Charlie still the marathon man

"It's the first time I've seen you dressed," says a passing parishioner, by which she means - of course - in anything other than running kit.

Now 49, Charlie was a Croxdale lad, grew up 50 yards from St Bartholomew's, couldn't open his presents until he'd attended Christmas Day service, even held his 18th birthday party (times change) in the church hall.

Now, billed as Charles Spedding - "my mother's influence, she's the only one who calls me Charles" - he was back officially to open the flower festival, sub-titled A Walk Through Time.

Charlie fair flew through it. A good schoolboy 1500m runner, he persisted despite recurrent injuries - "hugely appreciated by Gateshead Harriers during the 1970s and early 1980s but almost unnoticed by athletics fans elsewhere," Athletics News observed.

Then suddenly they sat up. He was fourth in the 1982 Commonwealth Games 10,000m, won the AAA 10k title in 1983, the London Marathon in 1984, Los Angeles marathon bronze the same year and was sixth, first Briton, in Seoul four years later.

Bronze came in only his third marathon; chase me Charlie, he'd won the first two.

His English record, 2-8-33, was also set in 1984, though he was second in that race behind the Welshman, Steve Jones. That the time has never been beaten amazes him, he says.

"Partly it may be social factors, Margaret Thatcher...." - the thought is diplomatically guillotined - "partly because of a general decline in the sport.

"To an extent, athletes no longer put all their eggs in one basket as I did. I'd spend half a year getting ready for the London Marathon, or maybe the Olympics afterwards. There was a great deal of mental preparation; people nowadays seem a bit scared to commit themselves like that."

A pharmacist, like his late father Joe - "a pharmacist by profession and an optimist by nature," The Northern Echo once said - he was also a founder member of the Durham branch of the Campaign for Real Ale, became CAMRA's North-East organiser and was occasionally irritated by the media's instinctive eagerness to link his two leisure pursuits..

"It was as if they were wondering how I ran so fast when I drank so much," he says.

"I've always liked beer but because I couldn't drink very much, I wanted it to be the best that there was available."

In 1984 he opened the Durham beer festival as well as coming third in Los Angeles.

The runner's return had helped crowd out the sumptuously floribundant church - "breathtaking," said Martin Wray, the Vicar - visitors pursued at Olympic training camp speed by charming ladies bearing ever-replenished plates of food.

A floral exhibit had been devoted to him, another to world renowned fashion designer Bruce Oldfield who as a Barnardo's boy had been fostered by a dressmaker in Hett, the neighbouring village.

Charles was due at his mum's for supper, urged to go steady on the church buffet and on no account to slope off down the pub - the Daleside Arms in Croxdale has conveniently been named Durham CAMRA's pub of the year - with the libertarian man from the paper.

Instead we overflowed into the churchyard, where he drank a glass of red wine instead. The column declined, incapable after all these years of simultaneously standing, writing and drinking.

"I could have just drunk a pint," said Charlie - affable, self-effacing, still wiry, abundantly glad to be back.

He'd been educated at Durham choir school ("I can't sing a note," he says), learned pharmacy at Sunderland Polytechnic, as then it was, joined his father in the family business at Ferryhill,

"Ah yes," folk there will still recall, "you mean Spedding the Chemist."

In the 1980s he worked for Nike, returned to pharmacy seven years ago with his own business in Gateshead, has recently sold it - "an offer I couldn't refuse, and didn't" - and is presently taking a breather.

"I'm open to offers so far as my future is concerned. It's a very nice position to be in," he admits.

Being a pharmacist, however, is something with which he has quite happily dispensed. "There were a lot of people who just didn't look after themselves at all and then expected the Health Service to make them better for free.

"I just found the attitude quite difficult, it irritated me and I felt that the Health Service was almost encouraging it."

Apart from that, he says - warming to the theme - there was no room for creativity. "You can't tell Mrs Jones that you've decided to interpret her prescription in a Gothic style and make her pills black."

What would his dad have made of that. "He'd say I was dead right," says Charlie.

His late development, he reckons, was due mainly to injury and illness. During one supposedly routine Achilles tendon operation he developed a reaction to the anaesthetic - anaphylactic shock, or some such - and spent a week in intensive care.

Though an outstanding club runner and frequently triumphant team man, his surge came just as athletics' Father Time was preparing to ring the lap bell.

"It was just a progression. I was never quite quick enough, so I kept moving up the distances. I'd have got to the marathon sooner but for the injuries."

It was persistent injury which also persuaded him to retire, in 1990. "I finally knew that I was never going to run better than I had already, and as soon as that happened, the motivation vanished."

His biggest cheque, £14,000, was for the London Marathon. He's not envious of the vast sums top athletes now earn, he says, only of those who get paid a lot more for covering 26 and a bit miles rather more slowly than he did.

Unlike other top line runners of his generation, his name has been little heard since - other than above a chemist's shop in Gateshead and as a Radio 5 Live commentator on the London Marathon.

He now runs twice a week ("half an hour, only if it's fine") rides a mountain bike and plays tennis - "the only thing I keep the score at" - and wonders about further openings in the media.

For the moment, however, he is looking forward simply to a relaxing summer. Charlie Spedding, who ran and ran, has finally come to a halt.

BERRY Brown, Hartlepools United's goalkeeper for 125 Football League games in the early 1950s, has died. He was 73.

"A great goalkeeper and one of the nicest men I ever met in football," says long serving Pools wing half Jack Newton, now 76.

Berry, signed from Stockton, had played previously for Manchester United and Doncaster Rovers. His best remembered match was probably Pools' 1-0 FA Cup defeat at first division Burnley in 1952, watched by a 38,608 crowd paying £3800 - or an average two bob apiece.

"The Hartlepools were little more than ghost towns that day," recalls Ed Law's club history.

Jack Newton, not too clever himself of late but now feeling much better, still recalls two saves from Burnley's English international left winger Billy Elliott, later to manage both Sunderland and Darlington. "Only Berry could have done it. He was absolutely magnificent."

CHIEFLY concerned with the Durham County Cricket League's attempts to improve behaviour - and language - on the field, Friday's column on league chairman Peter Metcalfe also added his twopennorth to the list of "named" dominoes.

In those Deerness Valley parts the double four was "owld square fyes" and double six was "Coxhoe lang rar". Another, though he was unable to remember which, was the Curse of Scotland.

During a cricket match at Esh Winning on Sunday he was told that Scotland's curse was the double three - something to do with the thistle on the old threepenny bit, it was said.

Peter - "mind, double three could be a sod to get rid of" - insists that his informant has impeccable credentials. "He's the Durham City Council dog catcher."

THE Oxford English Dictionary, incidentally, confirms the suspicion that "sledging" was originally an XXXX Australian term - "trying to disrupt a batsman's concentration by abusing or teasing." Dennis Lillee, it's inexplicably said, was one of the masters. The etymology is striking - it's from "as subtle as a sledge hammer."

ONE or two expletives may also have had to be deleted in Bishop Auckland over the one game NYSD League career of Gareth Wylie, a London based South African who contacted the club through the Internet.

"The story's too extraordinary to print," says club chairman Keith Hopper, but recounts it strictly off the record.

It's much too long, an' all. Mr Wylie, suffice, has returned whence he came.

FRIDAY'S column sought the identity of a Newcastle United player who had made first team appearances in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, another who appeared in the 70s, 80s and 90s and a third whose career now embraces the eighties, nineties and the present decade.

They were John Craggs, Mark McGhee - in two spells - and Steve Howey, whose Magpie debut was in 1989.

Brian Shaw from Shildon today seeks the identity of the only England manager to have won the PFA Player of the Year award.

We're back in charge on Friday.

Published: Tuesday, July 3, 2001