Sheffield’s Olympic heroes of track and field

Sheffield has a rich history of sporting prowess and, as a new book shows, has helped produce some of our greatest Olympic athletes. Chris Bond reports.
Jessica Ennis-Hill, gold medal winner at London 2012.Jessica Ennis-Hill, gold medal winner at London 2012.
Jessica Ennis-Hill, gold medal winner at London 2012.

IT was a chance remark from Matthew Bell’s brother that inadvertently got the ball rolling.

“He’s interested in the Second World War and he asked me if I’d heard about this athlete from Sheffield who ran in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but I’d never heard of him,” says Bell. “He reportedly ran the last eight miles with bloodied feet and that pricked my interest.”

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The man in question was Ernie “Evergreen” Harper and when Bell began delving into his past he unearthed some interesting details. “He worked for a clog-making company on the edge of Sheffield. He would walk to work in his clogs every morning and afterwards he would go home, kick off his clogs, put on his training shoes and go running in the hills.”

He was renowned for his consistency. “He broke the 25 mile world record and won various national titles at different distances.” He got his nickname from the fact he raced at the top level for well over a decade, competing in three Olympics, including the Berlin Games when Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals which undermined the Nazi plan to showcase their Aryan supremacy and left Hitler enraged.

In 1928, Harper competed in the Paris Olympics, taking part in the cross country race on a sweltering summer day when just 15 of the 38 athletes that started managed to reach the finishing line. “Reports of the race said it took some of them two minutes just to do the last 30 metres because they were so exhausted. But the people watching couldn’t go and help because the athletes would have been disqualified.”

Harper came fourth but in Berlin he made it on to the podium after winning silver in the marathon. He was sandwiched between two Koreans who were running for Japan. “Korea was occupied by Japan at the time and their athletes were made to run for Japan,” explains Bell.

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“When they were on the podium they kept their heads bowed. The winner [Sohn Kee-chung] was given a baby oak tree which he held to his chest to cover the Japanese rising sun on his vest, which didn’t go down very well.”

The story doesn’t end there. In a heartening footnote, 52 years later Sohn carried the torch into the stadium for the opening ceremony of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, to a standing ovation from 80,000 of his countrymen.

Harper, who ran for the Hallamshire Harriers, is one of nine athletes featured in a new book called Steel and Grace: Sheffield’s Olympic Track and Field Medallists. The book has been co-written by Bell, editor of the Sheffield United fanzine the Flashing Blade, and his friend Dr Gary Armstrong, from Brunel University.

It examines the lives and careers of athletes from the city and their contributions to the Olympic Games stretching back more than a century. Their story not only takes in the Berlin Olympics, but also events in Munich in 1972 when terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes and Moscow eight years later when British athletes competed against the wishes of the UK Government at the height of the Cold War.

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For Bell it was an opportunity to discover more about some of Sheffield’s forgotten sporting heroes, as well as to fly the flag for two of Britain’s greatest Olympians - double gold medal winner Sebastian Coe and Jessica Ennis-Hill, poster girl of the 2012 Olympics and winner of the heptathlon.

Bell discovered that Harper wasn’t the first person from Sheffield to win an Olympic medal, nor was he the first member of the Hallamshire Harriers to compete in the Games.

Harold Wilson won silver in the men’s 1,500 metres at the London Olympics in 1908 and was part of the five-man team that took gold in the three miles race. He also has another claim to fame. “He was the first man in this country to run the 1,500 metres in under four minutes,” says Bell.

“Today that kind of time would be seen as deathly slow but this was the first time the 1,500 metres had been run in Britain because before that they ran the mile.”

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It had long been believed that Wilson was killed in France during the First World War, but Bell’s research sheds fresh light on his story. “He emigrated to South Africa and fought in their army in the war in East Africa and was wounded and invalided out.” He discovered, too, that after the war Wilson was living at a hotel in Durban. “There is no record of him dying in England so we had to assume that he spent the rest of his days in South Africa,” he says. “Putting that record straight was one of the most satisfying aspects of the book.”

Another Harriers athlete was Ernest Glover. He competed in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres events at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the last before the First World War. Although he came 16th in the individual cross country event he earned a bronze medal in the team competition.

Bell says what’s striking about these men is they all shared a common, working class background. “Harold Wilson was a saw maker from Sheffield, another man was a potato merchant and one was a coal miner, so they weren’t privileged people by any means and they didn’t make any money from athletics.”

Coe and Ennis-Hill were more fortunate. “Coe bridged the gap between the amateur and professional world and he was one of the first to get big sponsorship deals.” But Bell says that as with their predecessors they weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth. “Coe went to a decent school but it was still a state school, while Jessica comes from a working class, inner-city family.”

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Husband and wife John and Sheila Sherwood are also an integral part of Sheffield’s Olympic story, although back in the late 1960s they highlighted the lack of decent facilities in the city.

“They were both teachers and complained about the lack of training facilities compared to down south. Sheila had to use a long jump pit that had quarry dirt in it and John had to practice the hurdles in the school corridors because there were so few training facilities.

“They actually went a long way to helping to improving facilities in Sheffield even though they didn’t get to benefit from them.”

Despite these hindrances Sheila won a silver medal in the women’s Long Jump at the 1968 Games in Mexico, while John took the bronze in an epic 400 metres hurdles final. The race, won by Britain’s David Hemery, also produced a famous TV commentary gaffe from David Coleman who, in his excitement at the fact that Hemery had just won gold, came out with the line “... and who cares who’s third, it doesn’t matter.” Well, it certainly mattered to Sherwood.

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Since then, British athletics has seen its share of ups and downs but is still basking in the warm glow from that golden summer of sport from two years ago.

“Whether Sheffield has contributed more to Britain’s Olympic story is hard to say, maybe it hasn’t. But it’s been interesting to look back at these people and find out more about their lives.”

Even so, he’s in no doubt about the impact the city’s sports men and women have had over the decades. “If you go back to the first London Olympics and the last then you see that Sheffield has played a big part in both.”

• Steel and Grace: Sheffield’s Olympic Track and Field Medallists is published by Bennion Kearny, priced £15.99.

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