by Stan Eldon
As we outgrew our shop, another door opened. A new shopping centre was being built in Caversham with a mixture of shops. I dived in quickly and got one of the largest units, but because someone had just beaten me to first choice, I had a downstairs unit of 1,600 square feet, but the upstairs above this unit had been let, so we had to take the upstairs of the next-door unit which was only about 800 square feet. We set about designing a modern open-plan sports shop. Instead of everything being pushed behind counters, as with the traditional shops at that time, we opened everything up and had displays all along the sides and in the middle of the store.
Two big names from football joined the Stan Eldon team. We were expanding and I needed staff, and the advertising brought two top ex-footballers to work for me. One was Bobby Ayre, who had played for Charlton and been an England ‘B’ international player. As well as being a good footballer, he was also a very good golfer with a handicap of one or scratch. The other was Sylvan Anderton, who had played for Chelsea under Tommy Docherty, and like Bobby had finished his playing career with Reading.
In 1968 we moved into the new premises with what was then a large rent. In the June my family had grown by one more, when daughter Joanna Elizabeth was born at 26 St Peter’s Hill. This brought my tally to four, and three had been born in Olympic years. No wonder I never made it to that big event in an athlete’s life.
In 1969 someone walked into the shop and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The man was Derek Baylis, a local grocer who had himself created a unique business, and had sold out a short while before for around £1 million. He was impressed with my modern shop and concept, and he offered to put £10,000 cash into the business for a minor share. There was no formal agreement and he handed me a cheque for that amount within days.
He had some ideas for the business, and wanted to introduce some of his supermarket techniques into the sports trade. This included trading with Green Shield Stamps whose redemption shop was next door to our sports shop.
Very rapidly he decided we should expand, and he asked me for ideas, so at Easter 1969 we went off in his Rolls-Royce to Windsor and called on a long-established sports shop, E. J. Harding. We walked into the shop, spoke to the manager and found out that Mr Harding was at home and unwell. A quick phone call and off we went to his home at St Leonards Hill in Windsor, where he was in bed. A quick conversation, and Derek had done the deal with Harding. He would not return to the shop and we could take over at once, which we did. A few days and the stock was assessed and everything else was tidied up.
It was an interesting acquisition. The shop was very old-fashioned, and some of the stock had been there for twenty years or more. The only way up to the stockroom was up a ladder and through a small gap into the roof, where out of season sports equipment was stored. This included cricket bats and pads, as well as a good stock of Hornby railway stock. Some of the cricket pads had been there so long they were wrapped in brown paper, which along with the pads was disintegrating into dust. The cricket bats also told their own story. There was a stock of about forty, and when the sales rep from one of the leading manufacturers came around for his order, he told me that Mr Harding had always ordered the same quantity of bats; around ten, each year; we concluded that he did not sell many cricket bats. The previous proprietor did not believe in reducing the price of anything to shift it, and would rather it wasted away in the upstairs loft. All that changed when we took over, and I had to change the attitude of the manager who I took back after the takeover.
We never suffered too much from break-ins at any of our shops, but on one occasion I did get a phone call about 1 a.m. in the morning at home in Caversham, to say the window had been smashed and some stock grabbed from our shop in Peascod Street in Windsor. The police had telephoned and wanted me to attend at once, but when I arrived at the shop barely twenty minutes later, they wanted to know how I had got there so fast. It was not a serious theft and the felon was quickly apprehended. The only thing missing from the shop window were a couple of sheath knives, and they had obviously been grabbed by the blades because there was a trail of blood. It did not take Mr Plod long to realise that it was probably a soldier from Victoria Barracks, not more than a few hundred yards from the shop. A quick trip to the barracks and the offender, with his hand still dripping with blood, was in custody.
The relationship with my sleeping partner Derek Baylis was rather strange, and was not without its problems. He did literally write a cheque and give it to me without any formalities being agreed or signed. We did move over to his London accountants and they gave useful advice. Using his muscle, D.B. and myself went off to see the local Barclays Bank manager, and an overdraft of £20,000 was agreed so as to finance the purchase of Hardings in Windsor. That was OK with me and the bank, until after only a few weeks, D.B. decided that he could then take back his £10,000. Once the bank found out they were not happy, and it affected our relationship from then on.
Derek Baylis kept in touch and very occasionally appeared in the shop. These appearances and any contact at all gradually disappeared, and after about six years he decided he wanted to be released from his commitment to the bank, where he was still securing the overdraft. This was a very difficult period, and it got more than a little heated, with the bank refusing to release him and the threat of liquidation hanging over our heads. I was determined not to be beaten, and I consulted with an acquaintance, who was himself a successful businessman and who was in the Rotary Club I had fairly recently joined. With his help I was able to secure an accountant who was an expert in liquidations and the like. The whole attitude changed very quickly, and both the bank and the Baylis family came to heel. The bank accepted a payoff of the overdraft, but not the full sum from Baylis, and I moved to Lloyds Bank. I learned a lot about banks and banking from that incident.
In 1970 I advertised for a shop manager for Windsor, and was amazed when I received an application from my older half-brother Bernard, who had worked for the Borough Council since leaving school and was now in his mid-forties. I thought he was a permanent local authority mandarin. He insisted I treated him like every other applicant, but he did get the job and stayed with me until he eventually bought the Windsor branch from me. Most of the time the shop could manage with one full-time manager and some part-time staff for busy times like Saturday. We did advertise for a full-time school leaver on one occasion, and I interviewed several young applicants before selecting what appeared to be a bright young lad who was very keen. We had a semi-automatic till that could do some calculations, and the lad soon picked up how to use it, until after a few days someone bought twelve football studs at 3p each. He got confused because the till would not do such a simple calculation for small items. The adult with him in the shop at the time explained that you just did that in your head. Then the truth was out, he could not muliply the simplest sums or do any other adding up. We had a chat and he explained his problem, which had not come out in either his job interview or in the report from his school. We had to let him go and it was a lesson for me; I was always a lot more careful when appointing staff after that.
Over the years this shop had some interesting customers, including Michael Parkinson, Mary and their two sons, who were regular visitors for cricket and sports equipment. They lived in Windsor at that time, just a few hundred yards from the shop. I served them personally on many occasions, but one personality I missed, who was served by my brother when he was later managing the shop, was Joan Collins, she called in and bought a tennis racket for her daughter. There was another customer who sent someone to the shop, especially around the time of Royal Ascot each year. Her Majesty ordered tennis balls for her guests attending and being entertained at the Castle for the special week. Our Reading shop did not miss out on personalities, and George Cole and his wife, who lived at Henley, were regular shoppers; as was cartoonist “Mac” and his first wife. At the Caversham shop, I got involved in some bartering with a rep for a record com
pany who used to pay me regular visits and bring me the latest hit records. The arrangement was more for his benefit than mine, and we used to exchange his records for squash rackets and other sporting clothing and equipment.
In 1964 my track running had continued to decline in quality, although I still ran regularly for Windsor, Slough and Eton and for my second claim club Reading AC. In April I did run the Finchley 20 again, and although I was nowhere as fit as when I had run the race the first time, I did set off with the intention of having a serious run. I ran the first lap of five miles in twenty-six minutes, but this was one minute behind the race leader and eventual winner Mel Batty. I went through ten miles in 52:13, and fifteen miles in 80:42, before finishing in 1:57:58. I was thirty-seventh and it did earn me a First-Class Diploma. In fact 1:58 was the cut-off point for these awards, so I was the last in the list.
By now Windsor had quite a good team of road runners, and I lined up again for the Poly Marathon in June. I had learned a lot from the previous year, and finished much higher up the field in thirty-fourth place with 2:34:04.
My family was growing, and on 18th October 1964 our third child was born, Neil William, and this time I was not off on my travels as with the earlier births.
At the end of 1964 I was back at Nos Galan, but this time as the Mystery Runner, but I did join in the race after I had sent the runners on their way and finished thirty-ninth in 20:41.
By 1965 I was really back to being a club runner with no international ambitions, but in some ways it was a successful year, as our club road and cross-country team did have some successes. My training had really dropped off, as I was busy trying to run my business and bring up our young family, which was now three. My training mileage was only thirty to forty miles a week and sometimes very much less, with just a couple of weeks in the first half of the year when I touched seventy miles.
In the thirteenth running of the Maidenhead 10, which was won by Gerry North in 51:37, I only finished thirteenth in 54:38, but the Windsor team easily won the team race; in fact the ‘B’ team won and the ‘A’ team were second. The teams were Peter Yates third, Roger Collins ninth and Robert Graham eleventh, making up the ‘B’ team, and the ‘A’ team was D. Collins sixth, Eldon thirteenth and Bernie Allen fifteenth.
I ran the Finchley twenty mile race again, and surprisingly improved on my performance of the previous year, by finishing nineteenth in 1:53.59.
The season’s top cross-country races were the Southern at Brighton and the National at Parliament Hill, but I did not feature in the results.
I again ran in the Poly Marathon, and with the experience of the two previous years, I ran a good race. I reached twenty miles in just about two hours, which was slower than the previous races, but I managed to finish twenty-eighth in 2:36:31.
Riding on the back of this modest success, I decided to go to Holland in August to run the International Marathon at Enschede. I travelled alone by train and it was a very pleasant journey. I say I travelled alone, that was the intention, but at dinner on the train in the evening I was invited to join an elderly lady at her table and we found plenty to talk about. The company was good for me as it helped me to stay relaxed and it was a bit like being on the Orient Express.
As we lined up for the tenth running of this international marathon, I felt quite confident I could crack two hours thirty minutes for the first time. The race started in the stadium at Enschede with a couple of laps around the track. This was perhaps my undoing, as I could never resist running fast on the track. I was in the leading group as we left the stadium for the flat and fast out and back course of 26.2 miles. I was running well and had been maintaining a place in the first three or four. I started to slow slightly before the point where the race turned back, but at the halfway stage I was in seventh place with a time of 74:14. I was in a group of four and we were just two minutes behind the leader Vandendriesse of Belgium. Those ahead of me included a German, two Czechs, two Dutch, and I was in fact the leading English runner. It was a warm day and that was never good for me, but I was still OK at twenty-five km, which I went through in 87:22 and still in the same position. Within the next five km I was in trouble; it hit me suddenly. I had seen other runners, quite good runners, taking a short walk, and I could not understand why. It was unusual to see runners in leading places having to walk, but it caught up with me, and I remember one runner, who I had flashed by a few kilometres back when he was going though a bad patch, suddenly doing the same to me. I did walk quite a bit and never really got going again, and could not wait for the stadium to come in view. I finished in sixty-sixth place with 3:9:43. There was an official England team competing, and they won the team race with 7:41:43. Interesting to note that the team result was worked on time, something which I thought did not happen until the switching to computers for results in the 1980s. The first English runner was Ron Franklin (Thames Valley Harriers), in seventh place with 2:31:58, someone I knew well as he had the largest stock of running shoes outside of a sports shop; at times he would have over forty pairs of shoes in use. Just one place behind was G. Dickson in 2:33:57. The third member of the team was G. Winchester who finished in 2:35:48. The race was won by the Belgian who had led at halfway with a time of 2:21:16, and he was over five minutes ahead of his nearest rival V. Chudomel of Czechoslovakia. There were some interesting names from England running in the race. There were runners from the Metropolitan Police, whom had I run against frequently in my days with the police. Also running was Stan Jones (Polytechnic Harriers). He had finished in seventeenth place in the 1948 Olympic Marathon, and on this occasion finished eighty-eighth in 3:26:52. Stan, along with Len Runyard, the Windsor secretary, were the two people who had helped me through my running career.
My family were growing, and we had to look for something larger than our flat above the shop. Having no money to speak of, I had to get a mortgage if I was to buy a property. As we thought my mother-in-law was going to have to live with us, I approached Reading Borough Council for a mortgage, and they agreed they would lend me £4,000 for a suitable property. One of the very first houses we looked at, was an Edwardian five-bedroomed semidetached house in a very good position; not far from the shop at St Peters Hill in Caversham. It was a large house; over 2,500 square feet, and stood on a plot of land 440 feet long and about 40 feet in width, but it needed a lot of work on it, as it had not seen any decoration since before the war. I made an offer to the owners, the Millward Shoe family, of £4,250 which was below the asking price of around £5,000. They did not agree, but did accept an increased offer of £4,500.
Huge cracks started to appear in my training in the next year, 1966; although I did have some weeks of consistent decent training, there were large patches when I could not find the time to run. I occasionally had a race on the road, country or track, but nothing like my schedules of the past. When I did find time for a run I usually made it a long one, and this usually fitted in with some other activity like a family visit to see friends and family in Windsor. On one of these runs I ran from Twyford to Windsor, about thirteen miles in seventy-two minutes, and on another run I clocked eighty-seven minutes for about fifteen miles. That run was on the Sunday, and on the Wednesday I ran back from Windsor, a measured distance of nineteen miles in 1:50, but my training notes say it was run into the wind all the way, so it was not a bad run. This was a fairly regular feature during March and April in this year, as I did the same on the next three Wednesdays; all of these were runs from Windsor, and the first of these I ran in 1:42, the second 1:47 and the last in 1:41 (with a following wind).
On the 23rd April I again ran in the Finchley 20, but after passing five miles in 25:50, and ten miles in 52:50, I dropped out at fifteen miles. I must have taken a little while to recover from this, as training fell away to very little, although I did have another run from Windsor, which took 1:43 for the nineteen miles again.
After a couple of modest track races, I ran in the
Portsmouth to Chichester 16.5 mile race, and the Inter County twenty mile, which took me 1:58.
This was followed by another run in the Poly Marathon, but this time I dropped out at twenty-two miles, having gone through the ten mile mark in fifty-seven minutes.
As that year progressed my training disappeared, and by the 1st October even my training notes and diary stopped. I was only thirty but I was now busy with other things.
Looking back on my ‘life on the run’ between 1957 and 1962, it was strange that I never had the opportunity to run my favourite distance on the track, the 5,000 metres, where I had been ranked in the top three in the world, in a major international championship. I ran in international races for GB at the distance but never in the Olympics, European or Commonwealth Games (Empire Games in those days). I always got pushed into the longer 10,000 metres where I was never as highly placed in world rankings. A classic example of this was my selection for the six miles and not the three miles at the Empire Games in 1958. But I suppose that was my fault, as having been selected for the three miles, I broke the British six mile record and that immediately got me put into the six miles.
My greatest victory was the win over Alain Mimoun in the International Cross-Country, and I had other good wins over the country, but in many ways I was not a good cross-country runner. I could not fly over muddy fields like Gerry North in his prime. My win at Cardiff over Mimoun was on a flat, fast, frozen surface which turned the race into more of a road race than cross-country (if you ignored the fences).
I liked track running, and the challenge it presented, especially at 5,000 metres, but my favourite event was road running, where I was able to excel and break records even after my other performances had started to decline. Maybe I should have stuck with my early ambition from 1948, and taken up the marathon seriously.
