Roy Fowler died a month ago. Or, to put it in terms that would be immediately understood by the many rivals who chased him fruitlessly round cross country courses in the English midlands and far abroad, Foxy has gone to the great chicken run in the sky.
Although we both ran for Staffordshire, I was very much an occasional minor cog in the county team of which Fowler was the perennial drive wheel. Yet he was an unlikely star athlete. Tiny, scrawny, and foaming at the mouth, because toothless when he ran (he took his dentures out) Foxy Fowler was nevertheless one of the hardest men who ever trod ground. At speeds which left most of his rivals gasping for breath.
Roy had reputedly taken up running after a doctor recommended it would improve his health following bouts of pneumonia in his youth. From winning schools races, he quickly became one of the best distance runners in the UK.
Trentham Park in north Staffordshire, near where Fowler lived was a regular venue for the county and indeed the Midlands Championships, when both were competitive races of the highest quality. When I was a junior I watched Fowler win both races. There was a huge hill in the middle of each lap, with a one in seven gradient. Fowler danced up it.
Although I was born and bred about 30 miles south of where Fowler lived the whole of his life, I barely understood a word he said, so impenetrable was his accent. And, as Basil Heatley – Olympic marathon silver medallist in Tokyo 1964, and one of the few men to beat Roy regularly – said of him, “Roy had the dirtiest mouth I ever heard on anyone”.
I always thought that the Foxy nickname was an inevitable result of that contradictory humour that leads to tall guys being named Titch, or black guys being called Chalky. But Tim Johnston (eighth in the Mexico Olympic marathon), who sent me the group pictures below, assures me that Roy was named after an elusive criminal of the time who was called Foxy Fowler, due to his capacity to outwit the law.
The closest I got to our Foxy was on one of the few occasions I ran for the Staffs senior team in the Inter-Counties cross country, in Brighton in 1969. The majority of us travelled to the south coast together, but Foxy had left earlier in the day. Since Roy was the multiple county champion, had already won the Inter-Counties twice (1961/6), taken bronze in the European 10,000 metres in 1962, and capped it all by winning the International Cross Country title in 1963, he was still very much the team leader. So when we arrived at the B&B where the team was staying, we went to his room to pay our respects.
Like many of the guys from that era, who held down a full-time job and trained on either side of it, Foxy had retired to bed at 9pm. So we trooped into his room, where he held court, propped up on his pillow, reading Pigeon Fanciers’ Weekly, with his teeth in a glass on the bedside table.
I promise, I am not making this up.
I forget where Foxy finished at Brighton Racecourse the following day, but it was almost certainly in the first half dozen, way ahead of me, with Trevor Wright winning the race.
I moved away from the Midlands shortly afterwards, so never got to know Roy better. But he was one of the characters, in all senses of the word, who had shaped my early running career.
It was a time when British, particularly English cross country runners ruled the world. As they had done throughout the century until then. The International Cross Country, inaugurated in 1903 as the Four Nations Championship (England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales) expanded very slowly. France joined in 1907, Belgium in 1923, with half a dozen other European nations joining over the next 25 years.
It wasn’t ‘til the 1950s that teams from the US, Africa and New Zealand competed. But of the 59 races which preceded the first IAAF World Championships in 1973, England won 42 team events, with Englishmen, including Foxy, taking 35 individual titles.
That domination was reflected throughout Europe every weekend in winter. Just like Kenyans nowadays, English runners would win in two or three different races, in France, Belgium, Holland, Spain.
The running pictures (top) of Roy come courtesy of his local journal The Sentinel, and editor Mike Sassi. And you can find more about Roy’s life in their obituary – http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/news/Athletics-Roy-Fowler-obituary/article-1120563-detail/article.html
The first group picture sent by Tim Johnston was taken on a ferry from southern Spain to Tangiers, Morocco. The members of the English team, on its way to Rabat for the ‘International’ were (left to right): Fowler, who finished fourth, Gerry North, Mike Freary (8th), Ron Hill (6th), and Tim (7th). The race was won by Ben Assou El Ghazi of Morocco, from Derek Graham of N Ireland, and Tracy Smith of the USA. Foxy led the English to another team victory.
This second pic was taken on the way back from the San Sebastian cross country in 1969. Tim is wearing the Basque bonnet and holding the cup; in the centre is Bill Adcocks, better known as a marathoner (fifth in Mexico 1968); and Mike Tagg won the race. As Tim wrote, “Those were the days”.
And those were the guys. Foremost among them was Roy. Prior to that International Cross win in 1963, Roy had complained about pain in his legs. After his victory, it was discovered that he had stress fractures in both tibia. He ended up in plaster casts, but had effectively won the ‘world’ title on broken legs.
Originally a member of North Staffs & Stone, he helped found Staffs Moorlands club. While coaching the youngsters later in life, he also won the national veterans’ (masters) cross country title four times.
Foxy was a legend. They don’t make ‘em like that any more, and I think I can safely say, we shall never see his like again.
Good stuff, Pat.
A footnote to Roy’s San Sebastian win, from Gaston Meyer, writing in L’Equipe. As is well-known, the Basques love a flutter. According to Meyer, the local books were quoting 3 to 1 against Basil (who’d beaten Roy in the National a couple of weeks earlier), 5 against Roelants and Jazy, with Rhadi at 7. You could get 66 or better against Roy. One of England’s supporters, a Coventry businessman who travelled every year to the International, accompanied by his secretary, got a couple of hundred pounds on. After the banquet, he bought Roy a beer. The secretary got a new diamond necklace.
In 1966, Roy came back from injury and illness to win the Inter-Counties again. He was then invited back to race in the Basque country, where he’d retained local-hero status. A comfortable win in Elgoibar was followed by the annual San Sebastian race, where I joined him, together with Jim Hogan, in the ECCU team.
We shared a room, and for a couple of days I was the beneficiary of Roy’s wit and wisdom, recounted in that incomparable accent: the ‘ten moile in boots on grass verge’, with clubmate Tony Walker (National Junior C-C Champion), ‘in poomps on t’road’, trailing in his wake; accounts of epic battles with arch-rival Heatley, complete with sound effects (‘Poof-poof, spit! Poof-poof, spit! Poof-poof, spit! You could ‘ear the booger cooming fifty yards back!’); lobbing a half-brick through the windscreen of a motorist who’d tried to run him off the road, then returning in his street clothes to ask the guy if he’d like him to call the AA…
Roy had his magic potion, whose formula had been given to him by an old gypsy he’d befriended. The main ingredients were cider vinegar and olive oil, plus some secret item which he promised to disclose to me at some future date. For years, I religiously dosed myself with cider vinegar and olive oil, but I never did learn what that secret ingredient was.
Two much-repeated admonitions: ‘If it’s not ‘urtin’, it’s not doin’ you no good!’ and ‘Keep the body warm at all times!’ Even in late January, San Sebastian was comfortably warm, but Roy wasn’t taking any chances. At bedtime, he climbed into full long-johns and long-sleeved woolly vest, added an extra blanket and pulled the covers up to his chin.
The race was something of an anti-climax. At that time, San Sebastian was one of the few winter events where you could come up against runners from outside the West European or North African circuit; the organisers regularly brought a team up from Ethiopia. That year, they’d invited some Russian, led by a new guy, Dutov, comfortable winner of the 10k the previous September in the inaugural Europa Cup (where GB were a poor last!). Roy and I got stuck in, swapping the lead with Mariano Haro, the top Spaniard. Then, coming into the long final straight, Dutov came alongside, looking as if he was out for a Sunday morning jog. Roy looked at me, shook his head and took off. Dutov glided after him, waited till the last 100m and shot past. ‘Booger weren’t even trying!’ said Roy afterwards.
Sadly, the oily Spanish food proved to be an even tougher opponent for Roy than the gliding Russian. I didn’t see him again until the National at Sheffield, where he explained that he’d been laid up for a month with dysentery: ‘I were that weak, me wife ‘ad to carry me to toilet!’ He nonetheless made the team for the International Championship in Rabat, where, first scorer in 4th place, he led England to a convincing win. Afterwards, he complained about being baulked mid-race by the erratic young Scot, Ian McCafferty: ‘Booger stops dead right in front of me, says he’s got a stone in ‘is shoe. You don’t stop for a f**kin’ stone!’
Roy was one of those obsessives who perhaps left many of his greatest performances on the training track. But, as Robert Browning put it: ‘…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’
Thanks, Roy, we’ll miss you!
Very good piece by Tim J, who perhaps knew Roy Fowler even better than you did, even though you and ‘Foxy’ were both Staffordshire men and Tim raced for Hampshire as a member of that fantastic Portsmouth AC distance squad back in the 1960′s.
The sad aspect is that the kids who work on Athletics Weekly now will say, “Who the f… was Roy Fowler?”
I have to confess to my shame I’m in the category referred to in Dave’s last sentence, although certainly no kid. I was in Leek last weekend on a visit to family nearby and we visited the Leek Show. I never knew Staffordshire was so hilly. Afterwards, walking around the town there was a book about Roy Fowler on prominent display in a local bookshop. To my shame, I thought he was probably some local hero only and didn’t buy it – I’m disgusted with myself now.
Great piece, Pat.
Roy will be mourned more widely than he would have imagined. Unknown to him, he had godlike status in the 1960s among student runners in the Cambridge University Hare & Hounds, partly because Tim J and Mike Turner knew him as England team members. He was our model for uncompromising hard training. In a tribute to him in my “Heroes and Sparrows” (1986), I cited the legendary Fowlerism that was our daily inspiration: “That were a good run. I were so tired I couldn’t turn the f -ing bath-taps on.”
It’s worth noting (since Pat sometimes laments the decline in commitment among English runners) that the Fowler Method and Mike Turner’s equally rigorous leadership made Cambridge at that era probably the best University distance team in history.
Roy’s bath-taps quotation is also well-known in New Zealand, where it has formed the basis of my training & coaching philosophy for 40 years.
He is not forgotten.
Roger Robinson
A true legend of the running circuit, my he have fun in the great chicken run in the sky