The ‘official’ obituaries of Frank Horwill, who died on Sunday, January 1, at the age of 84 will doubtless hint at his unoffical role in British athletics over the last 50 years as Troublemaker-in-Chief. There is a tradition for the obituarist to observe the ‘nil nisi bonum’ (nothing but good) of the recently deceased, but since Frank would have scoffed at that, so do we.
So for those of you who only knew Frank as one of the founders of the British Milers’ Club (BMC), as a coach to dozens of Olympians, and as the creator of the ‘five-pace, multi-tier’ system of training – already sufficient for any man – here are a couple of reminiscences of Frank, including from himself…
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Although he would never admit it publicly, in the 1970s Frank was instrumental in the publication of a scurrilous mimeographed magazine called Athletics Truth, which attacked the then leading lights of the administration. Frank’s abrasive style was apparent in the same period when at a meeting to discuss Olympic selection policy, he publicly accused a national coach of favouring a particular middle-distance runner, “because he is fucking her”.
“I first met Steve (Ovett) at a Southern Counties Easter training weekend… I was in the middle of explaining some exercise, and I remember saying, ‘Listen carefully, because we’ve got to get this down,’ and I heard a raspberry. So I said, ‘who did that? No need for you to own up, I can see who it is, it’s you. You’ll never make a champion, you haven’t got the right attitude.’”….. Years after, Horwill presented Ovett with a BMC world record plaque. “I handed it to him, and he said, ‘This is strange, because I was told by Frank ten years ago that I’d never make a champion, and those words stung me into action’”.
“I first met (Seb) Coe when I put on a boys’ 800 metres at Copthall (north-west London stadium). I remember getting ‘em all together before the race; I said, ‘Look here, boys, the BMC hasn’t paid your fares to come down here and fuck about, so get stuck in”.
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It may be that each successive generation has characters like this, and I hope that is the case. Because, over the past year or so, as we have lost people like Roy Fowler and Mel Batty and Peter Hildreth, and now Frank, we can truly say of these of our contemporaries, they don’t make ‘em like that any more.
Frank Horwill was another ‘one-off’.
(recent pic by Dave Cocksedge)
Yes indeed, Pat, Frank was a real stirrer. One of his associates, Bill Giddings of Deptford Park, overshadowed my first important X-C win, the South of Thames Junior, by running the entire race a few yards ahead of the leaders, despite being ineligible under the event’s ‘barring clauses’.
I quickly learned from my friends and clubmates, Martin Hyman and Bruce Tulloh, to stay well clear of such characters. Those were the days when you had to remain studiously polite to those who had power of life and death over your athletic career. Martin and Bruce used to give me advice on who to brown-nose, and how best to go about it. Key players were ‘Uncles’ Jack, Harold, Phil and Arthur, as well as Auntie Marea. I think one of them collected foreign stamps. . .
And then there was the famous Les ‘There’s-Pros-and-Cons-For-Chum-And- There’s-Pros-and-Cons-Against’ Golding, the only Olympic Team Manager who could smoke a cigar, drink a glass of whisky and shave all at the same time!
They weren’t necesssarily bad people in themselves, but ‘All power tends to corrupt. . .’ Characters like Frank were necessary in order to redress the balance. And thanks to Derek Johnson, we also had the International Athletes’ Club. Now we have the power of the market. . .
Happy New Year!
Tim
As acidic as Frank may have been to those he perceived as being involved in athletics for themselves, he was generous to a fault with his athletes and to those people who sought his help. I had reason to contact Frank a year or so ago seeking his advice and he responded promptly, thoughtfully and entertainingly despite his ongoing health problems. If only everybody was so selfless!
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Good to see some balance in your tribute: Frank relished the role of rebel, and before he mellowed somewhat in later years he was a constant thorn in the side of the authorities – specifically his enemies in the BAAB. When one prominent coach was left out of the staff roster for the 1976 Olympic team, Frank alone was publicly critical of the non-selection. He said of his colleagues, “They agreed in private that he had been scandalously treated, but said nothing in public for fear of losing their perks. Like monkeys in a cage, they leap about and perform for peanuts thrown to them by the zoo keepers.”
With his outspoken views, he quickly became an expert on legal matters. When another coach asked his advice on being served with a solicitor’s letter, Frank retorted, “They are just trying to rattle you, old boy. I love solicitor’s letters – I wipe my arse with them!”
ATHLETICS TRUTH was launched in November 1971 soon after Frank crossed swords with the formidable Marea Hartman, WAAA Secretary for many years. When Frank walked into a Coaching Conference at Crystal Palace hostel (close to the stadium), for the evening session a very drunken Ms Hartman sneered loudly, “Here comes the biggest shit in athletics!” (Frank had dared to pay for an advert in ATHLETICS WEEKLY that was critical of BAAB selection policy).
Frank was enormously generous to his friends and slow to forgive his enemies. Athletes and coaches who worked with him in recent years have almost canonised him in their effusive tributes, but he was Francis Horwill, MBE not Saint Francis of Asisi… He growled like George C Scott as General Patton in the 1970 Oscar-winning movie; and was always pleased when anyone noted the similarity. (PATTON was his favourite film, of course).
Little known fact – Frank lost his job as a marketing inspector and was jailed for 3 months in September 1980 for accepting bribes from traders who had neglected the required paperwork in setting up their stalls. But what did Frank do with the cash? He booked and paid for weekend coaching courses for young athletes at venues such as Crystal Palace and also make sure that any needy athletes among those invited had all their expenses covered.
He devoted his life to helping others and gave coaching advice to all who cared to ask for it without ever seeking financial reward for himself- unlike some of his colleagues. As you state, Pat, Frank Horwill was a one-off, and the sport lost one of it’s great characters when he sadly died at St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney at 5.49 pm on Sunday, 1st January 2012, having lived among us for 84 years and 195 days.
Nice reminisces. Obit was in Times today.
The Times (London)
January 5, 2012 Thursday
Frank Horwill;
Demanding athletics coach who helped to raise the standard of British middle-distance running to a point where it led the world
SECTION: FEATURES; OBITUARIES; Pg. 47
LENGTH: 802 words
Frank Horwill was an inspirational but controversial athletics coach who played a vital role in the world dominance of British middle-distance running in the 1980s.
In that decade British athletes held world records from the 800 through to the 5,000 metres and, at one point, claimed every leading global 1,500 metre title. Sebastian Coe was the Olympic champion, Steve Cram was world champion, Steve Ovett held the European crown and Dave Moorcroft the Commonwealth title. All were members of the British Milers’ Club (BMC), which Horwill founded in 1963 when British middle-distance was in the doldrums.
“The work of the BMC in making Britain the greatest miling nation in the world between 1977 and 1988 cannot be overestimated,” Coe once said. Horwill’s other great athletic achievement was devising his so-called five-pace training system, whereby athletes train at different race speeds over a given period. It was adopted by the brilliant Moroccan runner Said Aouita, as well as by Coe, whose father and coach, Peter, said: “The results are there for all to see.”
Yet, despite coaching more than 50 international runners through his career, Horwill remained outside the UK’s official coaching hierarchy. Instead, for decades he could be found several nights a week exhorting athletes of varying abilities around the track in Battersea Park, southwest London. He never sought payment, or demanded that they possess any talent – only that they give their all. “I once saw a one-legged man in Zimbabwe run 100 metres in 17 seconds. That is a champion,” he wrote, defining the courage that he looked for above all else in his runners. He was often at odds with the athletics’ establishment and, particularly in its amateur days, appeared to be a lone eccentric railing against the conformists who ran the sport.
Francis John Horwill grew up in West London, and had a traumatic childhood. His father was in the Navy and drank heavily, and his mother vented her frustrations on her children with regular beatings. “My mother was cruel and I didn’t take to her at all,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “You react to that situation in two ways. You either wallow in self-pity or become too forceful.” In Horwill’s case, it was the latter. At 14 he tried to run away from home, and two years later left for good, never contacting his parents again, but finding work on a farm in Sussex, before becoming a Bevin Boy during the Second World War, an experience which for a time engendered communist sympathies.
Soon afterwards a love of running was kindled, and back in London, he took his coaching exams and started to train athletes. By the 1960s British milers lagged far behind the world’s best. “I felt deeply resentful that a once great middle-distance country was declining so rapidly,” he recalled. Peter Coe observed in Horwill “a messianic urge to save British miling single-handed” – and it was to that end that he founded the BMC, organising races and running courses the length and breadth of the country. The severity of his sessions was legendary, and after one BMC course, Ovett claimed to be “almost living proof of life after death”. The British Amateur Athletic Board saw the BMC as a threat, however, and Horwill was soon at loggerheads with it. When he helped to produce an anonymous pamphlet called Athletics’ Truth, making scandalous allegations against the sport’s administrators and decrying the lack of democracy in the governing body, some never forgave him. In 1981, with British milers ruling the world, he hit a personal nadir when he was briefly sent to prison for tax evasion.
Horwill, who lived humbly in a council flat with few possessions, had been working as a street market inspector in the East End and earning undeclared backhanders. Most, if not all, the extra cash was being poured into the BMC, which he funded to the tune of £12,000 over ten years, even giving credit cards to hard-up protégés.
In 1984, though, he experienced a real triumph when Tim Hutchings, to whom he was very close and had coached since the age of 15, finished an heroic fourth in the Los Angeles Olympics 5,000 metres and second in the world cross-country championships.
Four years later Horwill was found to be suffering from stomach cancer. He reacted with the sort of resolve that he sought in his athletes. To the consternation of his nurses he got out of bed each day to exercise with a drip attached to him. “I am going to enjoy this day,” was his mantra. He survived for another 23 years.
Last November the former scourge of the athletics’ establishment went to Buckingham Palace to receive his MBE for services to the sport. “It was a more fitting way for him to be guest of Her Majesty,” Hutchings said.
Frank Horwill, MBE, athletics coach, was born on June 19, 1927. He died on January 1, 2012, aged 84
A wonderful raconteur and wit. Frank couldn’t abide pretension and airs especially what he recognised in the athletics hierarchy but he also had an immense love of the sport and a desire (and ability) to influence improvement and make athletes believe in themselves.
I bumped into him one Saturday morning in Portobello market, uniformed and with an official peaked “bus conductor’s ” hat handing out and checking licences of stall holders; very much the Baron on his patch!
He always had time to speak to you no matter what he was doing and would often come up to you when he first saw you at the track, in a conspiratorial, almost theatrical way, glancing around to see who might be watching or listening and when in earshot and still glancing around he’d exclaim through half gritted teeth, in that gruff, military style of voice he could put on so well, “do you know what!………………………and then launch into a tirade about some injustice over selection, management or organisation or general state of the sport, but then like a sail boom sweeping across the deck, changing tack, he’d start espousing the virtues and value of some other countries’ systems or individual scientific research into training methods, many of which he studied assiduously and commented on in his own articles.
Frank was an eccentric in the very best sense. He was a true gentleman and genuine to the core in his love of the sport and his belief that every athlete could achieve far better than they might otherwise imagine.
Dave you summed him up perfectly,the day he went to prison i thought the world had ended as a beneficiary of that money staying in that hostel at the palace.Not seen for many years but fondly remembered with my sole england vest 24×400 will never be forgotten.
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