Fifty Years of Progress 1880-1930

ATHLETICS IN THE SOUTH BY ARTHUR S. TURK /7ice-President, and /7ice-Chairman Southern Committee WHEN the interest in athletic sports spread from the Universities and Public Schools to the larger world outside clubs were formed in London and the South. In the early sixties there came into being the Mincing Lane Athletic Club, which became world famous under the more ambitious title of London Athletic Club. Organisations like the Blackheath Harriers and South London Harriers, devoted in their incep– tion to cross-country running, soon found a fresh field for their endeavours on the track. Before the A.A.A. was talked of, some of the smaller paper– chasing clubs had banded themselves together as the North of the Thames Cross Country Union. At the never-to-be-forgotten meeting at Oxford this body was represented by Mr. J. E. Fowler Dixon, who is, happily, still with us, and in heart as young as ever. As might have been expected, participation induced a desire for a share in control. The non-university athletes felt they had a special grievance, in that the Amateur Athletic Club, which was the body respon– sible for the first and subsequent Championships, held the meeting at a time of year when the before-mentioned athletes, by reason of the fact that they were men with their livings to earn, had no opportunity of training in the daylight. This, though the chief, was not the only basis of the demand for reform, and it was not surprising that the Southern clubs and competitors gave whole-hearted support to the negotiations that ultimately brought the A.A.A. into existence. An early difficulty in connection with the formation of the A.A.A. was the defining of an amateur, for the industrial North and the com– mercial South presented different problems. While the majority of South of England clubs were prepared to stand by the " Henley definition," in other parts of the country the exclusion of the "mechanic, artisan or labourer" would have confined amateurism within a much narrower circle. When the A.A.A. decided to throw the sport open to all who had neither competed nor taught for money, many heads were shaken and doleful doubts expressed as to the future, and it was many years before the debates on the wisdom of abandoning the " Henley definition" died away. As laid down by Law XI. of the Association, the control of athletics in the Southern District (defined in Law X.) is vested in the Southern Com- 73