Athletics and Football (extract)

30 ATHLETICS Queen Square in 58 minutes. Eight years later a younggen­ tleman, with a jockey booted and spurred on his back, ran a match against an elderlyfat man (of the name of Bullock) running without a rider. The more extraordinarythe wager the more excitement it often caused amongst the public. A fish-hawker is reputed to have for a wager run seven miles, from Hyde Park Corner to Brentford, with 56 lbs. weight of fish on his head, in 45 minutes ! Another man trundled a coach-wheel eight miles in an hour round a platform erected in St. Giles's Fields. Another extraordinary match was one between a man on stilts against a man on foot, the former re­ ceiving twenty yards start in a hundred and twenty yards. What is more astounding is that the man upon the stilts won the match. A few examples mayalso be given of the many genuinely interesting matches which were brought off. As regards the alleged times, however, many of them are as obviously absurd as that supposed to have been done in the four-mile race in Woodstock Park, ofwhich we have alreadyspoken. An Italian is said to have run from Hyde Park Corner to Windsor in an hour and three-quarters. Another man walked from Bishops- gate to Colchester and back (102 miles)in twelvehours ! In 1750 two well-known ' peds,' Abron and Temple, ran a four- mile match for 100 guineas a side, the former winning. In 1762 another man, for a wager of thirty guineas, walkedseven miles just within an hour and five minutes on the Kingsland Road. Many of the matches (and these were the most popu­ lar ones) consisted of feats of endurance and long-distance matches against time. One Mr. John Hague, in 1762,walked 100 miles in 23 hrs. 15 min. How little notion the public had of the speed at which a good man could travel is evident from the nature of manyof the matches which weremade. A clerk, for instance, won a wager of fifty guineas bywalkingfour milesin less than fifty minutes. This bet was made in 1766, and four years afterwardswe hear of another man winning a wager by running a mile through the streets between Charter-