How good would he have been with a decent start in life. It’s very sad to see how amateur athletics treated him.
The working classes really were second class citizens, like gentlemen and players in cricket. Rugby league and rugby union.
Rugby League is particularly relevant in this instance, as a game it’s had so many attempts to kill it, the so called gentleman amateurs couldn’t bear to be out muscled by the working man, so did everything possible to exclude them, mainly by not paying them for lost hours at work on a Saturday, the Welsh RFU even secretly paid players to stop clubs breaking away and joining the Northern Union, which they had more or less decided they would do, as Welsh players were in the same boat as the players in Yorkshire and Lancashire, the French Vichy government even got backing from their Nazi rulers to ban the game and even ban it being called Rugby, in France it was known as the Jeux de treize, just because it’s popularity was starting to overtake that of Rugby Union, however it remained popular in the Catalan Region of Southern France, probably as the Vichy Government’s grip never got that far south.
Back to John Tarrant, got to agree, seems to have been one hell of man, there’s definitely a film in there
