As for your legs, Dad McPherson can get to work on them, and you’ll have to stretch daily. Now you’re to be moved above ground the muscles should start to lengthen anyway.”
“So who made you the expert?”
“I can read,” answered Stevie, holding up a thick red book. “It’s all in The Complete Athletic Trainer by Sam Mussabini. He coaches some university guy named Abrahams. I’ve read it from cover to cover. And now it’s all in here.” He tapped his head.
“Well, just make sure it all comes out,” said Hugh sourly.
But Stevie was as good as his word and conducted every detail of Hugh’s preparation. And every day old McPherson massaged Hugh’s legs.
“Tight,” he said, on the first day. “Don’t run hard on these yet.”
McPherson had been blinded in a pit accident, but the old man had supple hands smoothed by years of massage, most of it on racing whippets.
“Stiff,” he said, when he came to knead Hugh’s calves. “But it’s all there – just wants bringing out.”
Others did their part with equal dedication. As he had promised, Lang smoothed and flattened one hundred and fifty yards of cinder track by the side of the railway, the area earmarked for the “exhibition”. It had taken ten miners most of two days to take the wrinkles and bumps out of the surface, but in the end it was sharp and fast. “A Powderhall indeed,” Hugh said admiringly when he saw it.
For a few weeks this bleak anonymous strip of track in the middle of a grimy coal mine in central Scotland would be the focus of his life. Six weeks from now it would be transformed into an arena in which he would face a man from another class – indeed, another world. Hugh felt the hair on the back of his neck rise, and he shivered. He had only run once with real money on his back, at the New Year handicap at Powderhall, and he knew the agonies of self-doubt which grew day by day as fitness becomes increasingly sharp and the mind trembles on a fine edge. He looked again down the dead, silent strip of cinder, and thought of the life which his feet would bring to it, and in turn drain from its surface.
Training – or “prep”, as the specialized preparation was called, in the time-honoured traditions of Scottish professional running – went well. Prep was the method of pedestrians who ever since the great clashes of professional sprinters in the nineteenth century had honed their bodies to a knife-edge for two-man “matches”, or for those twelve burning seconds which formed the annual New Year’s Day Powderhall sprint in Edinburgh.
The method itself was a ritual whose secrets were as closely guarded as those of any ancient priesthood. After a big breakfast Hugh would be massaged lightly by Dad McPherson, then off to the track for six scores – twenty yard sprints with great attention to relaxed running technique. Next would follow an hour’s sleep, in turn followed at one o’clock by a steak dinner; there was no such meal as lunch to the miners at Shotts.
After another hour’s sleep it was back to the track for six runs over one hundred and twenty yards, at half effort, every run watched by the meticulous Stevie, who would again stress relaxation and running form. Then, in a disused hut beside the track, where Stevie had created a primitive gymnasium, Hugh practised for half an hour on the punch-ball, the sweat drenching his thick jersey as he rhythmically pummelled the springy leather ball. The next half hour was spent on hundreds of repetitions of abdominal exercises, performed until his stomach went into spasms.
“Mussabini says the secret of sprinting is in the abdominals,” Stevie would comment earnestly, tapping the spine of The Athletic Trainer, as Hugh lay writhing on the floor of the hut. Sometimes Hugh wished Mussabini had kept his secret to himself.
The day’s ritual ended with a walk back through gathering gloom to McPherson’s cottage for a final massage and high tea. Hugh would then put in a light shift on the mine’s surface before retiring to bed at nine thirty.
There was no doubt that the training was working. Every day Hugh’s recovery from runs became quicker, and gradually the running began to flow into him and from him. Under Dad’s skilful, searching fingers his muscles became soft and supple, the hardness of the months at the pit face teased gently from them.
More important, Hugh again began to feel like an athlete. With the hardening and stretching of the muscles he could feel that his mind became daily quicker and sharper; like some delicate, hunted animal learning to tread its way in a world of danger.
Nor was there a day when a miner did not approach him to ask how he was feeling. “How’s it going, then?” they would ask. “The training. Getting enough steaks, are you?”
There was no envy in their questions. Hugh was their man, on whom they had placed their hopes, and it was right and just that he should be given special treatment. The miners’ experience with whippets and pigeons had taught them that you did not treat diamonds like quartz. They knew that a professional sprinter, a “ped”, had to be treated with care, like the greyhound he undoubtedly was.
However, each question, each query about his health and well-being increased the weight of responsibility Hugh felt resting upon him. What had begun as a “wee race” was, whatever Lord Featherstone felt, going to be a race to the death for Hugh. Men had staked their wages, some their entire savings on him, for the initial odds offered by the bookmakers had been generous. Featherstone was after all an Olympian, having run 47.8 seconds for 400 metres, one of the fastest times in the world. Hugh realized that it was not only the money, though God knew that was reason enough for concern. It was “Them” against “Us”, Tory against Labour, workers against management.
Final training went well. With two weeks to go Hugh clocked ten point three seconds in a trial run, two yards off target time. For all that, Stevie could feel his man becoming more and more tense in the week before the race.
“Let’s go to the pictures,” he said one afternoon, over tea.
The Roxy in Shotts was a fleapit, but a warm and pleasant place. The Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush was ideally suited to the occasion, and Stevie knew he had made the right decision.
Then came Pathé News. A couple of items, then “Oxford versus Cambridge, Queen’s Club, London” read the titles. The annual athletics match. There on the screen was Featherstone, clad in Oxford bags and white sweater with a woollen scarf wrapped carelessly round his neck.
“Lord Featherstone, a triple winner,” said the titles. “440 yards – 48.2 seconds. 220 yards – 21.9 seconds.”
“Wait for it,” said Hugh, gripping his seat.
“100 yards – 9.9 seconds.”
“Jesus Christ!” Hugh exclaimed.
They could both feel the change in the atmosphere as the lights went on. All round the cinema miners were arguing. “I think they know the score now,” said Hugh quietly, as they made their way to the exit.
“It was probably wind-assisted,” growled Stevie on the way home. “Amateur time-keepers.”
It did not take the people of Shotts long to hear that their man would have to find four extra yards by race day. The atmosphere at the mine on Monday was sepulchral.
“What do you think?” asked Lang that evening at Dad McPherson’s.
Hugh shook his head.
“I’ll not run nine point nine if you took a red-hot poker to my arse,” he said, then added: “Still, we’ve got two weeks, and that railroad track isn’t Queen’s Club.”
Lang’s eyebrows lifted. “How d’you mean?”
“I mean nine point nine at Queen’s Club might only be worth ten point one here. I’m running ten point three now, with two weeks to go. I’ve got to find two-tenths. Anyhow, for Featherstone, it’s just an ‘exhibition’. For me it’s shit or bust.”
In his final trial, two days before the race, he ran ten point two. Everyone in the colliery knew, for there were at least ten watches on him when the trial was run. Still two yards to find, perhaps three.
“I’d like you to see someone,” said Stevie as they talked together at Dad McPherson’
s one night after training. “It might help.”
“Help!” exclaimed Hugh. “I’ve had help enough. Steaks, massage, my own track, handmade spikes from London. I’ll tell you the help I need. I need a bloody miracle.”
“Calm down,” said his friend sharply, as there was a knock at the door. “Here,” he added. “I’d like you to meet Jock Wallace.”
He ushered into the living room a big, heavy grey-haired man in his mid-fifties, cap in hand. The man looked uneasy and immediately sensed Hugh’s antagonism as he lay on the bed on his stomach with Dad’s smooth fingers kneading his calves.
“Sorry to trouble you . . . at this time,” he said apologetically, as Hugh looked up.
Gathering himself he blurted: “Just some advice. You forget about Featherstone. You’re not running against him. You run against yourself when you’ve got big money on your back. Run in four feet of space. That’s all. Just run in four feet of space.”
He picked up his cap, nodded at Stevie, and was led out of the room by McPherson.
Hugh scowled and looked at Stevie.
“What did he mean, four feet of space?”
“He meant run your race. If it’s good enough you’ll win, if not you lose. So just drill through your four feet of space. That’s what sprinting’s all about. You run in blinkers.”
“What does he know about it?”
“You know who that was? That’s Wallace of Perth. He won the Powderhall sprint in 1888. That old man ran with five thousand pounds on his back. He’s been there. He’s been through it. He knows.”
Wallace of Perth. Hugh had heard of him. Twelve point seven seconds off two yards handicap on crushed snow. Wallace had been a legend in his time, a Scot who had taken on and beaten some of the best professional sprinters in the world. And now there he was, a big, soft old man telling Hugh to run in four feet of space. As Hugh pondered he realized the old man was right. You ran a hundred yards in separate tunnels, the winner being the man first out of his tunnel at the end. That tunnel was four feet wide and that was the space he had to penetrate oblivious of Featherstone.