26.2 - The Incredible True Story of the Three Men Who Shaped The London Marathon. John Bryant
take on a boarder or two to help meet living expenses. Some lived in hallways, in basements or in alleyways – anywhere they could squeeze themselves in – and all too often the rents they paid were extortionate. Living and working quarters were often the same. A family would cook and eat in the overcrowded room where they made their living, and from the oldest to the youngest, everyone took whatever work they could find and did their part. Wages usually tottered at the brink of subsistence.
There was no margin for any error in the family budget, for survival could ride on a few cents. Day after day, the people of the lower East Side would grind out a living, working, saving and trying to move slowly ahead, and in so doing they would create a niche for themselves in the complex economic and cultural world of New York City.
It was in those circumstances, there in the railroad flats that once existed on the site of Tudor City, the site of slums and slaughterhouses, that Johnny Hayes grew up. There, local gangs thrived and could be powerful, but the local politicians could be even tougher too. The men from Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s bastion of corruption and power, knew that the Irish-American immigrants were like unformed clay and happy to be moulded in the ways of New York. And so they helped them to be a little more American, to feel a little more at home in their new world, and before long they were American citizens – and most of all, American voters.
The children of peasants – the shoemakers, bakers and so on who had been brave enough to cross the Atlantic – were not content to sit back and waste their lives amid the debris. What got them out of the slums and away from the clutches of the corruption that thrived during the 1890s was the determination to haul themselves up by their boot straps and to get out. To be an American was to climb into that great melting pot and to be poured out ready to take on the world as an American winner.
Johnny Hayes grew to be a small boy, but he was strong – strong enough to work while still a child, and he didn’t stay the baby of the family for too long. He was the firstborn, but was soon joined by another baby and then another. They were hungry mouths to feed, and Michael Hayes grabbed every hour to slave as a baker in the cauldron of the bakery at Cushman’s in New York. Soon even his 14-hour days were not enough and often he would bed down at the bakery, sleeping at the back in order to be up and ready for yet more overtime. Sometimes Johnny would join his father, earning a few more badly needed quarters long before he left his lost childhood behind him. ‘Heat never bothered me,’ he used to say, years later. ‘My grandfather and father were bakers and I worked in the bakery as a boy – I was used to heat.’
Next after Johnny, and within the year, his brother Willie was born. Then two sisters came along: Harriet and Alice, who were six and eight years younger than Johnny. Finally, baby Dan joined the family when Johnny was already 11 years old. There might have been more but when the next baby, Philip, died in his mother’s arms, Ellen knew she would need all her energies to keep her family alive.
Life was hungry and tough, but in Manhattan you could always feed on dreams and no little boy could walk along the quayside in the New York of the 1890s without being mesmerised by all he saw and heard. Sometimes, Johnny would walk past ships being docked, watch cargoes being unloaded and study the faces of the seamen as they swung down the gangplank. For a moment, he would be a sailor, voyaging out to take on the world. He would weave these men into his adventures, playing out the hero, drinking in their excitement.
Ambition was a fire inside him, and Michael and Ellen Hayes, both exhausted long before their time, took some comfort in realising that their eldest son shrugged aside this poverty and still burned with the unquenchable energy of the young. Exactly what he wanted to do they couldn’t be sure, but still they admired the way he was not scared of hard work. They smiled with fondness at the effort and the hours he would put in and at his happy-go-lucky self-confidence.
But that confidence and thirst for hard work were about to be tested to destruction. Michael and Ellen, old long before they had reached middle age and wrung threadbare by the effort of surviving in New York, both died within weeks of each other in 1902. There was no money for a tombstone.
At the age of sixteen, Johnny Hayes found himself head of the family with two brothers and two sisters to support, the youngest of them just five years old. The children were taken into a Catholic orphanage and Johnny did what he had to to support them all there. He took the toughest, most dangerous job he could find, but a job that paid well for your sweat. It was working underground, digging tunnels for the New York subway, and shovelling sand until you dropped. They called the labourers ‘sandhogs’ and the work of the sandhogs was tedious, not to mention perilous and claustrophobic.
Johnny, and sometimes his brother Willie, worked shoulder to shoulder, straining to earn as much in a day as other labourers might bring home in a week. They needed the money now they had a family to keep. Each morning, the two boys would marvel at the tangle of derricks and scaffolding. There would be gangs of 60 or more men gulping hot coffee. Following a roll call, they would walk single file to the mouth of the shaft. Most of the men wore nothing but their shirts and trousers with waterproof boots reaching above the knees.
Just entering the tunnel took a long time. Crews would go into airlocks, one at a time, after which the doors at each end were sealed. An air pipe would start hissing and the men’s ears popped as the air pressure climbed until it was the same as in the adjoining locks which took them underground. Then the workers were able to open the connecting door and crush into the next chamber, where the entire ordeal would start all over again. Once they got to the far end of the tunnel the men had to work quickly because they could only handle the pressure for a short while.
‘Pinch your noses, keep your mouth shut and blow!’ the foreman would yell. ‘It helps your ears.’ Sometimes eardrums would rupture and bleed, and the two Hayes boys soon learned the dangers of working too fast in these conditions.
‘You need to pace yourself,’ Johnny would say to his brother. ‘Don’t go so fast at the beginning.’ Above all, the job was wet, and the dampness seemed to seep into their very bones. Half-remembered warnings from his now-dead Irish mother niggled away at Hayes’ weariness. ‘Keep yourself dry, Johnny boy,’ he could still hear her saying, ‘the rheumatism is a terrible thing – it’s the ruining of the joints.’
When he wasn’t working, Hayes would catch up on his sleep and fool around with the other Irish lads, sharing stories of sports heroes, throwing a ball, swinging a bat and sometimes for fun taking part in an impromptu foot race.
When Johnny was just ten years old, he experienced the ballyhoo that surrounded the return of the Americans from the first Olympic Games in Athens. No boy could forget the excitement of the crowds and bands, the flag-waving and the cheering, as New York saluted their conquering heroes. And among those heroes was the very first winner in those 1896 Games, an Irish-American boy like Johnny himself and a fine all-round athlete called Jim Connolly.
Connolly had won the hop, step and jump, and a year later he went on to become a prolific writer on sport, an author of sea sagas and a newspaper man for the Boston Globe and the Boston Post. But the ten-year-old Johnny Hayes never forgot the sight of him draped in the Irish tricolour on his way through Manhattan. Connolly made a huge impression on Hayes and all the other Irish-American boys in New York.
Aggressively proud, not only of his Olympic victory but of his Irish roots and sporting heritage, Connolly had been raised in the predominantly Irish-Catholic neighbourhood of South Boston. ‘We were a hot-blooded fighting lot, but also clean living, sane and healthy,’ he wrote. ‘The children grew up rugged and just naturally had a taste for athletics. Among the boys I knew as a boy it was the exception to find one who could not run or jump or swim, or play a good game of ball.’
Local sporting heroes figured prominently in the young Jim Connolly’s life. Among them was John L. Sullivan, the ‘Boston Strongboy’ and a world heavyweight boxing champion from 1882 to 1892. Another was a neighbour by the name of Gallohue, who enjoyed fame as a circus acrobat, and it was to him that Connolly attributed his earliest interest in track and field athletics.
‘Our curious jumper of whom we were all very proud,’ he wrote, ‘was a true picture of an athlete six feet in height