Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon
Page 19
“The wheelchairs MUST start first next year so this doesn’t happen again. Was very frustrated as we have warned this was bound to happen.”
Further comment seems superfluous. Except that, the following year, heed had been taken, and the wheelchairs did start first – congratulations to Hugh Brasher, Chris Brasher’s son, who by now was race director. I haven’t had the opportunity of talking to him about the troubles we had so long ago – it seems unlikely that Chris would have made no mention of the issue at home when it was all bubbling up. But further congratulations are in order, for in 2014 it wasn’t only the wheelchairs who had their headstart. The cameras also highlighted a group of blind runners, elite blind runners with their guides, who were taking part in the International Paralympic Committee’s (IPC) World Championship marathon race for blind athletes. And further, there was a group of elite amputee runners (leg amputees only, I think) taking part in their IPC-sponsored World Championship event. The congratulations are due not only to Hugh Brasher and his team for managing to accommodate the complicated arrangements that must have been necessary, but also to the IPC, who saw, and seized, the opportunity of locating their own World Championships within the framework of such a prestigious event as London. I hope Hugh Brasher’s dad would have been proud.
Postscript
Notes on a few of the people who have featured to a greater or lesser extent in the story above. There are no doubt many others, of whom I have no knowledge, who played a part in getting a wheelchair section established in the Marathon.
Chris Brasher
Since dropping out of the organising group for the wheelchair event, I had no contact with him. Interestingly, at some point he switched from writing for The Observer to writing for The Sunday Times. He died in 2003, and there was a memorial service held at the “journalists’ church”, St Bride’s in Fleet Street. For all our battles, I still think he was a great man, and I’d much rather have had him on our side from the start.
John Disley
Similarly to my lack of contact with Brasher, I had none with Disley, except once. I had been appointed by successive Sports Ministers to serve on the GB Sports Council, and subsequently the English Sports Council, between 1988 and 2001. One of the jobs I took on was to chair the Plas y Brenin Advisory Committee, a group which drew together all the users of the centre to advise the Councils on how far the centre was meeting their needs. This role continued after my formal appointment to the English Sports Council finished. In 2005 there was a celebratory dinner held at PyB to mark 50 years since it came into the ownership of the CCPR. John Disley was there, as the first senior instructor, and I was there, as chair of the PyB committee. In the crush before the sit-down dinner, the crowds parted and there was Disley, right in front of me. “Hello, John.” He looked baffled, first of all – he would have had no idea how I could have come to be at such an event. But the bafflement turned rapidly to what looked like hostility: he wouldn’t talk, and he turned away to find someone else to talk to. Very sad, really. He died in 2016.
Bill Parkinson
Having played such an important role in getting the Derwentwater affair going, and after taking part in the attempted canoe-camping trip in Scotland, he just disappeared from the scene. There was a rumour (there were always lots of rumours amongst those who knew him) that he had gone to America, but like the best of rumours this could be neither substantiated nor refuted.
Ivor Mitchell (“Mitch”)
When I first met him, Mitch was the headmaster of a local special school in Birmingham which educated especially children with physical disabilities. He was the driving force behind a fund-raising campaign to build a swimming pool at the school, and was passionate about ensuring that the pupils from his school had worthwhile activities to do having left school, employment for some but sport and physical recreation for all. He became a vice- chairman of BSAD, and was eventually awarded an OBE for his work.
Liz Dendy
Liz was a senior officer at the GB Sports Council, whose portfolio included Women’s Sport and Sport for Disabled People. She did much voluntary work in two fields, Riding for the Disabled, and the International Cerebral Palsy Sport and Recreation Association, rising to be head of each. She was awarded an MBE, and subsequently an OBE, for this work. She retired from the Sports Council in 1995.
Jenny Ward
As has already been noted, Jenny came to post-1983 meetings until she left for Switzerland in August of that year. I have had no news of her since then.
Mike O’Flynn
Mike O’Flynn just disappeared from the scene. He wasn’t at the crucial April 7th meeting in County Hall, nor at the following press conference at the Waldorf; and I don’t remember seeing him at/around the event itself. He must have resigned from BSAD, but I don’t recall any announcement about it.
Philip Lewis
I saw Philip only once after the events described above, at a rugby match at Twickenham in about 1992.
Julia Allton
Julia was a senior lecturer in PE at Tower Hamlets Institute. She was a main organiser of the Docklands trial run in December 1982, and I first met her at the Department for Education conference in Birmingham in February 1983. She was very keen to help with the campaign, and became a kind of unofficial deputy to Jenny on the day.
Illtyd Harrington
Illtyd Harrington was originally a teacher of English. First elected to the GLC in 1964, he was deputy leader between 1973 and 1977, and then again between 1981 and 1984. We (BSAD) didn’t originally write to him over the marathon business, but after our first meeting with Tony Banks and Peter Pitt, Banks’ deputy, it must have been obvious to them that, as one of the Governors of the Marathon, he was high enough politically to take the case on, if he thought it worthwhile to do so. He did, and as we have seen, led the final confrontation with Brasher and Disley. He died in 2015 aged 84.
Tony Banks
Not to be confused with Tony Banks the musician from Genesis, this Tony Banks was first elected to the GLC in 1970. He was made Chair of the Arts and Recreation Committee in 1981, and it was in this capacity that we wrote to him in 1982. He was strongly in favour of the wheelchair event, but although he had been elected to the GLC before Illtyd Harrington, must have recognised the latter as having greater political clout, and hence drew him into the campaign. Subsequent to the abolition of the GLC, he was elected as MP for Newham North West in 1997, and to his astonishment was appointed Minister for Sport in 1997, a post he held for two years. He left the Commons in 2005, was appointed to a peerage, and died in 2006.
Mark Agar
Mark was the first person in this country (I think) to have completed a full, open, competitive marathon, and as such probably held the national record for a few weeks in 1981. But after the Great North Run and the Birmingham marathon later that year, he disappeared from the racing scene.
Mick Karaphillides
We first met at the 1983 Reading Half-Marathon. I never discovered the reason for his absence from the London Marathon a few weeks later, but we came across each other in different races over the next few years, notably in the British–American Marathon at Basildon later in 1983. It was in this race that Mick became the first British athlete to break 3 hours for the distance, with a time of 2h 54m; unless, that is, Gerry Kinsella had already managed to get there first (I never found out). The last encounter with Mick was when going to the marathon in Brno in September 1988.
Gerry Kinsella
In setting up the Greenbank project, Gerry was trying to offer disabled people on Merseyside the kinds of opportunities which came only late to him. There is an extensive website about the project, which offers training in IT and office skills, self-advocacy, sport and other topics concerned with improving the life chances of disabled people in what at times must seem a distinctly unfriendly, if not downright hostile, world. To those looking at Liverpool from the outside, his fundraising efforts seemed to involve the whole of Merseyside. He gained the wholesale support o
f the “Two Bishops” – the Catholic Derek Worlock and the Anglican David Sheppard – and continued fund-raising for many years, including repeating the Land’s End– John o’Groats trip in 1989 with Vince Ross – in a tandem, articulated fore-and-aft wheelchair built by Vince especially for the event. He was awarded an MBE for his work creating the Greenbank centre.
Philip Craven
Injured in a climbing accident at the age of only 16, Philip was already a seasoned wheelchair basketball international when, aged 22, he wrote to me in hospital. In the 1990s Sports ’n Spokes selected their world’s best-ever team, and he was one of the five chosen. Awarded an MBE for his basketball prowess, he rose to become Secretary, and then Chairman, of the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation. Further achievements saw him become President of the International Paralympic Committee (retired 2017), the “disabled” equiv-alent of the International Olympic Committee, in 2002, joining the IOC as a full member in 2003, and being awarded a knighthood in 2005. It’s a long way from falling out of a wheelchair in Heidelberg.
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Published by Clink Street Publishing 2017
Copyright © 2017
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