Coaching and Care of Athletes

CHAPTER III THE ENGLISH SUMMER SCHOOL METHOD LIKE a number of other important things in this life, the English Summer School for Athletes had a small and obscure beginning. The inception of the idea really dates back to the year 1922, when a number of old English athletes found themselves taking their holidays at various small villages on the east coast of England. Sir Gordon Fraser, J. S. Moll, whose sons were destined to make their names famous at Bedford School, in the Public Schools Championships, and at Cambridge University, W. E. B. Render– son, the old Oxford Blue and Olympic athlete, together with his wife and two sons, and the Laytons and the Eadies were all staying at Bacton, while at a farm at Happisburgh, some few miles away, an Oxford working party numbered in its midst M. C. Nokes, the English hammer-throwing champion. In yet another village was E. H. Flack, at that time Hon. Secretary of the London Athletic Club. My wife and I, together with our son and two daughters, were at Bacton, as was E. H. King, an old Oxford athlete who had been a rival of E. L. Stones, of Ulverston, a great performer in the early days of pole-vaulting, when the world's record had not .Yet reached I I ft. g ins. All these sportsmen played their part in subsequent happenings. In the previous year I had visited Sweden for the purpose of improving my knowledge of athletics, and had brought back with me a very small discus, smaller even than that which is used nowadays in women's competitions, a slender vaulting-pole for my son, and one or two quite small javelins. Waiter Henderson, of course, was intensely interest,ed in these small articles of athletic impedimenta, which for some reason I had taken with us on our seaside holiday. Not unnaturally Henderson and I; who were beginning to regain our energies after the War, did a good deal of discus-throwing and practised more or less elementary athletic performances on the sands. The children, and there was a host of them in that little Norfolk fishing village, took a vast interest i:q. our activities, and soon they 36