An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

34 AUTOBIOGRAPHY time in a walking race in very slow time by a man called Brewell, having had no sleep at all the night before, and suffering from a slight sunstroke. On the 25th June I showed this was all wrong, for I did 7.17½, 14.56, and 23.4 at a L.A.C. meeting, the 2 and 3 miles being then the best on record. During the year 1870 I published a little account of Cromer Church, which was an enlargement of an article I had contributed to the N. and N.A.S. on the same subject. I was married at Old Putney Church on the 25th August, 1870, and we spent our honeymoon at orwich (the old "Norfolk," up St. Giles) and at Cromer (the " Belle Vue"). Arthur and W. W. Ball, both well-known athletes, were also at Cromer at the time, and we did a good deal of cliff climbing, &c. I had furnished a small house at 4, Craven Terrace, Wandsworth, and lived very comfortably on a very small income; my furniture cost me just under £mo. In the October of this year the Waddells having brought in a number of non-athletic friends as members of the Loudon A.C., outvoted me at a General Meeting of the Club on the gentleman amateur question, and I resigned the secretaryship, and they taking the Club in hand with lamentable results, till they bad to fly the country on becoming defaulters as accountants. On 16th November, 1869, I saw Miss Fry's Norfolk Collections on Hornchurch, when they were in custody of her nephew, ·whose son was R. P. Fry, a well-known amateur athlete. During 1870 I kept up my paperchasing, and especially remember taking the bags on a bitter day (26th November) during which to escape the hounds we swam the Wandle. I thought to secure a d.ry jersey to finish home in, so stripped and put it in my scent bag to throw over the river, but unluckily it fell short and I had to dive for it and put it on wet. Anything more bitterly cold than the run across Wimbledon Common I cannot conceive, but we are both still alive after 46 years, which is a sad proof of the injury athletics do to men. This winter I began to sketch out a Norfolk handbook, which came into print nine years later and was a great success. In December was the farcical meeting at single stick .at the L.A.C. Assault-of-Arms between Bentley and myself