1/8/2024 0 Comments Roger bannister family![]() ![]() McWhirter described the loss of his younger twin as “not a bereavement, an amputation”.įive days after the murder, in a blaze of publicity, he appeared at the launch of the National Association for Freedom, along with likeminded souls such as Aims of Industry director Michael Ivens and the group’s first chairman, ex-Tory MP and war hero William Philip Sidney. The men who shot him were members of that gang. He had offered a £50,000 reward for the capture of what became known as the Balcombe Street Gang, an IRA group responsible for bombings in London. On 27 November 1975, Ross was gunned down on the doorstep of his Enfield home. Their political destiny did not involve elected political office. Six years later, he stood as Conservative candidate for Orpington, backed by Denis and Margaret Thatcher, losing but cutting the Liberal incumbent’s majority, while his brother Ross was defeated as Tory candidate in Edmonton. Moscow is making use of you.” Superbly, he thereby drove lefty pacifists to violence: only after causing £150 damage to his Mercedes were they hauled off by stewards. “Each one of you is increasing the risk of nuclear war,” he shouted through a megaphone. In 1958 Norris went to Aldermaston to hector anti-nuclear demonstrators from the roof of his car. The McWhirters were also rightwing political scrappers. In 1955, Norris and Ross published the first Guinness Book of Records, written in a mere 16 weeks. ![]() He asked Christopher Chataway, who came second to Bannister, to recommend someone who could write a book about records. Roger Bannister had just broken the four-minute mile (McWhirter was the announcer at the Iffley Road, Oxford track that day) and public hunger for records was insatiable. In 1954, Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness, had a bright idea. Photograph: S&G and Barratts/Empics Sport McWhirter as an Oxford University and Great Britain athlete in 1948. His father, William, was managing director of Associated Newspapers and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, Norris and Ross moved into sports journalism, Ross becoming the Star’s rugby and tennis correspondent while Norris was for 16 years athletics correspondent of the Observer, and also covered every Olympics from Rome (1960) to Munich (1972) for the BBC. He competed for Great Britain against Norway in 1951, winning the 100 and 200 metres. Certainly, he fought against, rather than played footsie with fascism, though his later rightwing politics were such as to make anyone to the left of Norman Tebbit seek a cold compress.Īfter serving on minesweepers in the Pacific in the war, McWhirter went to Trinity College, Oxford where, apart from graduating in international relations and economics, and then taking an MA in law, he became an athlete, running the 100 yards in under 10 seconds. Tory MP Julian Lewis argued Baddiel’s remarks were “disgraceful”, not least because McWhirter was a second world war veteran. The suggestion that McWhirter was a fascist outraged his admirers. “Was he a brownshirt with Mosley or whatever they were called?” Davies asked, referring to Oswald Mosley, the 1930s leader of the British Union of Fascists. During it, Baddiel described the Freedom Association as a “slightly posher version of the BNP”. We were reminded of this in September when Katie Hopkins announced her intentions to tour the country’s schools to talk to teenagers about the importance of owning their opinions.īaddiel’s fascination with McWhirter, though, got him into trouble that same year when the BBC was compelled to apologise for a conversation with Alan Davies on Radio 5 Live. They were expecting to delight in his knowledge of arcane stats, only to hear him blether for 45 minutes about the Freedom Association, the grassroots rightwing political organisation he co-founded in 1975. It was inspired by a day in 1978 at Baddiels’ school when the teenage boys turned up for a talk by McWhirter. Seven years after his death in 2004, McWhirter briefly returned to public consciousness when comedian David Baddiel did a show for Sky called The Norris McWhirter Chronicles, in which Alistair McGowan played the title role. We will never see his like again, not because the world doesn’t teem with libertarian ideologues, nor with grown men who know too much about the minutiae of stuff but because combining these two disciplines successfully in public seems beyond our wit in 2017. McWhirter with Roy Castle on Record Breakers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |