An Athletics Compendium

TheUteratureofAthletics suffered from the loosenessof their organisation, their lack of any centralgoverning body. In 1948, the Edinburgh Scot Tom Young formedthe ScottishGamesAssociation, drawingtogether an almostdead pedestrianismand the surviving Highland,Border and LakelandGames. The SGA in no way resembledits equivalentamateur organisations, being essentiallya loose assemblyof localgames. British ruralgames had, from the mid-nineteenthcentury, been the provinceof mainlyagricultural workersin field events, to which wasadded a mix of athletes from mining and steel communities for the running competitions. Shunned by amateur athletics, rural sports possessed no coaching, no clubs, no facilities, no developing nationaland internationalcompetitivestructure to stimulateperformance.By1914, trial and error performancedevelopment in ruralsports hadvirtuallyended and it was only in the period a decade after the Second World War that there was a fitful revival in performance, partly stimulated by amateur training methods and defections from amateur ranks. Alas,the sport suffered from a shrinkingbase in agricultural and heavy industry,and the competition providedby more activeamateur bodies,now supported byGovernment grants. Post-World War II performances were therefore for some time almost static. Indeed, hadDonaldDinnie or A.A. Cameronreturnedto compete in aHighlandGames of the late1940s, theywouldhave been able to dominate them justas theyhad done in their prime. A paradox in money-based Highland Games is the fact that they were almost invariablysponsoredand supportedby locallairdswho hadbeen nurtured in the public school/universityamateur tradition.Had the lairds,in the finalquarter of the nineteenth century, insisted on pri2es in kind,rather than cash, then the Games wouldhave been amateurand a weakBritishfieldeventsculture mightwellhavebeen transformed. Sucha policywould almost certainly have brought British professional foot-racingto a rapid conclusion. Our only record of the Lakeland Games of north-west England is Machell's detailed account of the Grasmere Games Some Records of the Annual Grasmere Sports 1852-1910 (1911).Machell's book is much narrowerin scope than the works of either McCombieSmithor Donaldsonand givesno generalpictureof what wasundoubtedlya rich Lakeland sports culture. Similarly, no detailed account exists of the even richer BorderGames movement or of a denseamateur Irish rural culture. It is also sad that the last descriptionsof the HighlandGames liein the Edwardian period.We have therefore little idea from the literature of the great Scottish 'heavies' Clark,McLennanand Starkeyin the 1920-40 periodor evenof the greatestScottishall- rounder of all time. JayScott, who competedin the 1950sand 1960s. The entry of the great amateurshot-putter Arthur Rowein 1964 injectednew life into Highland Games and Rowe, quickly absorbing the skills of hammer, caber and ringweight, demolished records that had stood for decades, and provided excellent [ xxiv ]