Jack Holden Interview (By David Thurlow, N.U.T.S.)
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- Published: 29 May 2012
David Thurlow (N.U.T.S. - National Union Track Statisticians) recalls a meeting with Jack Holden, a marathoning legend. This article first appeared in Track Stats Volume 38 No.4 in 2000. It is reproduced here thanks to the kindness of David Thurlow and also Bob Phillips the Editor of Track Stats.
“I decided I was going to go – it was either Joe Stalin or King George!”
When the competition lined up for the 1948 Olympic marathon at Wembley Stadium in
The change had taken place earlier than he had anticipated, and it came about because he missed running in the National cross-country championships. Competitors from the
Holden was extremely angry and said that he would never run cross-country again – and he never did. He was a man of strong principles and still is at the age of 93. He remains very articulate, with an excellent memory of this international athletics career which lasted from 1929 to 1950. He is a Christian man who went to Communion before every race. He is family man with two daughters. His honesty and integrity was well known and respected. A great man to meet!
When he made the decision to take up marathon-running seriously he changed his training routine from twice a week with his club mates – a hard six or so bash on grass or on the road – to five days a week. The exception were Saturdays, which were days for the family unless he was racing, and Sundays, which were for church-going and on which he only ever competed once and that was because he head confused the dates of a race and was committed to it.
In those five days, he still averaged 100 miles a week, and he was the first marathon runner to take on such a heavy schedule. All this running was done after five ‘o’ clock in the evening at the end of a working day at the Palethorpe sausage-making firm where he was employed as a groundsman but described as a general labourer in case the nature of his job broke the AAA rules!
It meant that his way of life had to fit in with family, church and work. With the agreement of his wife, he went straight out running as soon as he got home from work. He told his wife how long he would be and she had his bath running as he got back and then prepared his evening meal. Holden fondly recalls that on one occasion when he was out running, a cyclist came alongside him on a steep hill and asked him why he did it. Holden told him it was because he didn’t have the threepence for the bus fare, and the cyclists stopped and offered him money!
Holden ate 100 eggs a week, plus mussels and oysters which he kept to supplement his diet, and he did all this on very small wages. When he ran abroad he lost pay, except for major events, but he took his holidays with the family, so that they wouldn’t go without rather than use them for running. Holden now has three grandchildren and since his wife died 15 years ago after 50 years of marriage he has lived at the home of his daughter, Joan in
His first AAA marathon victory was achieved in
As Holden explains: “I had the lead in the race and was the favourite. I was almost a certainty; I knew I could win it. But them I blistered badly and had to come out. I’d had blisters many times before. They would burst and sting, but I carried on. This time I’d overdone the hardening and made the skin like leather and I couldn’t carry on. It had blistered under the skin at 17 miles I had to drop out.”
Tommy Richards, who never before or after was close to Holden in road races, finished 2nd to the Argentinean, Delfo Calvera, and Holden has never really got over the memory of the day. “I was so disappointed that I had let everyone down,” he reflects. “I could not run any more after the Olympics because of letting them down. I thought I was going to die, I was so upset about it, I felt really ill. I kept on training but not racing.”
It was Holden’s religious beliefs that helped him to work it out. “After considering it all I realised I was not meant to win. It was an act of God. I had been so sure of winning that I’d packed my clothes to take my wife and two little girls on holiday, and there I met a woman who told me I’d been stopped from winning by God. But I replied that it was definitely not so, and that all I’d ever asked him for was to reproduce the form I had shown in training, and that in a race I would force myself to do better. Then it was Jack Crump, the British ream manager, who worked on me to start racing again. He said to me, ‘Hang on until we have someone to take your place. We haven’t got anyone.’”
Not caring if he “died on the course” Holden recovers his zest for racing.
Later in the year Holden’s wife – “behind every great man is a wonderful woman, and she was” – timed him on some of his occasional training runs and discovered that he was, in fact, running very fast, “I didn’t feel that I was,” Holden says, “but the next week I timed myself and found I was running even faster when I was dying emotionally.”
He had run the SLH 30 again after the Olympics, but his road back began with the annual Morpeth-to-Newcastle race on New Year’s Day 1949 when “still smarting over the Olympics, vowing I wouldn’t run any more and thinking I didn’t care if a died on the course” he ran right away from the field, including Richards, and smashed the course record in one of his four consecutive wins in the event. He also won the 1949 AAA marathon comfortably in 2:34:10:6 and the next year his hard training brought him another AAA title win by almost six minutes in a lifetime best of 2:31:03.4. The second man home was Edward Denison, of the Milorarian club and the Army, with whom Holden had shared his first track international at three miles against
The year of 1950 was his great one, erasing the shame of the Olympics. Holden was favourite for the Empire title in
“Everything was in my favour,” Holden explains. “I was favourite and fit enough to win it, and then everything went wrong, I knew that I should have had a new pair of shoes, but you can’t run a marathon in new shoes. There was a cloudburst at the start and water came over the kerbs of the road. My old plimsoll shoes burst, and because I couldn’t stop and ask someone for a couple of handkerchiefs to wrap round my feet I threw the shoes away and ran the last nine miles barefoot. It was then that a dog leapt out of the crowd. It was a Great Dane and it didn’t attack me, but people thought that if had because there was blood on my back from my feet. When I finished I ran straight across to the microphone to ask that whoever had found my shoes should bring them back to me. I gave them to an old couple who’d been helpful to me.”
Back in England Holden ran in the “Sheffield Telegraph” marathon which he had twice won before but pulled out when leading into rain and a headwind at 18 miles. The Jack Crump got to work on Holden again, telling him he could win the European title, too, and after wins in the Polytechnic and AAA races he duly went off to
In the dressing room the Britons came across the two Russian competitors, and Holden, who has a sharp sense of humour, recalls their encounter. “
“I never took a drink during a race because I’d found that if I took a drink in training it took 20 to 30 minutes to settle down again, but I always made up some lemonade and sugar in a small brandy bottle just in case I needed it. Somehow, the British coach, Geoff Dyson, dropped it, and Jack Crump told him to tell the people out of the course that if I asked for a drink they should ignore me!
“I was ahead, but when I came to the hill the Russian, Varin, came up to my shoulder. He obviously had the same theory as me that if you catch someone up you don’t stay with them. I believe in psychology, and I guessed he thought I was a little chap with plenty of guts. He came up to me again, but then we came to a drinks station and I saw his hand go out for a bottle I decided that was when I was going to go – it was either Joe Stalin or King George – and I did.”
Holden won by 32 seconds from Veikko Karvonen, of
Back home after an overnight journey, and there’s just time for breakfast before work
It was typical of the way of life even for champions in those days that when Holden arrived back in his home town at 6’o’ clock in the morning, having travelled overnight by rail and sea, and called into work to say that he had won, his boss told him to go home for breakfast before reporting in for duty – which he did an hour later!
Holden ran only one more marathon before retiring because the former AAA six miles and 10 miles champion, Jim Peters, who had been 8th in the Wembley Olympics 10,000m, was now being trained with new ideas of fast running by the 1928 Olympic 5000m runner, Johnny Johnston. Even so, the old fox saw off the young cub in the Finchley 20 miles road race because it had been instilled in Peters that Holden was only good up hills and could be beaten on the flat. The champion showed him that was not so by racing away to smash his own record by nearly three minutes and win by 96 seconds. Peters threw his shoes on the floor in exasperation demanding, “How am I going to beat him?” His coach said he would have to do more training.
Two months later Holden and Peters met again in the Polytechnic marathon from
Jim Peters ran under
The start of Jack Holden’s running career in the 1920s
John Thomas Holden was born in Bilston, in Staffordshire, on
His initial interest in sport was at a boxing gym where he kept in shape and had a few fights. He was a strong young man working in a foundry and when a local publican staged a three-mile race Holden was an onlooker and not only thought he could do better but told the winner so afterwards. When challenged, Holden claimed he had run in and won a lot of races – which wasn’t true – but the next time the three-mile race was held he took part in it and won easily. His prize was a pig, and this was to cause him some bother later in his running career when he declared his winnings. He had to be re-qualified as an amateur and years afterwards was accused by a jealous rival club president of having been reinstated (which was a quite different matter) and therefore been disqualified from international competition. Holden, never one to mince words or to hold back, wrote to the local paper and the allegation was withdrawn.
It was because claims were made to the AAA that he had broken the regulations by working in a job connected with athletics when he took up work as a groundsman with Palethorpe’s that he was described as a general labourer by his employers when a AAA official called to investigate the matter. In fact, there was much skulduggery in
Holden’s attitude did not always please officialdom. He went his own way and would not toe the line if he felt he was in the right, and that might have cost him a place in the 1946 European Championships marathon. After five years’ war service in the RAF as a physical training instructor he had one run in the
To show the selectors what they were missing Holden asked his old friend, Joe Binks, who was the former World mile record-holder with 4:16:8 in 1902 and was now athletics correspondent for the “News of the World” to organise a 30 miles track race at the White City. Holden won in 3:00:16.8 for a World’s best time, despite having to run an extra four yards every lap in the second lane, and passed the marathon point in a faster time than Mikko Hietanen, of
During the 1930s Holden had proved he could hold his own on the track with any of the good home talent that was around. As well as his AAA titles and innumerable wins in Midlands races, he was 4th in the 1934 Empire Games six miles and 4th again in his last major track race in the AAA six miles in 1937. His best times were around
Altogether, Holden won 11 Staffordshire county track titles at the mile, 3 miles and 4 miles and he was on seven occasions
“I never really concentrated on anything until I took up marathon running, and that became a way of life – almost my whole life – and training became second nature. It was a sport and I did it for fun to keep as fit as anybody else. If I had my time again I would do the same.”
Immediate success on the track and over the country in the green-and-white of Tipton Harriers
When he gave up boxing to concentrate on running he gained selection in his first season of 1926 for the Tipton Harriers team at the National cross-country championship in their distinctive green and white hooped shirts which are still so prominent in competition more than 70 years later. His twice-a-week training runs were on the road or round a makeshift track laid out with markers and jackets on the Dudley cricket ground, and from the start he showed his toughness by walking five miles to one meeting, starting half-a-lap behind the others in a five-lap race, and turning the laughter of the crowd to cheers as he caught all the other runners and won the race. At another meeting he won the mile race and the two miles by a lap and then finished 4th in the 440 yards.
When he was 2nd to the future Olympic marathon silver-medallist, Ernie Harper, in the 1929 AAA 10 miles he took his shoes off while leading at nine miles because he had got blisters and still finished a lap ahead of the 3rd man. That year he won his place in the
Yet despite having won the International on three occasions by 1935, he just could not win the National title, and he explains why. “It was because I was so determined to win it that I trained too hard. Then after a week with no training in disgust at losing the National I got back to running stone cold and won the International. Eventually it dawned on me that I was a fool, so I changed my training tactics and eased off, and I became the first man to win the National and International in the same year.”
Having placed in the National in successive years from 1929 onwards 9th, 4th, 8th, 3rd (to Alec Burn and George Bailey in 1932), 8th, 3rd again (to Sammy Dodd and Burns in 1934), 9th, 8th and 8th again, he at last won in 1938 to 1939 (the year of his “double”) and again after the war in 1946. He also won the Inter-counties title four times and the
During our interview Jack Holden wrote for me in a steady hand a list of his triumphs, including reference to many of the Royal Family to whom he had been presented. In one race with his old friend and marathon rival, Charles Cerou, In France they competed against horse-riders and cyclists and the winning horse dropped dead on the line. The prizes for the runners were set out on trestle tables, and it was inevitably Holden – who never took a single penny piece as a prize during his athletic career – who had his pick!
Voted “Sportsman of the Year” in 1950, Holden completed his career in fine style by winning a 15-miles road race in
Ian Buchanan, whose marvellous book, “Who’s Who of UK and GB International Athletes 1896 -1939,” is reviewed elsewhere in this issue of “Track Stats” provides the information for an intriguing footnote to Jack Holden’s career. The magazine ‘Athletics,’ which was the forerunner of ‘Athletics Weekly,’ published an article in the autumn of 1946 in reply to the dozens of letters received from readers on the subject of Holden’s non-selection for the marathon at the European Championship which had taken place that year in Oslo. In the article it was said that Holden had not been omitted through spite but because of a train of events which had left the selectors with a problem. Holden had won the