by Stan Eldon
In 2002 while I could still run I carried the Commonwealth Games torch through Abingdon, Oxfordshire and then appeared on stage at the Kassam Stadium, Oxford, where the run that day finished, with Sir Roger Bannister, who was the special guest.
My pacemaker continued the job of keeping me ‘ticking’ and it was replaced in 2006 as the battery was very low.
The heart was not behaving as it should and after several sessions at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford it was decided that I needed surgery to replace arteries to the heart and the aortic valve.
On Sunday 31st December 2007 I arrived at the appointed time at the JR. The operation on Monday 1st January 2008 did not go too well and I was rushed to Intensive Care where I stayed for nearly a week and can remember nothing of that time, except a real ‘out of body’ experience. Family were told they could visit any time and Marion knew what that meant although she was shocked to see me linked up to eleven different machines including a ventilator. As soon as I came to I was taken back for surgery to tidy up the wounds left after the first op including the removal of my breastbone. Then several weeks later, which included some weeks in a single room, isolated from others because of infections and after living with a vacuum attached to my chest for five weeks, I had plastic surgery to rebuild my chest with a muscle from my abdomen, what is known as a muscle flap. I had several delays with this, sometimes having the operation cancelled at the very last minute. This and suffering four infections made my stay much longer than it should have been and it was ten weeks before I left hospital. During my weeks in hospital I continued to exercise by walking up and down the long corridors pushing my trolley with the special vacuum pump connected to my chest, a few lengths building up to dozens of out-and-back walks from the ward, much to the surprise and amusement of patients and staff.
On my sixty-sixth day I was told I might be able to go home, but then they thought I had yet another infection. I insisted I was going home and it was agreed that I could if I could learn very quickly how to treat myself with antibiotic injections, which included mixing what was required and washing through the vein in my arm before injecting. A very patient specialist nurse gave me instruction, but I did not get it right first time and I was told if I could not do it there would be no exit for me. During the following night a young nurse spent some time with me and next morning when the other nurse returned to test me I passed and could go home. I was also told that many nurses took a lot longer to learn the procedure than I did. Marion came to collect me and we left with three large boxes of medication and equipment as well as an infusion stand. I always did like a challenge and carried out the procedure for some weeks before signing on at a gym to improve my fitness.
Not all bad news in 2008 as in May I received a letter advising me that I had been recommended for the award of an MBE for services to athletics and sport for the disabled. I had to agree and then await the actual date and venue for the investiture.
In November the letter arrived and it gave me the date - 12th December - and the really good news that it was to be at Windsor Castle in my home town, where I lived for the first eighteen years of my life.
It was also within two days of the date in 1958 when the Royal Borough of Windsor presented me with an Illuminated Address for my contribution to English sport.
There is always someone behind such a recommendation, and my grateful thanks to blind runner Bill Gulliver, himself an MBE, who I know did the work of getting support letters and completing the application.
We decided to stay in Windsor the night before and to have a lunch for the family after the event in the Royal Adelaide Hotel where we had our wedding reception fifty-one years earlier.
On the day, dressed in my hired morning suit and top hat, I drove up the Long Walk, where I used to play as a youngster, to the castle entrance. I was accompanied by my wife, Marion, eldest sister, Janet, and eldest daughter, Caroline.
I parked the car and was met by castle officials who told Marion that the Queen was carrying out the investiture (such decisions are often made on the day). One of the castle staff on duty was Francis Holland, who had lived almost opposite me in Elm Road, Windsor when we were boys. Prior to moving to the castle he had been a sailor on the royal yacht for many years.
It was a great experience; even the music that played me in and out was significant - ‘My Heart Goes On’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’, which I had heard in the abbey when I attended the funeral of Princess Diana. The Queen was fantastic and we had a nice chat.
Then it was a bow and turn out of the chamber where my MBE was quickly taken away from me. I thought, ‘That was short’, but it was only to give the box that it can be kept in. The press were waiting as I was one of several they wanted to interview and so it was out into the quadrangle for photographs and chat.
We left the castle via the Frogmore Gate on to the Long Walk, where all the family were waiting, all very cold as they had been there some time and it was a very cold day.
We had family photographs in front of the castle and a drive back down the Long Walk to the Datchet Road that crosses the park. The police stopped the traffic to allow me to leave the Long Walk. Many years earlier I could have had the job of stopping traffic there and now I was getting the special treatment.
Then it was back to the Royal Adelaide Hotel in Windsor where we had our wedding reception in 1957, for lunch with the family. This included our son Neil, whom I had found after twenty-plus years (in the book).
At the end of 2010 the man who was a great influence on my running and who wrote the generous foreword to this book, Len Runyard, former secretary of the Windsor and Eton AC (as it was then) sadly died. Later a memorial bench was placed in honour of Len at the Thames Valley Athletics Centre, Eton, the home of the Windsor, Slough, Eton and Hounslow AC.
In June 2011 Marion and I went on the maiden cruise of the Queen Elizabeth to the Baltic for fourteen days, visiting many of the places I had run at or visited in my earlier life - Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Copenhagen, and St Petersburg. In life you often meet people in other parts of the world who have a connection to you, and the cruise was no exemption. When we were allocated our table in the restaurant on the first night we met a lady who it transpired had been at the same infant school in Windsor as me during the war. Near the end of the cruise we were due to make a trip to Flanders to visit the war cemeteries.
In August 2012 we attended a special service in St Paul’s Cathedral before the start of the Paralympics. We had a special seat under the dome and just behind the Lord Mayor of London, where during the service a basketball demonstration was performed.
We now have eight grandchildren and in 2012 two of them were married, one in March and the other in October.
In May 2012 there was a special exhibition at the Reading Museum to celebrate the Olympics which was titled ‘Bikes, Balls and Biscuitmen’ to celebrate ‘Our Sporting Life’, showing the history of Reading sport and sporting individuals. I was well featured in this and had worked with the curator to ensure as much as possible of sport in the town was covered.
Good news came in the middle of 2013 when Marion and I were told that we were to be great-grandparents, but the not-good news was that after a lifetime of being fit and well it was my wife of fifty-six-plus years who was to end up in hospital.
On Saturday 31st August her problems started after a week of not feeling well; she was suddenly much worse and at about 11:15 a.m. I called 999. They were very good and asked all sorts of questions and said a doctor would ring me, which he did straight after. We went through the questions again with some extra, and he confirmed that help was on its way. After thirty minutes the paramedic arrived and started checking Marion. Then the ambulance and she was off to the JR. At about 8 p.m. they decided after discussion with Marion and us that the best place to be was at home as there was no guarantee of a bed in the ward!
That was
not the end, but the beginning of a health problem for Marion. When two weeks later she was taken ill on the Saturday night, she could not get out of bed and by the morning was much worse. She could not stand and told me she thought she had suffered a stroke. Another call to 999 and I was asked to check for all the usual symptoms of a stroke. Apart from the weakness in her left arm, no strength in her left leg and the pain in her shoulder/neck which she had been suffering from, she did not have other symptoms such as loss of speech or distorted face.
Again the ambulance was called and she was off to the John Radcliffe Hospital again, where she stayed for nineteen days. Marion has made a great recovery; she quickly ditched her walking frame and seldom uses her stick although she still has some discomfort.
My Rotary Club of Caversham closed in 2014. Sad as I had been involved with it for thirty-seven years, and put a lot of time into working for it and its projects. It did have one good result for me: I was able to take possession of a gift the club received from the twin club in France to mark my two 176-mile runs. It was a Greek bust, the ‘Head of a Victorious Athlete’ from the Louvre in Paris, where the original is held. On 1st July I became a member of the Rotary Club of Didcot, so my link with the organization continues.
I also resigned as the representative for the South East to the English Federation for Disability Sport after thirty years of being involved with sport for disabled people, although I still maintain my interest.
Not all negative news: the next generation are now being born, so we have five children, eight grandchildren and now we have had three great-grandchildren born in November 2013 and January and September 2014. I am very proud of all my family.
At the get-together of athletes from the past on the weekend of the London Marathon 2014 I met many of my old friends from athletics in the 1950s and 1960s. I also met an athlete that I had never met but whom I had watched and admired in my formative athletic years, miler Bill Nankerville. He used to wear brightly coloured satin shorts that showed up very well under floodlights, so what did I do? I copied him and wore similar when I progressed in the sport. At the same meeting I also met Basil Heatley the former world record holder for the marathon and Olympic marathon silver medal winner in 1964 and discovered that we had very similar health problems. He also had the same view as me, that there is a question over distance running and its effects. Keeping fit is obviously beneficial, but can the body stand the greater exertions put on it by intense training in any sport? Many top athletes have died early in life and others live with the problems of diabetes, heart disease and/or cancer. Little research has been done to find out if this is a fact. Overexertion of the body will become a growing problem for all sports people as there is more and more pressure to perform, very frequently for financial reasons.
I recently read a book, The Ghost Runner, about runner John Tarrant, who was banned from athletics events because he had accepted £17 in expenses as a teenage boxer. This made him turn to ultra-distance events where he ran unofficially, setting records at 100-mile-plus events, but he died in his forties with cancer. He joined a long list of runners who died early, like Gordon Pirie, Lillian Board, John Merriman, Peter Driver and many more. These were not in the generation that used drugs to enhance performance, just hard-training athletes. Others like me have suffered from heart disease - for example, David Bedford and Gerry Stevens (an international steeplechaser from Reading) - and they are not all international athletes like a very good veteran runner Tim Hughes. These are still living, but have had a problem from an early age.
In October 2014 my heart was giving me problems. I get very tired and breathless and very weak in the legs, which makes walking even just a couple of miles difficult. I also had other problems and I was booked in for urgent hospital appointments. One of these was for a prostate examination at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford which resulted in being diagnosed as having prostate cancer. Then I went through various tests and procedures to check the rest of the body, had a CT scan and full bone scan as I could not have an MRI because of the pacemaker. I went up to the hospital again one week later expecting to be told what treatment I would be having, but the news was good: the cancer had not gone into the bones and no immediate treatment was advised. I would be monitored regularly to keep an eye on it.
I had a thorough examination at Cardiology in the John Radcliffe Hospital re the heart problem. I had two ECGs and an echogram before seeing the same doctor who saw me back in 2007/8, and he booked me in for another procedure at the JR. Both Marion and I have been very well looked after by both hospitals in Oxford.
In November it was announced that the Reading Post was to close and I had my last column published in the final edition on 17th December, 2014. So it was my last ‘job’ after starting work when I was eight helping out at the Royal Albert Laundry in Windsor, where my father worked. So my working life had matched his as he started on his father’s brewery dray at about the same age and worked until he was nearly eighty.
My main occupation now is the family tree which I have been working on for the last two years. It has proved to be very interesting, looking back on the various lines of the family as far back as the 1600s. The family Eldon has served in the army during three centuries, including my grandson James, who is serving now and has had tours of duty in Iraq and then twice in Afghanistan. I can find the records of most of my family, but my own father is still a bit of a mystery. Several of my ancestors were bigamists; one finished life in a workhouse and another in an asylum. I now have nearly 900 family members in the tree, covering Marion’s family and my own. My family has not been easy as the names were Aldwin in Chertsey in the 1600s then Alden and later Elden before my father, who was born as Alden and was Elden for part of his life, finally adopted Eldon after World War 1. The early family in Surrey were carpenters and wheelwrights and then tailors for two generations before military and other careers. Both my father and my grandfather used all three names.
On my maternal tree things were much easier as the family name was Marshall and they lived and worked in agriculture in the same area of Wiltshire, many of them on the same estate, Stourhead, for many generations.
While writing this last chapter I learned of the death of Mary (May) Eldon, the widow of my half-brother WO Class 2 Leslie Gordon Eldon, who died in May 1945 in East Africa. They had a son, David Gordon, born a few months after his father’s death. He had a career in banking and was chairman and chief executive of HSBC Asia. He is an honorary doctor of business administration of the City University of Hong Kong and a CBE.
Looking back to 2002, when this book was published, I have been pleased to see that the Reading Half Marathon that I was responsible for and organized for the first twelve years has now passed thirty years and going strong. This makes the battles I had to get it started worthwhile. The three running clubs in Reading which I have had some involvement with over many years have all developed and grown, providing a choice of different clubs that new runners can join. Reading Athletic Club has climbed back to being the successful club for all avenues of athletics that it has been for much of its life since 1881. They are now producing many very good athletes, including twenty-year-old Jonny Davies who has already become an international. Reading Roadrunners are providing road-running events and cross-country and have produced some very good road runners. Reading Joggers is a good club for those who are beginning and want a slightly different approach to their sport, including ultra-distance running.
My life has changed as there is no more running and I am envious of those who are running at my age or older, like Peter White (Reading Joggers), aged eighty-four, and Tom Harrison (Reading Roadrunners), who is my age. Both started running at a late age. I do walk, but that has been reduced from five miles to two miles if I am feeling good, but with impending treatment this may improve. I seem to spend a lot of time at hospitals as I have also had long-ongoing treatment for my right eye, which is having regular Lucentis
injections for macular oedema.
It is pleasing to me that after more than fifty years since my successful years I am still of interest to athletics journalists around the world. In the past three years I and the book have been written up by a Canadian journalist John Cobley and also a long article appeared in a Norwegian publication on the Internet featuring, in particular, my front-running tactics. Not bad after over half a century, and hopefully I am not on my last lap yet...
Stan Eldon
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