WHEN last running around this particular block, we had mused briefly upon the richly remembered race against time - Chariots of Fire style - down Fawcett Street in Sunderland. As the man with the air pistol might have observed, the column just didn't know what it had started.

Before turning once more into a pumpkin, this one will touch upon the Geordie who ran in the Olympics for a jar of Horlicks and a couple of pairs of Y-fronts, upon the timeless mystery of the town hall clock and upon the Rev Jim Taylor, known as the Millfield Rebel, who (for want of a more modest term) was somewhat spectacularly unfrocked.

Like Harold Abrahams' square bashing around the Cambridge quadrangle, the idea of the Sunderland spectacular - run since the late 19th Century - was to cover course and distance before the clock struck 12.

It chimed, like so much else, with the indispensable Tom Purvis who passed an hour or two in the local studies library and came up with the kernel of a column.

Mrs Margaret Rutter from Gunnerside, Swaledale, writes, too. Harry Gardiner, her late husband, was a Fawcett Street flier - the record holder, she believes - around 1960. Harry died, aged 41, in 1971.

Down Fawcett Street, the Gas Office to Mackies' Corner, was reckoned 367 yards. The town hall clock, erected around 1890 and modelled on Big Ben, took 38.5 seconds to mark time at 12o'clock.

The traditional race appeared to be over, however, until 30 years ago the council moved to a new Civic Centre and a final re-run was instigated by Alan Quayle - a Conservative on a Tory controlled council (honest) - before the town hall was demolished.

His grandfather ("a great athlete") had often taken part. It was midnight on July 23, 1970. "I just expected a few people to turn up," he recalls. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I turned into Fawcett Street and saw simply thousands there."

Almost 50 started the race, among them the Millfield Rebel, Alan Lillington - then a recently arrived consultant paediatrician - and Kevin Carr, now the Sunderland Echo's athletics correspondent.

"Old drunks were lining up against decent runners," says Kevin, 55. "We'd worked out that to beat the clock you'd need either to be an Olympic sprinter or else Bruce Forsyth. I don't think anyone ever did it."

The race was won by Paul Chapman, a Sunderland hairdresser. Kevin Carr was second, the flying doctor - then 37 - third.

The pseudonymous Falcon, among Kevin's forerunners as athletics correspondent, noted that the record attempt must count as a failure. The start was "dubious", the huge crowd prevented anyone reaching the finishing line and the din was so great that they couldn't hear the chimes, anyway.

There are thousands of Wearsiders, however, who still regret spurning the midnight toil.

ALAN Lillington - Dr Lillington, it is doubtless presumed - played football for Newcastle United's nursery team, trained with Jackie Milburn and the Robledo boys, was just 19 when he ran the 100 yards in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.

Horlicks was already comfortingly familiar, Y-fronts little sexier but just about the team's only reward. Perks was the porter in The Railway Children.

Harold Abrahams, by remarkable coincidence, was among the young Lillington's athletics mentors. His 21st birthday, he recalls, was spent at an international in Stockholm, Abrahams and Chris Chataway carrying him shoulder high round the room on the stroke of midnight (though not, perhaps, in a course record.)

Though reason itself for celebration, Fawcett Street was very much different. "I was a sprinter, anything over 200 yards was a killer and besides I was getting on a bit at the time," recalls Dr Lillington, now in Whitburn.

Like Alan Quayle and Jim Taylor - who himself had 100 backers - he was sponsored for the Sunderland Spina Bifida Society. Near Mackie's Coprner, he remembers, a caf called Elizabeth's - "businessmen's lunch one and sixpence" - was offering free midnight feats to finished and finishers.

"I was that exhausted I could hardly even drink a cup of tea," insists Dr Lillington. "The crowds were so vast you had to run down a narrow gap in the middle."

He went on, as it were, to become High Sheriff and a deputy Lord Lieutenant of Tyne and Wear and recently helped form Sunderland Sports Council, which in the past year has given £15,000 to promising youngsters.

Never again, however, has he been tempted to take off down Fawcett Street. "If I go past the gas office, I walk."

AMID Sunderland City Council's chamber of horologes, we have also been on the timeless trail of the town hall clock.

"Its whereabouts are still a mystery, a real bone of contention," says Alan Quayle. "The Civic Centre is good and nice but it'll never replace the town hall."

The original hour bell is in the Civic Centre itself and valued at £100,000. The base became part of a different clock in the Bridges shopping centre - or maul, as we must now call such developments - put into storage when the arcade was redeveloped. (Debenham's, Bridges II, opens today.)

The Bridges clock is five feet tall, weighs half a metric tonne and is still minutely maintained.

"We are looking for a new site but its size is the challenge," says a city council spokesman. "We are aware that a great deal of nostalgia attaches to it and are as keen as anyone to see it preserved". John North strikes again.