Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon

by Tim Marshall

  The other person chosen for this “link” role was Janet Yates, an able-bodied archer from Northern Ireland whose main claim to fame was that she had lost the 1982 Commonwealth ladies Archery title in a shoot-out against Neroli Fairhall of New Zealand; and Neroli Fairhall was a paraplegic, a wheelchair user. I hadn’t heard of Janet before the event, and didn’t keep in contact after, but the example her experience provided was a wonderful tool to be used when teaching about disability sport and integration: who is “disability sport” for? and (why) do we need separate competitions for able-bodied and disabled people? (It depends on both the sport and the disability, of course.)

  Anyway, we recorded the programme in, I think, the autumn of 1982, though the final edited version wasn’t shown until early summer of 1983, by which time I had acquired a certain notoriety over campaigning for London. It was a surprise to be asked to be photographed alongside the kids, both those who were competing and those who were just spectators from the participating schools. And signing autograph books …

  The Second Battle of Marathon The Greater London Council

  I drafted a letter to the GLC, to Tony Banks, on June 9th. In it, I suggested that it was more than time for London to include a wheelchair section in its marathon, citing examples both from overseas: Boston, Rotterdam, Berlin, Paris and others; and in this country: Manchester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Hull and so on; and suggesting that our event might be called “The GLC London Wheelchair Marathon”. The rationale for including information about events elsewhere was, of course, the implication that London was falling behind, not only other big international cities, but also provincial cities in this country, cities which could hardly claim to have the same status as London. I did also mention that Brasher and Disley were implacably opposed, but without suggesting why this might be so.

  For some reason it was never sent – I think I probably had second thoughts about the likelihood of a letter from an unknown individual successfully hitting the target. So I sent this draft to Mike, along with my recent article in “Running” magazine and Disley’s reply, and various other letters and items of information including my letter to the Minister (his reply came six weeks later). The same day, BSAD centrally sent out a letter to their regions (chairmen, secretaries and officers) asking them to collect and collate any information they could acquire about wheelchair marathons being done in their regions, and to send the information to me. The idea was to circulate a list of races and times at the end of the year.

  From this point the correspondence is incomplete, but enough remains to provide more than a mere skeleton of what happened. A letter from Mike at the end of the June suggested meeting in July, and included the news that Philip Lewis, a full member of the Sports Council and shortly to become BSAD national chairman (or who was chairman and was about to relinquish the post), had had a “discussion” with Disley about the matter, pressing the wheelchair case very strongly; but that Disley was still muttering on about perjury. The letter to Tony Banks, from Mike, finally went out on July 29th, including a formal proposal to stage the first National Wheelchair Marathon in association with the 1983 London Marathon. The proposal included details of who the organiser should be (BSAD, of course), the numbers of entrants (20), and suggestions for the start (10 minutes’ headstart), refreshments and finish. The letter was copied to me, and gave me the label of “National Wheelchair Marathon Coordinator”, a designation I was happy to use thereafter.

  Whilst we waited for Tony Banks to reply, I had another thought: the race was called “The Gillette London Marathon”, because Gillette were putting up the sponsorship money. How about trying to interest them? But, again, what would be the point of a letter from me? I floated the idea to Mike, who, as it happened, knew the UK national chairman of the company, and he sent off a letter outlining the state of wheelchair marathoning both in Britain and abroad, suggesting that they might like to add a string to their bow in supporting “The Gillette London Wheelchair Marathon”, admitting the opposition of Brasher and Disley, but hinting at the interest of the GLC (see below). I don’t know what happened to the approach to Gillette – it seems to have gone up a blind alley. I have no more correspondence from or to them, and I recall no discussion about them at all. Possibly, having been alerted to the opposition to a wheelchair section, they decided that they didn’t want to fish in such murky waters, and simply declined to become involved at all.

  The GLC had replied on September 9th, from Peter Pitt (Tony Banks’ deputy), inviting Mike to send a list of possible dates for a meeting. A meeting was eventually agreed for early October, and though Mike couldn’t attend, he suggested that Jenny Ward, the BSAD officer for the Greater London area, should attend in his stead, along with me. After all, if this lead eventually went somewhere, it was likely that she would be involved with any administrative fall-out to do with organising a wheelchair section. Maybe, just maybe, we were beginning to get somewhere.

  That first meeting with the GLC was on Tuesday 5th October. Tony Banks was there, as were Peter Pitt and Lord Birkett, but not Illtyd Harrington. Jenny Ward was also along and she, living and working in London for the BSAD and with a direct line into headquarters (yes, I know, it’s beginning to sound like a military operation, but at times that’s what it felt like), became an important link drawing things together. I remember little about the meeting, except that I presented an abbreviated account of wheelchair marathons, initially in the USA and then over here, and ending up with the proposal Mike had sent at the end of July. Both Banks and Pitt expressed strong support for the idea, but wanted a specific London slant to the event; so, on the hoof, Jenny and I suggested that the original proposal for 20 participants be modified to 10 from Greater London and 10 from elsewhere. This seemed acceptable but, deferring to the absent Illtyd Harrington, who was both their political senior as well as being a governor of the race, they said I would need to write to him making the full case. I left several papers with Pitt, including the recent correspondence with Disley; but even before they had a chance to read it, I picked up from Banks a considerable antipathy towards Chris Brasher. Maybe this was a kind of perverted wishful thinking on my part, but the same antipathy was evident at all subsequent meetings. Jenny and I left the meeting in high spirits, believing that we had found the key to what had up until now been a firmly closed and locked door. Each of us wrote to Mike the next day with our impressions of the meeting, again full of optimism.

  The letter to Illtyd Harrington went the next day. I included a copy of “Sharing the Road” from “Sports ’n Spokes”, a recent article from the same source on the Montreal Marathon showing an application of the rationale for integrated racing, the article by me that had appeared in “Running” magazine, and the proposal for establishing a race with 20 entrants, modified to make explicit it would be for 10 athletes from London and 10 from elsewhere. I added that Tony Banks and Peter Pitt were in favour (this had come over very strongly at the meeting), but that Brasher and Disley were opposed, notwithstanding approaches going back three years. Finally, I offered to meet him to discuss the matter further, if he was interested; and waited.

  But not for long. The meeting had been on October 5th, and my letter to Illtyd Harrington went on the 6th. He replied on the 8th, thus:

  “Dear Tim Marshall

  Thank you for your note regarding a wheelchair section in the London Marathon.

  I am in contact with Peter Pitt to try and organise a meeting and would be very happy to meet you. I will be in touch as soon as we sort out a date and time.

  I have also copied your letter to Chris Brasher who is, as you know, the Co-ordinator.

  Yours sincerely…”

  He sent me a copy of his letter to Brasher, the last paragraph of which read: “I have discussed this with Sir James Swaffield, my fellow governor, this afternoon and he is as keen as I am that we get this proposition before the governors as quickly as possible. I attach some relevant papers.”

  The date on the letter i
s indistinct, but it was sent in late October or very early November.

  Quite rightly, I don’t have a copy of Brasher’s reply, nor of what transpired at the meeting of the governors, though each would be fascinating.

  The next letter from Illtyd Harrington was dated November 15th:

  “Dear Tim Marshall

  Further to my last letter of 8th November, I now write to invite you to a meeting with Peter Pitt and myself, on Tuesday 30th November 30th at 3 p.m.

  Could you please confirm if this is convenient…

  Yours sincerely…”

  On the 17th Mike wrote asking if I was going to select the athletes for the race, or whether he should make the necessary arrangements. Then Jenny wrote asking if I had a definite outcome about London. News was leaking out – in truth, rumour rather than news – and they were receiving lots of enquiries from prospective entrants. The region had agreed to hold a race, a kind of elimination event, in the Docklands on Saturday 18th December, a two-lap half-marathon from which the top 10 would be selected as London’s entrants; and because she, Jenny, was going to be in Austria at the time, the event would be co-ordinated and run by Julia Allton, a senior lecturer in PE from Tower Hamlets Institute of Adult Education, together with an army of volunteer helpers.

  This was all going a bit fast. Yes, I was pleased about the Docklands race, even though the roads wouldn’t be closed (though Saturday in the Docklands would, I supposed, be pretty free of traffic); but the GLC had not (yet) agreed to there being a wheelchair race as part of the main event the following April – many others were involved in making such a decision. Looking further ahead I suggested to Mike that, if the GLC couldn’t eventually swing it, BSAD put on a press conference to expose the whole business, and that we offer the event, the First National Wheelchair Marathon, to the Piccadilly race (because this was by far the best course I’d yet been on). This would, of course, have to be cleared with them first, rather than just announcing it. Meantime…

  An Unexpected Threat

  In mid-November, at work, the phone rang.

  “Hello, Tim Marshall.”

  “Mr Marshall, I understand you organise marathons for wheelchairs.” A woman’s voice, very Welsh.

  “Well, not exactly, I try to find out what’s going on, what races people have done, what their times were, what the course was like, and then tell everyone else what’s going on.”

  “Oh good,” she said, “because we’re going to put on the first national wheelchair marathon next year, just for wheelchairs, and we would like to invite you to join the organising committee.”

  Alarm bells began to ring. Right from the start I’d been worried that someone, no doubt very well-intentioned, would stage a wheelchair-only marathon that would encapsulate a view offering a completely different perspective on wheelchair road-racing: “Ah, isn’t that nice, they’ve got their own race,” and leading to a view that separate races were the right way to do things. I didn’t want to be part of my “own race”, I wanted to be part of everyone else’s race, just as they did in the USA and Canada, reported every two months in “Sports ’n Spokes”. And the experience of the last two years had shown that a) it was possible to do that in Britain, and that b) by and large, race organisers were happy to have wheelchairs as part of their event, though there was still some education to do over front-end starts.

  I needed to find out more. What organisation was she representing? I couldn’t imagine that it was BSAD – surely, Mike O’Flynn would have told me if the hierarchy was planning something like this? The only other organisation I could think of was the British Paraplegic Sports Society – the BPSS, which I wasn’t in favour of, because they limited their eligibility to spinal injury people only; and in any case, there hadn’t been a squeak out of them about marathoning over the previous two years. So…

  “What organisation are you from? When’s the race going to be, and where? But perhaps you haven’t got that far yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter what organisation I’m from, but,” her voice dropped to a conspiratorial tone, “I can assure you that there are some very, very important people involved.” An even more hushed tone. “Downing Street is interested.”

  If that were true, it would be quite likely to sink any widespread interest in integrated marathons for some time, certainly as far as London was concerned. She continued: “But the other matters you asked about: it’s going to be held in Hyde Park, in September, and there’ll be laps. And there’ll be teams of Department of Health engineers round the course, together with pits for servicing the chairs and making any necessary repairs to the chairs as the race unfolds.”

  “But people don’t use Department of Health wheelchairs for racing.”

  “Oh,” she said, evidently quite puzzled. “Are there any other kinds of wheelchair?”

  In the immortal words of the “News of the World” in a rather different context, I made my excuses and left. But I still hadn’t found out what organisation lay behind the plan.

  The explanation came in a copy letter from Mike, together with a copy of a letter he had received back in November from Jim Russell. This was the same Jim Russell who had taken part in the People’s Marathon 18 months earlier, completing the race in 4 hours 50 minutes, and who had done at least one marathon since (I think), though I knew neither the place nor time. Now, he revealed that Motability was planning to stage the first National Wheelchair Marathon in September 1983. (Motability was – and is – an organisation which acquires new cars at a discounted price and leases them to disabled people in exchange for what used to be called their Mobility Allowance.) There were to be three events: one for children, one for electric wheelchairs, and a full-length marathon for self-propelled wheelchairs. The purpose of this event was three-fold: “To raise funds for Motability and other participating charities; to heighten public awareness of Motability’s work; and to bring their variety and development [of wheelchairs], as well as the skills necessary in handling them, into sharper focus”. (Note the absence, other than in the overall title, of any idea of competition; it would seem to be mainly an event promoting Motability.) In pursuit of all this, would he, Mike O’Flynn, send the number of people in wheelchairs in each of the BSAD regions, and the proportion of these who would be potential participants. As a carrot, he added “Mr Jimmy Savile has accepted Motability’s invitation to be associated with the Marathon.”

  One comment worth making here is that, with the well-known exception of Gerry Kinsella and the Greenbank project, most people (wheelchair athletes) didn’t do marathons with the purpose of raising funds (except, perhaps, to buy a proper racing chair for themselves), but rather, just to do them. No one would have expected Hugh Jones or Joyce Smith, our top British runners at the time, to have as their main reason for running to raise funds for a favourite charity through sponsorship, or even to buy a better pair of running shoes; why should wheelchair athletes be any different?

  Two months later, on January 28th, Mike wrote a stalling reply (at that stage, we were still hopeful of getting into London), suggesting that Jim Russell contact me about the proposed “National Wheelchair Marathon”. I never heard anything more, from either Jim or Motability, and as far as I know no Motability-sponsored event ever took place.

  The Greater London Council (continued)

  I went to the meeting on 30th November but remember absolutely nothing about it. The only clue lies in what happened afterwards: there is a copy of a letter I sent to Tony Banks on December 3rd (only Harrington and Pitt had been present, and maybe Birkett; probably, they suggested I write to Banks as a matter of protocol). In it, on behalf of BSAD, I thanked him for the meeting with the others; assured him that with the imminent breakthrough on a wheelchair section we would make sure the GLC was given full credit for this; recognised that there was still a meeting of the governors to take place; and said that we would set in train various administrative arrangements in order that, when confirmation finally came through, we would already have
done as much as possible to minimise the additional burden we would have created. This was copied to Harrington and Pitt as well as Mike and Jenny.

  There were two further letters from Jenny, on December 7th and 16th, the first being largely about administrative matters but including the important information that a week earlier LBC radio had announced that the GLC were inviting 20 wheelchairs to take part in the inaugural London Wheelchair Marathon. This broadcast had led to Jenny putting a short item in the regional newsletter about the 20 places for wheelchairs in the race, of which 10 would be reserved for athletes from London, and the two news items together provoked a flurry of enquiries to the local office. Someone must have been in touch with Jenny – not me – and told her that things were not so far advanced. So, almost as soon as the newsletter went out, the information about a wheelchair section had to be withdrawn. At this stage, all she could do was to back-track onto the strict status quo: that a wheelchair section had yet to be confirmed, but there was a race in the Docklands on the 18th , a race which would become a qualifying race if a wheelchair race as part of London was eventually confirmed.

  The second letter, on December 16th, was rather more interesting. It included an account of her meeting Chris Brasher at a conference on Sport in the Community which had been organised by … Peter Pitt; Chris Brasher chaired it. Here is the meat of the letter:

  “It was not until after the conference I got the chance to talk to Chris Brasher about wheelchair entrants in the London Marathon in any detail, though I had raised it from the floor. Chris had only just received the letter from the GLC, and was able to explain to me that it would be impossible for wheelchairs to precede the race in 1983. The timing is such that the first runners arrive at Buckingham Palace just as the Changing of the Guard has finished; this is apparently a shortened version following a special dispensation from the palace. The whole race runs on such a tight schedule then, including the closure of a motorway exit, that it would be impossible to have an earlier start for wheelchair entrants in 1983. If this is going to be achieved in 1984 it would seem that this can only happen: 1) if BSAD works towards this end now and it would seem sensible for Michael O’Flynn to make a formal approach to Chris Brasher. 2) For 1983 the best we could hope for is wheelchair entrants at the back or you may think it preferable to seek another venue for the BSAD National Marathon. Chris suggested the one in the Lake District …” [this was Windermere]