The Cruise of the Branwen

PREPARATIONS formances at the Athenian Games given in later pages, the English athletes as a whole were not very successful in other forms of sport, apart from fencing, though such good runners as Hawtrey, Crabbe, Halswell, and MacGough represented this country on the cinder-path. The great event of the meeting, the Marathan Race, though not credited to an Englishman, was certainly won by a Canadian, who most thoroughly deserved it, for he had been training on the road for several weeks beforehand. Hawtrey won the five mile race ; two British cyclists won the tandem bicycles, and we also scored the I zt mile bicycle race ; and Taylor won us the mile in swimming with Jarvis second; but the British athletes suffered from lack of that careful organisation which went so far to help the Americans to victory, and my own experience leads me to believe that if another visit is made to these Games at Athens in 1910 the whole British team should start together from the Port of London in a steamer big enough for them to live on comfortably in the harbour of Phalerum throughout their stay in Greece. But I will not anticipate. Our fencing team has not left London, and I must return to the events immediately preceding their departure. Among the most important of these was the official sanction given by the Amateur Fencing Association to our team to represent England in the fencing tournament, a sanction without which none of us could have worn in Athens those articles of clothing which are now among 25