Harry Hutchens
On two occasions during the course of the compelling 2021 Wanda Diamond League season, Gateshead was chosen to stage fixtures that had been scheduled for other points on the global track and field map.
Due to the repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic, and other factors, Diamond League meets were switched from Rabat and London to the track in the north-east of England that was famously christened with Brendan Foster’s world 3000m record back in 1974.
It was not the first, nor the second, time that Gateshead had been chosen to stage a rescheduled major athletics event.
The pedestrianism era
29 October marks the 134th anniversary of the distance running stronghold showcasing what was officially billed as ‘The Sprint Championship of the World’ – and trumpeted in the British newspapers of the day as ‘The Race of the Century’.
The century in question was the 19th and the year 1887. The race was over a distance of 120 yards and was a head-to-head showdown between Henry ‘Harry’ Hutchens and Henry Gent.
The favourite was Hutchens, one of the greats of the professional running era known as pedestrianism, which became a popular sport centred in Britain in the 19th century.
It was driven by money, with promotors offering grand ‘purses’ at stake and a huge amount of public betting on the outcome. Most races were handicapped, based on recent form, to encourage betting, but the elite performers were pitted against one another from ‘scratch,’ the start line.
The Jesse Owens of his day
Harry Hutchens was born next to the River Thames in Putney in south-west London in 1858. He discovered his talent for sprinting while working as a messenger at the local branch of the WH Smith newsagents at Putney Railway Station, turning professional at the age of 18 in 1876.
With his long, baggy shorts, his droopy moustache and his wiry 5ft 10in frame, Hutchens hardly cut the figure of a world-beater, yet in a 1936 magazine article he was described by Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic 100m champion and one half of the Chariots of Fire film story, as ‘the Jesse Owens of his day’. Sam Mussabini, Abrahams’ celebrated trainer, deemed him to be “the most brilliant sprinter of all time”.
Hutchens set nine professional world records, including 9.75 for 100 yards, 21.8 for 220 yards, and 30.0 for 300 yards – all from a standing start, and fuelled by a ritual pre-race meal of roast beef and potatoes.
The latter performance, 30.0 for 300 yards, came on a grass track at the famous old Powderhall Stadium in Edinburgh on 2 January 1884. Reports said Hutchens had his hands in the air, celebrating, 30 yards from the finish line – Bolt-in-Beijing style. His time has never been bettered in a 300 yards race.
By 1887, Hutchens was 31 and a new rival was emerging. He returned from a tour of the US and Australia to discover that 26-year-old Henry Gent from Darlington was claiming to be Britain’s premier sprinter after a series of impressive wins in handicap races.
And so the promoters, the newspapers and the British public started whipping up a clamour for a Race of the Century, a showdown between the veteran champion from England’s southern capital and the rising young pretender from the north country.
It was arranged as that year’s Sprint Championship of the World, over 120 yards, scheduled for Lillie Bridge in West London, Britain’s premier athletics track at the time, for 19 September 1887. The purse at stake was £200 – about £27,000 (or US$37,000 or €32,000) in today’s money – and an expectant crowd of 15,000 packed into the sports ground. Hutchens and Gent warmed up at opposite ends of the track but never got down to their mark.
Lillie Bridge Grounds, venue for the first scheduled clash between Harry Hutchens and Henry Gent
Riot and fire
When they returned to the dressing rooms for a pre-race rub-down, the two protagonists were confronted by an angry group of bookmakers. They claimed they had discovered that Gent had secretly broken down in training and, with the odds heavily in favour of the younger runner, they stood to be cleaned out if the race went ahead.
It was common at the time for promoters and bookmakers to “agree the outcome” of certain races in advance, in order to line their pockets. Runners, and their trainers, were given a cut of the proceeds for not racing quite flat out.
Hutchens and Gent were forcibly bundled out of a side entrance and spirited away in separate carriages. The incensed crowd tore down the wooden stadium buildings, uprooted the perimeter railings and set fire to everything that stood. It was not so much Chariots of Fire as Chariots on Fire.
One newspaper report described “groups of men dancing like savages around the embers of the ruined stadium”. Terrified spectators clambered over the fence between the stadium and the adjacent railway and ran along the tracks to the local station. The ageing stationmaster tried in vain to stop the first wave but dropped dead of a heart attack.
The Press Association news agency reported: “A bookmaker who had taken heavy odds against one of the competitors employed a number of men to intimidate the competitors and prevent their running. It is said these men proceeded to the dressing room and threatened them with violence, producing knives and other weapons with which they seemed prepared to carry their threats into execution if the race was run.”
Hutchens later told The Sporting Life newspaper: “They stood over me with open knives and bottles in their hands, and swore they would murder me if I attempted to go on the path [as the cinder running track was known]. They threatened Gent as much as me and said the first man that attempted to leave the room by the front door would soon be a dead ‘un.
“Pointing to the door at the back of the room, they said that was the one I was to go through and I had better be quick about it.”
Gent said: “I told them I would run even if they tried to kill me but they took possession of my pumps [racing shoes] and drawers [shorts] and I was overpowered. I was hustled through a back entrance, pushed into a cab and dropped somewhere near Haymarket.”
Gateshead rematch
And so, after the fires faded and the dust settled, the big race was moved 300 miles north to Gateshead: to the Eslington Park Grounds, on the site that was used for the English National Garden Festival in 1990.
It proved to be something of a damp squib. Or a windy squib.
“Gent prevailed by a margin of two feet with a terrific burst which thrilled the cheering crowd of 9000 spectators,” The Tyneside Echo reported. “His time, 11.75, was slowed by a strong wind blowing against the men at the finishing end of the track.”
A bit like the feature race in the 2021 Wanda Diamond League season opener across town at the International Stadium in May, when Dina Asher-Smith fought through a -3.1m/s headwind – and driving rain – to win the locked-and-loaded hotly anticipated women’s 100m final in 11.35 from Sha’Carri Richardson, with Shelly-Ann Fraser Fraser-Pryce back in fourth in 11.51.
End of an era
Back in 1887, the unsettled score from Lillie Bridge had been resolved, but the sport of pedestrianism was never the same. The Lillie Bridge riot sounded the death knell for the entire professional running culture in Britain.
The stadium was never rebuilt; the overspill car park of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre stands on the site today. The disillusioned Victorian sporting public turned its back on the tarnished world of pedestrianism, though it remained popular in pockets of Scotland and the Edinburgh New Year Sprint, first held in 1870, endures to this day.
Hutchens became a football trainer in later life. He worked for Woolwich Arsenal – the future Arsenal FC – alongside Charlie Gardiner, a former professional distance runner.
Gardiner gained considerable renown in 1909 for winning a head-to-head indoor marathon at the Royal Albert Hall in London against Dorando Pietri, the Italian who had gained much public sympathy in Britain after being disqualified for being helped across the finish line in the 1908 Olympic marathon. Gardiner completed the dizzying 524 laps in 2:37:12, collecting the £100 purse. Pietri dropped out after 23 miles.
As for Hutchens, he continued running handicap races into his fifties. He died on 2 January 1939, aged 81. It was, somewhat poetically, 55 years to the day since his epic 300 yard record run in Edinburgh.
Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage