Somewhere among the mountain of medals, trophies and memorabilia that Jack Holden (GBR) accumulated from his life as a long distance running pioneer was a long-yellowed newspaper clipping. ‘The Old Fox is Dead,’ the headline proclaimed. It was dated 17 June, 1951.
The Old Fox chuckled as he ran his gaze over it in January, sitting in the living room of the house he shared with his daughter and son-in-law in England’s Lake District. His marathon-running days might have come to grief on the road from Windsor to Chiswick in the classic old Polytechnic Harriers event in 1951, but Holden was still going strong right up to last weekend.
He died on Sunday night (7 March 2004), six days short of his 97th birthday.
His legend, however, will linger on.
Won 1950 "Commonwealth" Marathon barefoot
Holden was the hard man of the marathon, the hard man’s race. When his shoes started falling apart in the rain in the 1950 Empire Games marathon in Auckland, he tore them from his feet and ran the last nine miles barefooted. His feet were cut to ribbons by the finish. He won by four minutes and five seconds.
European title too, aged 42
Holden was 42 at the time, an astonishing feat in itself. He was 43 when he won the European title in Brussels later the same year. He finished 32 seconds clear of the Finnish runner Veikko Karvonen.“I can remember Karvonen coming up to me after the race and asking me my age,” Holden said in January. “When I told him he said, ‘But you’re older than my father!’”
The Old Fox chuckled at the memory. So did his daughter, Joan, and his son-in-law, Brian, with whom he lived in Papcastle, a Cumbrian village near Cockermouth, the birthplace of William Wordsworth. Holden himself was a native of England’s West Midlands and retained the delightfully distincitive brogue of the industrial ‘Black Country’ area. He was the oldest surviving winner of the Morpeth to Newcastle road race, the oldest surviving road race on the British athletics calendar, which celebrated its centenary in January – hence the visit for what proved to be his final interview.
1948 Olympic disappointment
For Holden, the half-marathon in England’s north-east held a particularly special place. He announced his retirement after dropping out of the 1948 Olympic marathon in London but was coaxed back into training by his wife, Millie, who persuaded him to make a comeback in the 1949 ‘Morpeth.’ “The Olympic marathon was such a disappointment,” he reflected. “I ought to have won that out of sight but I bathed my feet in permanganate of potash and I over-pickled them. The skin was so hard it just blistered. It was impossible for me to keep running. I had to drop out.
“The Morpeth to Newcastle was my first race after that and the first person I bumped into when I got up there was Tommy Richards, who had won the silver medal in the Olympic marathon. There was a chap standing with him and he said to us, ‘Whichever one of you wins tomorrow it’ll not be by much.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you this: I don’t know who’s going to win, but I’ll die before anybody beats me on the road’.”
The next day Holden led from start to finish, winning in a course record time. He also won the race in 1947 and 1950. According to Jim Peters, who broke his Morpeth to Newcastle record in 1953 and who succeeded him as Britain’s leading marathon man, Holden was “a ruthless runner, always starting with the absolute determination to kill the opposition right from the off.” It was a natural reputation, given Holden’s steely Black Country roots.
From Bradley, near Wolverhampton, he was one of nine children and left school at 13 to work at a foundry. He started his sporting life as a boxer before entering a three-mile handicap race run by a publican in Wednesbury. He was given a scratch-mark but had caught the other runners by halfway. “The prize was a pig, a live pig,” he recalled. “I took it home and we killed it and ate it. There were nine of us. Times were hard.”
Having brought home the bacon, as it were,Holden very nearly lost his amateur status before his athletics career had begun, but he joined Tipton Harriers and poured his heart and soul into his running.“My background did help me,” he said. “My father worked at the same foundry as me and at dinner time I’d do to the section where he worked and get a sledgehammer and smash pig iron for training.”
Four International XC championships wins
Between 1933 and 1939 Holden smashed the opposition four times in the International Cross Country Championships, the forerunner of the IAAF World Cross Country Championships. He lost his foundry job in the Depression and, after serving in the RAF in the Second World War, he worked as a groundsman for Palethorpe Butchers. In the evenings, he pounded the roads of Wolverhapton, Bilston and beyond, laying the foundations for a marathon career that yielded 14 victories in 17 races.
“I was the first to run 100 miles a week in training,” he reflected. “All at night, after I’d finished work. Jim Peters wrote to me asking for help, and I told him he had to do more and more miles. They all copied me.”
When Peters caught and passed him in the 1951 Poltytechnic Marathon, on the road from Windsor to Chiswick, to the west of London, Holden finally decided to hang up his racing shoes. “I’d made a vow to retire as soon as another British runner came along and beat me,” he recalled. “I intended to keep it.”
Sadly, it is not just the marathon career of the Old Fox that is dead now. As an inspiration, though, his deeds live on.
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The funeral will take place this Friday 12 March in Bridekirk , Cumbria, England. A memorial service will also be held at a later date in the West Midlands where most of his large family are based.Jack Holden who was one of a family of 14 children, had lived for many years at the Cumbian home of his daughter Joan and son-in-law Brian, and had three grand and four great-grandchildren.
