The faces stare out from the sepia-tinted postcards. Mostly clean-shaven, eager, purposeful, only occasionally conceding the hint of a smile to the camera.
Runners of the Edwardian era. All of them, of course, long since dead. Some, sadly and surely, ending their days less than a decade later in the ghastly mud of the Somme and Passchendaele.
The history of Wallasey Athletic Club, on the Wirral, will come as little surprise or revelation to anyone the least familiar with the formative years of several hundred similarly modest clubs the length and breadth of Britain. Humble origins at the beginning of the century, honest endeavours, rare successes, occasional crises, some stalwarts soldiering on for a lifetime, many more flitting shadowy through a season or two before succumbing to enticements elsewhere.
It's a common enough story, but nonetheless fascinating for all that, and one worth recording, if only for its very ordinariness. This, after all, is what comprises ninety-nine per cent of athletics: getting nine out for a Cheshire League cross-country on a Sunday afternoon, and the supreme ambition is to finish 99th rather than 160th.
For Wallasey it all began on Saturday, 12 November, 1904, when six stout-hearted fellows set off from the Congregational schoolrooms in Liscard at 4.15 in the afternoon and returned after a sedate 7½-mile run at 5.35, having gone 'across the marsh to Bidston, and thence along Upton footpath and fields to Moreton, returning by Leasowe Station'.
The names of these pioneering harriers were A. G. Nicholson, G. Spence, W. L. Young, R. Young, A. McClelland and H.McClelland. They dubbed themselves 'Liscard Congregational Harriers', and in all probability some of them previously belonged to another club called Rake Lane Harriers, dating perhaps from the late 19th Century. We know all this detail because it was meticulously recorded by R. Young, even including a reference to 'weather fine but damp underfoot', and has miraculously survived as pencilled notes in a tattered penny exercise-book.
Athletics was already, of course, long since established as one of the reputable forms of manly exercise for gentleman and artisan alike, and the Wirral drew huge numbers of people escaping from the dark satanic industrial confines of Liverpool to seek leisure and entertainment by the bracing sea. More than half-a-million people crossed the Mersey by ferry over the Easter holidays at the turn of the century. Crowds of 5,000 for local cycling and athletics meetings were commonplace. The Wallasey Village Fete of 1906, held in a field behind the Presbyterian church, even included 80 yards races for boys and girls under the age of seven and for married women.
On a more serious competitive note, the first English Championships on the track had taken place almost 40 years previously. The National cross-country championships had been held since 1877 and had even been won by a Liverpool Harrier. The Olympic Games had been revived in 1896.
The finest distance-runner of the era was Alfred Shrubb, of South London Harriers, who earlier in 1904 had set World records for two and three miles which were to last into the 1920s, and then just one week before the Liscard hardies ventured forth on their Saturday afternoon pipe-opener he had recorded sensational times for six miles (29:59.4), 10,000 metres (31:02.4) and 10 miles (50:40.6), all of them again World Records.
It's intriguing to speculate whether Shrubb's achievements could have served as athletic inspiration for those God-fearing founders of the Liscard club. One of them, Bert Nicholson, became president in 1913 and still held the same post when he died in November, 1955!
The Liscard weekly runs continued throughout 1905 and into the following years, and sometimes even developed into an organised race for the last mile or so. On February 24, 1906, Liscard met Homecroft Harriers, whose members were drawn fkom the local YMCA, in a race starting from Wallasey Road Church, and 16 competitors followed a trail laid by two hares.
Thomas Brookes, of Homecroft, is recorded as the winner, though Liscard provided seven of the first nine home, and everyone must have enjoyed the occasion hugely because the following autumn Liscard renamed themselves 'Wallasey A.C.' and Homecroft amalgamated with them a year later.
None of all this information, it must be readily admitted, has any significant bearing whatsoever on the history or development of the sport in Britain, nor does it even merit a footnote, but its appeal lies in its very triviality. The secretary elected at that inaugural meeting of 83 years ago - the memory again preserved by a fading pencilled scrawl on dog-eared paper - was Spence, and the Youngs and Nicholson were also involved from the start.
The next records to be found are the ones from 1913 onwards - those for the intervening years were later lost - and by then Nicholson was the prosperous and benevolent president of the club offering to cover losses sustained on club dances up to a total of £10. The first controversy to be touched upon was a reference to the fact that some members who had broken away to form New Brighton Harriers & AC when there was a split between the A.A.A. and the Northern Cross-Country Union had rejoined Wallasey.
The Great War devastated the club, like so many others, and when barely a dozen members met to re-form in 1919 respects were paid to the 'numerous members and friends who had given their lives for their country'.
It was a spartan athletic existence for the survivors. In 1920 it was reported that the club was still seeking a suitable headquarters and that 'a loft over the stables of the Cheshire Cheese Inn was an admirable starting and finishing place, but the room was very small and could only be approached by a ladder leading through a hole in the floor, and therefore it would be impossible to get any water up for washing purposes.' Reluctantly, the club members agreed to continue to meet at a hut at Thorndale Farm which had at least been cleaned and made rain-proof.
The minutes for the same year also intriguingly reveal that 'the question of the recent suspension of T.N. Etheridge was alluded to, and it was resolved that the secretary write to him suggesting that he appeal for more lenient treatment and at the same time express his regret for his error.'
Etheridge had joined the club only a year before and was immediately its most successful competitor, but nowhere is there any mention of what exactly 'his error' amounted to, nor is there any subsequent news of the affair or of Etheridge in any context. So, presumably, he left under a cloud - maybe to stump off aggrieved to a rival club. Now, doesn't that sound only too familiar?
Having drawn a discreet veil over that evidently unsavoury business, the secretaries of the day contented themselves with mournful references to lack of support for hot-pot suppers, training nights or club funds, and there even appeared to be some sort of breakaway movement to form a Hercules Athletic Club, but Sep Edgar, who had been associated with the club since 1906, struck a philosophical note with his report for 1922-23. 'Again the club lacked support, and I would appeal to all present to try and obtain one additional member this season,' he told the 15 present at the annual general meeting. 'There is one thing about the sport, which is the finest of the lot, that once started the fever clings.'
Edgar's successor as secretary, Hector Heighley, noted in 1928: 'I received some amusing letters relating to the draw from various people, and some others were openly rude, all of which I ignored, this being decided the best method.' How many secretaries of the 1980s would recognise the situation and sympathise with Mr Heighley?
There was an even more remarkable occurrence two years later when the very same Mr Heighley proposed 'that the club be wound up but as there was no seconder the motion was lost.' No further explanation of what led to this drastic suggestion is contained in the cryptic minutes, and amazingly Mr Heighley was promptly re-elected to the committee and appointed as auditor. More money problems, maybe?
The subscription for over-21s were five shillings (25p), and even this was halved the following year despite the club's continuing financial difficulties. But then this, of course, was a time of deep economic depression, and presumably most members could afford nothing more. At least Wallasey was still in business, whilst a host of other local clubs like Ravenhead, Seaforth, Runcorn Tally Ho, Liverpool Oddfellows, Knotty Ash, Old Crosbeians and North Liverpool gymnasium were disappearing.
An appropriate point at which to conclude these impressions of the growing pains of an athletics club seems to be September, 1932. The secretary's report, by Reginald Hyde, is a minor masterpiece and includes a wonderfully descriptive passage about the poor facilities available to the club.
'We were without a private headquarters and were dependent on the New Brighton Tower track for a training ground,' Mr Hyde stated. 'This track was in a shockingly neglected state and the five shillings per head demanded by the owners for the privilege of contracting sore feet by attempting to run on the bumps, ruts, loose bricks, sandpits and broken bottles which comprise the surface of this caricature of an athletics ground can quite reasonably be regarded as daylight robbery. I was unable, however, to influence the secretary of the Tower Company to sympathetically consider reducing this charge.'
He concluded on an optimistic note by saying, 'I am firmly of the opinion that the prospects for the future have seldom been brighter, and if the members will give unstinted support to the club's programme for the future season, and really unite for a collective effort, there is no reason why we should not leave our mark on local athletics history.' That seems to me not a bad watchword for any club.
Incidentally, the runner-up in the club cross-country championship that year was the same Bob Young who had taken part in the opening run of 1904, whilst first place in the sealed handicap went to John Edwards, who only in 1989 - 57 years on - has retired as club chairman. Tempus fugit?
Ends
Source - Northern Runner - Saturday, 01/07/1989 by Bob Philips
Ref 1622