When Chris Brasher came back from the 1979 New York Marathon along with John Disley he set about persuading the City of London to do the same and in March 1981 the first London Marathon set out from Greenwich to Buckingham Palace.
Back in 1954 I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Brasher along with Chris Chataway when they came to visit our Queens Park Harrier’s young athletes group who met at Kilburn Grammar School as a follow up to the first four minute mile by Roger Bannister. A group of about 20 went for a run together. An occasion never to be forgotten.
My athletic career came to a halt when I left university in 1963 when I started a career in Social Work. An occasional game of squash or rugby kept me going but married life and small children saw me put on weight. We were living in West Yorkshire and in an effort to regain some fitness I applied for the London Marathon and was accepted. My training consisted of about 5 times a week and my longest run was 20 miles. Together with a small group of local veterans we travelled to London on Friday and registered. Chris Brasher was at the reception desk and I introduced myself reminding him of our meeting 27 years before. He said he REMEMBERED! Whether that was true, I am not sure but he asked me if I could return the favour by getting together a small group of veterans to do some publicity with Hugh Jones the men’s favourite and Joyce Smith the ladies favourite. The plan was they would meet at Westminster Bridge at 10.45am on Saturday for a photo shot with the press.
I was delighted to accede to his request and quickly got a small group of Scottish and Irish veteran (over 40’s) runners to agree. We met at 10.30am. Waited and waited for the celebrities to arrive but they did not come. At just before 11am the photographers started dismantling their tripods. We felt disappointed but one photographer suggested that we ran over the bridge as a group. We did this several times and ran back to the hotel and had to tell Chris that it had not worked out.
On Sunday morning the excitement was buzzing along with the adrenaline. I could hear someone calling my name and a friend was waiving a copy of the Sunday Observer news paper showing a picture on the front page of our group crossing the Westminster Bridge.
That really set me up and I ran in the rain finishing along Birdcage Walk in a time of 2 hours 56.minutes. It was in 1982 that runners came over the Westminster Bridge, but we had done it first a year before.
Henry Muchamore
Memory added on June 4, 2015
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