Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon Read online

  Wheelchairs, Perjury and

  the London Marathon

  Tim Marshall

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  Hospital

  Stepping Out

  New Horizons

  A Churchill Fellowship

  Derwentwater

  The Internationals 1978

  Chicago

  Marathons

  The Fellowship

  Derwentwater For Everyone

  Interlude

  Chris Brasher and John Disley

  The People’s Marathon

  1981: The Lakes Project

  Another Interlude

  Windermere

  A Final Interlude

  Next Steps

  The First Battle Of Marathon

  Breathing Space

  Humber Bridge

  Ullswater

  We Are The Champions

  The Second Battle of Marathon The Greater London Council

  An Unexpected Threat

  The Greater London Council (continued)

  The Third Battle of Marathon

  Another Enquiry

  A Last Throw

  Reading Half-Marathon

  Does He Take Sugar?

  Wolverhampton Marathon

  Breakthrough

  Truth Will Out

  Aftermath

  1984 And Beyond

  Postscript

  Copyright

  Preface

  The idea for writing this book came to me during a prolonged stay in the high dependency unit of the Spinal Injury Centre in Middlesbrough in early 2013. As I chatted with one of the nurses, she let slip that she had once done the London Marathon, in 1983, the first year that she was allowed to run that distance, having reached the age of 18. 1983 was also the first year that wheelchairs were let in, so we swapped memories of our experiences. The idea for a book arose from that conversation, and this is the story of how the wheelchair section came about.

  Thanks to Kathy for inadvertently provoking the idea in the first place (she really didn’t realise what she had unleashed!); to Mick, Mark, Denise, Gerry, Jo, Gordon, Joe, Ric, Stuart, Chas and all the others whose names I have forgotten but who were part of the early struggle; to Caroline, Jon, Libora and Liz for their comments on earlier drafts; to Liz also for her more than tacit support, which resulted in the crucial contact with the GLC; and finally to Caroline again, who, when friends have (unwisely) asked about my involvement with London, has had to suffer an abbreviated version of the whole book on innumerable occasions. Text within square brackets convey my own thoughts and feelings, often after the event. Any remaining inaccuracies and faults are of course mine. I can only plead the fallibility of memory of events over 30 years ago, and that the documentary records are rather incomplete.

  Hospital

  In September 1972 I was climbing in the Peak District with a friend from work, on the gritstone at Birchens Edge just above the Robin Hood pub where the road from Baslow to Sheffield splits off from that to Chesterfield. Late on the Saturday afternoon I was trying to pull up a narrow crack on finger jams, but failed, and fell off, about 20 feet, landing full square on both feet and getting a compression fracture of the spine. Taken first of all to Chesterfield Royal Infirmary, two days later I was transferred to Lodge Moor Hospital in Sheffield, the regional centre for the management of spinal injuries. This was to be my home for the next eight months.

  The hospital was high up on the moors at the western edge of the city, with no buildings beyond it. In the acute ward, you could hear the clip-clop of horses from the local riding school as they trotted along the roads beyond the grounds of the hospital; and, depending which way you were facing when lying in bed, you could see the helmets bobbing up and down above the dry stone walls, the sight accentuated when, as often seemed to happen that winter, the fields were covered in snow. Round to the right, and way down in a deep-cut valley, was the A57 road that came out of Sheffield, over to the Ladybower dam, and on to the Snake Pass, offering access to the high moorland of the Dark Peak. It was inviting, even if the immediate prospect of getting there was non-existent.

  But the outdoors wasn’t entirely out of bounds. One day I woke to a snow-covered paradise. It had snowed overnight, well over an inch, and the sky was a crystal clear blue; I decided to go out and enjoy this.. Despite the blazing sun, it was very cold as I pushed the wheelchair through an inch of snow up to the helipad at the back of the hospital, and sat there surrounded by the snow, in utter quietness, soaking in the pleasures of being outside, in the country once again. Almost everyone thought I was mad, but the ward sister – who could beat me at Scrabble, and was altogether a very impressive lady – knew, for me, what that experience was about; simply magical.

  The physiotherapist assigned to me, Harry Charles, was a leading light in the hospital sports club – strictly speaking, the Spinal Injury Sports Club – so even though I was stuck in bed for the first 10 weeks, there was an early introduction to the sports side of rehabilitation. The gym, in which all the sports took place, had originally been an ordinary ward (South 2, or S 2) when the whole hospital was an isolation hospital for infectious diseases; and there was still one ward functioning as the regional infectious diseases unit. But S 2 became the gym when the Spinal Injury Unit was established there in the early 1950s.

  While I was still in bed in Lodge Moor I had seen a clip on the BBC’s Saturday afternoon “Grandstand” programme taken from the Paralympic Games held in Heidelberg. They showed a British athlete in a wheelchair doing what the programme called a slalom, pushing the wheelchair along a pre-set track, tipping the wheelchair onto its rear wheels to bounce up or down a step, ducking low like a limbo dancer to get under a low tape, and so on. My memory of this broadcast finished with the man in the wheelchair doing a back-wheel balance on the two rear wheels, and in my memory the wheelchair fell over backwards and the man fell out. The programme had introduced him as Philip Craven.

  A few weeks later, still stuck in bed, I had a letter from France. I didn’t know anyone in France; what on earth was this about? It turned out to be from the same Philip Craven, who at that time, he told me, was teaching wheelchair basketball, and other sports too, at a rehabilitation centre at Kerpape in southern Brittany. (The connection to him was obscure: a daughter of some friends of my parents had been at university with Philip, already in a wheelchair from a climbing accident at the age of 16. She contacted him about me, and so he wrote to me.) This was the first instance of contact with Philip that was to continue, on and off, for the next 40 years.

  Once I was allowed to start getting up the gym was an obvious destination. Other than Wednesdays it was used routinely as part of the rehabilitation programme, but on Wednesday afternoons it was used by ex-patients who came up for a sort of mini sports day, when as far as possible the gym was cleared of moveable equipment to enable people to play battington (a kind of badminton but with solid rackets), table tennis, snooker and wheelchair basketball. The size of the central section of the gym, maybe 15 yards by 6, made basketball – no more than 4 a side at maximum and more usually 3 – especially exciting to watch.

  It was Harry Charles (actually a Remedial Gymnast rather than a physiotherapist) who got me playing table tennis, along with his successor John Honey, just finishing his training in physiotherapy. Swimming was also sometimes on offer, very good for paralysed limbs, but I’d never been a water sort of person, had never learned to swim, and I didn’t take up the pportunity then. It was Harry, though, who first aroused my interest in wheelchair sports, and who encouraged me to go to the national championships held annually at Stoke Mand
eville.

  My first visit there was straight after being discharged from hospital. I had supposed that going to “The Nationals”, as the games were universally described, would involve a rigorous selection procedure. I had no idea what that might be, but presumably through some regional or club-based structure based on performance: were you good enough? The presumption was partly correct, in that the hospital sports club made the entry for you, including such details as sex, level of disability and which sports you were going to do; but it seemed that anyone could go, regardless of ability, provided that they were attached to an existing sports club. At that time the clubs were essentially hospital-based, and the hospitals were those with spinal injury units. So, there was “my” club – Lodge Moor Spinal Injury Sports Club – and clubs from other hospitals: Stoke Mandeville, Pinderfields (Wakefield), Southport and so on. The only exception to this that I could discover was the Scots, who came down as the Scottish Paraplegic Association, rather than from Musselburgh or Philipshill, the two hospitals in Scotland then offering specialised treatment for spinal injuries.

  One memory from that first visit to Stoke was of meeting Philip Craven, but also of meeting a colleague of his from the Southport club, Gerry Kinsella, who was later to do remarkable things in setting up and running the Greenbank project on Merseyside. This was a project teaching the empowerment of people with disabilities through education, employment training and so on. At that time the Southport club was a powerhouse in UK wheelchair basketball; Philip and Gerry were both in the international squad.

  Stoke, however, wasn’t the only sports event for the spinal injury community. Most of the spinal units put on a day’s sports event, featuring all the usual sports: basketball, bowls, table-tennis, field events, and so on. There were the Pinderfields games, the Lodge Moor games, the Southport games … These events also provided the opportunity for those aspiring to international selection for both more competition and to strut their stuff in front of the selectors, who thus had a wider range of events in which to appraise someone’s abilities. But there were occasionally events which were unique to the particular centre. At Sheffield, the last event of the day was always what was called a marathon. Of course, it wasn’t anything like a marathon: it began on the outdoor basketball court, turned left along a poorly-surfaced road which ran along the back of the hospital, turned round at the end and came back along the road, and up to the helipad. There it did a 180° turn and back to the finish at the basketball court; maybe ¾ mile in total. There were usually 30 or 40 participants, and during the several years that I went to the games, the winner was always the aforementioned Gerry Kinsella, from the Southport club; this was a pointer to the future, though I didn’t know it at the time.

  A final memory of my first visit to Stoke was of Professor Guttmann’s farewell address to the assembled athletes. This was 25 years after the first games had been held in 1948, and he lauded particularly two people – John and Gwen Buck – who had attended every National Games right from the beginning, both achieving international selection in bowls, both of them fine examples of making it in the spinal injury world through the medium of sport, and all starting at Stoke Mandeville 25 years ago. Yes, I thought, I’ll be here in 25 years’ time, just like they are now…

  Stepping Out

  It didn’t quite work out like that. Becoming involved with a wheelchair basketball club from the Nottingham/Derby area, a breakaway from the original Lodge Moor club, and successive visits to the nationals, slowly opened my eyes to give a broader view. Firstly, Stoke appeared to be an organisation limited to spinal injury wheelchair users, not wheelchair users with other causes of having lost the use of their legs, or other disabilities altogether; somehow, that didn’t seem quite right. (My initial understanding of the place wasn’t strictly correct: the lettering across the outside of the main sports hall announced it to be “Stoke Mandeville Stadium for the Paralysed and Other Disabled”. It was just that, at the time, the “Other Disabled” seemed conspicuously absent.) And secondly, many of the people I met in the sports world seemed largely to have their lives, especially their recreational lives, totally described by, even defined by, their disability. Of course, this wasn’t true of everyone, and those of whom it was true seemed quite contented; but I didn’t want such a life. I had had the good fortune of being appointed to a lectureship – more on promise than achievement, I think – in the department where I’d been working for two years before the accident. I also found a place in a hall of residence, where I eventually became an assistant warden. The job, and living in a hall of residence, however artificial in relation to “real” life, brought about a wider perspective. Disability wasn’t one of my fundamental characteristics like gender or ethnicity. It was there all right, all the time, but it didn’t define what or who I was.

  For me, it was important to keep contact with the climbing club, the social group with whom I felt the closest affinity, and within which I’d already developed a number of good friendships which survive to this day, over 40 years later. Curiously, this had been quite easy to do when in hospital, as the club owned an old gritstone cottage barely 5 miles from the hospital, so that the ward was frequently invaded on Sunday evenings by a large group of climbers on their way back to London from a weekend away; visiting rules were quite relaxed at the time. This contact was part of the essentially outdoor recreational lifestyle which had become so important to me, and which I was determined to keep going, somehow, once out of hospital. Difficult in the first year out, it became a lot easier once I had my own transport (a van) fitted out for sleeping in, so that I could go away for whole weekends once again. Of course, going away at weekends didn’t mean I actually went climbing. Whilst the others went off to the crags, I began exploring disused railway lines and forest trails, which could be found in abundance in both the Peak District and North Wales. And failing these, there was always the possibility of using minor roads.

  In the mid- to late-1970s I was still involved with the Notts and Derby club, mostly for wheelchair basketball, but also from time to time for table-tennis. Local authority recreation departments would stage a day, or an afternoon, of disability sport, and invite local disabled sports clubs to take part. Thus it was that, one grey, dank, drizzly November day in a sports centre in what felt like the back of beyond – actually, the outer regions of Stoke on Trent – we arrived to play an exhibition game of basketball, and to try anything else that was going. One such was short mat bowls, which by some extraordinary luck I managed to win, and win a small cup to boot. Club members were enthusiastic for me, pointing out that if I could transfer the skills I obviously had to outdoor greens, I could easily find myself on international trips to – well, all over. The prospect didn’t seem that enticing, certainly not in comparison with what I hoped – thought – the outdoors might yield, if only I could find out more. But how?

  Exploring outdoor activities further came about from a completely unexpected source. The concept of Town Twinning, which took off after the Second World War, drew together cities and towns from different countries with something in common. So, for example, a fishing town on the north-east coast of Scotland might be twinned with a fishing town from Brittany and a German town from the Friesland coast. The idea was to develop knowledge and understanding of the different cultures of peoples from countries which had spent much of the last 60 years fighting each other. Over the years, Birmingham had become twinned with Lyon, Frankfurt and Leipzig (then in East Germany). Thus it was that in the autumn of 1976 a group of people from Birmingham came together to go on an informal visit to Lyon for a swimming competition, and would I like to come? As a non-swimming table-tennis player there didn’t seem much point (except that a visit to Lyon would always be nice), but a table-tennis tournament was added so I was on the plane.

  Attached to the group that went to Lyon, both as a general helper/carer and as a qualified ASA instructor, was someone called Sheila Dobie, who in the past had been involved with the swimming group
from Stoke. Though I don’t remember at all, I must have talked to her about my interest in outdoor activities, because the next thing that happened, in early 1977, was getting a letter from someone called Liz Dendy at the Sports Council. She explained that she had been given my name by Sheila Dobie, who had told her of my interest in outdoor activities. Liz went on to say that this was an area the Sports Council was interested in, and they were organising a week-long event at Plas y Brenin, the national climbing centre in North Wales, for instructors of disabled people in outdoor activities, and that they needed some disabled people to act as role models (or guinea pigs, though that term was never used in official documentation). Would I be interested in taking part? Would I?

  New Horizons

  The designated week was the first week in June 1977, Silver Jubilee week. I had to obtain permission from my head of department to be absent during term time, not so difficult then as the students were approaching exams, there was no more teaching, and I was only peripherally involved with the exams. So I was allowed to go. But I had to learn to swim first, and this was done with the help of a couple of staff from the PE department at the university. It was pretty obvious, though, that swimming was not going to be one of my favourite activities, since I hated putting my face in the water, and only ever achieved a doggy paddle on my back. But at least, if I fell into water, I would be unlikely to drown.

  The weather in North Wales was awful, pouring with rain almost every day, but it didn’t seem to matter. There were some indoor sessions where different people explained how their disability affected the physical requirements of an activity (canoeing, sailing, skiing etc.). Practical sessions showed how people could overcome or circumvent the limitations imposed by the disability. I spent most of the time paddling a canoe, something called a Caranoe made by Frank Goodman from Valley Canoe Products in Nottingham.