26.2 - The Incredible True Story of the Three Men Who Shaped The London Marathon. John Bryant
whenever there were big prizes to be won. His men would sometimes finish glassy-eyed and semi-conscious, almost living corpses, but still somehow they would find the strength to win. Warburton would goad them to even greater efforts and, as some sharp-eyed spectators noted, he would sometimes pull a mysterious bottle from his greatcoat pocket and encourage them to drink from it.
His face half-hidden beneath a Derby hat, and always wrapped in a huge black overcoat, Warburton exuded a great air of mystery. Many spectators reckoned his methods were all hocus-pocus, a crude form of psychology, but others thought the little bottles contained some of the most powerful drugs known to man at that time – a mixture of strychnine to stimulate the body and morphine to kill pain. For these cyclists, taking the stuff was a matter of life and death because so much money was at stake.
There were many deaths from cycling in the two decades from 1890 to 1910, some cyclists dying in the saddle and others shortly afterwards, and eventually Choppy Warburton was warned off every cycling track in Europe. But he was not the only such trainer and the life expectancy of racing cyclists at the turn of the century was terrifyingly low. The cyclists were said to have died from exhaustion and fatigue, but in fact, they mostly died from abuse to their bodies.
Dorando had no wish to kill himself and he believed that there was no stimulant that could match his own burning desire to win applause and acclaim for his races. So, after his accident and, weeks later, the incident when he matched strides with Pagliani in the piazza, he switched his passion from cycling to foot racing.
Within three weeks of that exhibition in Carpi, he was lining up for a 3,000-metre race in Bologna. There, on 2 October 1904, in his first official race, he came second to Aduo Fava, and in the weeks that followed he would take on races and distances wherever he could find them. A week later, in fact, he got his name in the record books when he captured the Italian record for covering almost 9,000 metres in half an hour.
More races followed. He would take on anything between 5 and 15 miles, and during October and November, Dorando found that he was winning most of his races. Luce, which had given over so much space to cycling coverage, suddenly started to allow a few more column inches to the exploits of the runner Dorando Pietri.
Dorando would make sure that his father saw the press reports, pointing them out with excitement. ‘You see,’ said Desiderio, ‘you might not be so keen to leave this place after all.’ Besides, there was now another reason for his son to stay in Carpi.
Teresa Dondi was a shy, delicate girl with large eyes, who looked younger than her years. There was something still and contemplative about her face, though her movements were quick and impatient. She was, in fact, just a few months younger than Dorando. Her father was a share cropper, a tenant farmer of sorts, and certainly not wealthy but still a few notches up the social scale from the Pietri family. She had caught the eye of Dorando’s boss, Pasquale Melli, who saw that she was bright as well as pretty. He had offered her some work, to act sometimes as a maid at his home and occasionally to help out if she were needed in the shop.
Dorando first ran into her at the confectioner’s and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Teresa was nervous and coltish; she moved quickly, almost jerkily, and whenever she reached up to pluck a box of chocolates from a shelf, the glimpse of lace beneath her overskirt produced a feeling in his legs and stomach that he had only ever known before the start of a big race.
He fluttered uncontrollably and was tongue-tied, but although neither of the pair could find the words, both knew there was much to be said between them. They were inseparable – the girl next door, so shy and so young, and Dorando, the boy who was winning a reputation to be proud of because of his other passion, for running. For as long as they could, they kept their friendship secret. But others could see, from the looks that lingered too long, what was going on.
Teresa’s mother would squint through the shutters, looking out for the messenger boy.
‘Look at his clothes,’ she would say to Teresa. ‘Why do you bother talking to someone like that? He’s poor and he’ll always be poor.’
Teresa’s eyes would swell with hot tears, and she bit her lip when her father told Dorando to stay away from her.
But Melli’s family, the owners of the shop, liked the girl. ‘Where’s the harm?’ said Melli, and so the lovers would snatch forbidden time together, keeping their secrets. Teresa was so proud of Dorando – she loved to see his name printed in Luce and she could see how happy that made him. She let him touch her and kiss her, and only the blushes would make him pull back, and he ached whenever he was away from her.
‘If I can be a champion, maybe it will help me to a fine job,’ Dorando would dream. ‘They know all about me at the hat factory – perhaps there’s something there for me.’ Teresa let him dream on.
Dorando certainly made sure that his dream of Teresa didn’t die. One morning, when he was away in Turin doing his national service, Teresa received a picture postcard. It was addressed in a neat copperplate hand to Gentil Signorina Dondi Teresina, Via S. Giovanni, Carpi. On the front was printed, ‘A thought from Turin’, and it carried a picture of a flower against the background of the city’s main railway station. There was no message, no greeting and no signature. Teresa looked at the card with a blush and a shrug. Twenty minutes later, she was at the Melli home, alone in the kitchen with the kettle steaming and trembling on the hob. As the steam softened the paste on the stamp, she gently peeled it off.
There, written in a tiny hand for her eyes only, was a message: ‘This is Dorando writing to remind you that he loves you, please forgive me for what happened when we were last together.’
Teresa read it again and again, and kept the card beside her until her dying day.
There is a copse behind the solid Victorian buildings of Charterhouse School, near Godalming in rural Surrey. It’s where generations of boys from the school, free from the shackles of classroom rules, could run a little wild and indulge their dreams and fantasies. It was here, as Wyndham Halswelle’s mother constantly reminded him, that you could find the first playground of a boy who went to the same school: the soldier, hero and role model of every schoolboy in the Empire – Robert Baden-Powell. They were, as she so often mentioned in her letters, old boys from Charterhouse.
The acts of ingenuity, courage and resourcefulness of Baden-Powell during the seven-month siege of Mafeking during the Boer War were followed in every detail throughout Britain and the Empire, and made a deep impression on Halswelle. Beyond that, the philosophy and ethos that Baden-Powell carried over into the Boy Scout Movement captured the imagination of generations of schoolboys to come.
Baden-Powell never really shone much at school subjects but he thrived at Charterhouse, where the public school ethos of cheerful courage under pressure, loyalty to the team and playing the game, which was already fuelling the armies of the Empire, suited this energetic sportsman, artist and actor.
‘The whole secret of success in life is to play the game of life in the same spirit as that played on the football field,’ he was fond of telling his audience of boys.
When war was declared in South Africa, Colonel Baden-Powell and 1,000 men were left to defend the town of Mafeking, which was the supply centre for the British. The town’s success in surviving the longest siege in that war, from October 1899 until May 1900, without any real loss of life, would in any case have elevated the name of Baden-Powell to the status of an imperial symbol, the hero of an empire under threat. But it wasn’t just his ability to succeed, it was his capacity to do so with nonchalance and a taste for fun and adventure, using a combination of fake barbed-wire defences and Sunday baby competitions, that in the eyes of the British public turned him into the very epitome of pluck and team spirit. A master of bluff, Baden-Powell thought up all sorts of schemes to make it seem