Fifty Years of Progress 1880-1930

FOREWORD BY LORD DESBOROUGH, K.G., G.C.V.O. President of the Association JusT fifty years ago, on April 24th, when the outlook for Amateur Athletics was anything but promising, a meeting was called at Oxford to settle the disputes which had been raging over the amateur question and the date of the Championship meetings. Feeling ran high at the time, and it has been stated on high authority that the situation was only saved by a dinner. Twenty-seven delegates representing the forty athletic clubs then in existence attended the conference. Resolutions were drafted and submitted by Messrs. Wise, Jackson and Shearman, and from the meeting there resulted the Amateur Athletic Association, which now represents nearly 900 Clubs and over 100,000 athletes, and is the govern• ing body of the sport in this country. It has served as a model for similar bodies all the world over. The first Secretary was our late most esteemed President, Sir Montague Shearman, whom I feel it a high honour to succeed. He was an old colleague of mine on the cinder track in the Oxford and Cambridge Sports of I 876, and to the end maintained his great interest in the welfare of athletics, and to his own athletic proficiency added a calm and unprejudiced judgment and competence in affairs. The Amateur Athletic Association owes much to the possessor of these qualities, and this book pays a well-deserved tribute to his memory. The ideals of Montague Shearman and of those who worked with him have been the underlying policy of the Amateur Athletic Association for the last fifty years and the immediate objects were threefold : (I) To improve the management of athletic meetings, and to promote uniformity of rules for the guidance of athletic Committees. (2) To deal repressively with any abuses of athletic sports. (3) To hold an annual Championship Meeting. There can be no doubt that the A.A.A. has successfully carried out these objects, but Montague Shearman in his chapter on "Athletic Government" in the Badminton book on "Athletics" uttered a word of warning when he wrote : "All that a governing body can be efpected to do is to keep order and punish open offenders against its laws, but it can no more render its subjects good sportsmen and amateurs than an Act of Parliament -ean render citizens virtuous." What the A.A.A. does for the true amateur is this : it assures him that wherever he goes to run under the A.A.A. laws he will find competent management and fair play- a fair field and no favour. Personally, however, I think that the Associa• 3