Suttie Smith: Scotland’s forgotten running hero

THOSE Scottish athletes who will compete at this year’s Olympic Games have been preparing for the big day for months, dedicating themselves full-time to ensuring they will be as competitive as humanly possible. The likes of Chris Hoy and Katherine Grainger have access to an army of expert advice and assistance, and to an array of training equipment.

It was all a bit different back in 1928, when the Games were held in Amsterdam. It was not far for British athletes to travel, of course – but that was just as well for John Suttie Smith, who did not even get an extra day off work before making the journey.

The Dundonian, a self-coached distance runner, had no hi-tech equipment either. He ran outside, on the track or across country, when it was dry. When it rained he ran up and down the stairs in the tenement in the Hilltown where he lived. Suttie was his middle name – there were thousands of other John Smiths, so he changed. And although he is not as well remembered now as Eric Liddell, in his day he was a star, as his daughter, Irene Gibson, can recall.

Now 72, Gibson grew up knowing that her father was held in high esteem in his own community. Not because of any boasting – he did not care to discuss his own achievements – but because of the attention he got.

“If you asked him, he would talk about it, but he was pretty quiet,” she remembers. “He was a celebrity, though. There was something in the papers about him every other week.”

The best example of that celebrity, she says, was a simple anecdote told to her after her father’s death at the age of 69 in 1975. “After my dad died, one of his pals told me ‘I used to feel dead chuffed walking in the town with your dad, because heads would turn and folk would say ‘There’s Suttie Smith, there’s Suttie Smith’.”

Born in 1905, Smith was selected for the 10,000 metres at the 1928 Olympics by virtue of having become European champion the year before. In spite of that success, however, his real prowess was over a longer distance, and preferably over muddy, strength-sapping fields than round and round a track.

Ten miles was his best distance, not the six and a bit which that 10,000m amounts to, and that probably showed in the fact he was only tenth at the Games. But lack of time off to prepare might also have been a factor compared to some more leisured opponents.

A carpet-weaver, he finished work on a Friday, so the story goes, and travelled to the Netherlands the following day. He spent a quiet Sunday, competed on the Monday, then set off back for Tayside on the Tuesday.

“In these days you didn’t get special coaching, and you didn’t get off your work for a race,” Gibson says. “Obviously he got off for the Olympics, but that was the exception. He never got time off to train. Okay, he was tenth in the 10,000m. But he got there.”

Smith went on to win several Scottish cross-country titles, and, as his daugher remembers, he excelled at other sports too – though not all have received Olympic recognition.

“He taught us to swim, because he was a good swimmer. He won medals for swimming and gymnastics. He was really good at walking on his hands as well. Even in his 50s and 60s I remember him walking on his hands about the house. Once, when he and some other Harriers runners were on their way home from a meeting in England, they had to change trains at Crewe. While waiting there, they met a group of acrobats and had a game of football, which the Harriers won.

“Then they had a race, and the Harriers won that too, so the acrobats said ‘Right, we’ve done your stuff, now you’ll have to take us on what we do. Let’s have a race walking on our hands.’ Well, they did, and my dad won that too. Or as it said in an article, ‘Needless to say, Suttie Smith won hands down’.”

Rightly proud of her father and of the colleagues with whom he ran, Gibson feels more should be done to celebrate the achievements of those past generations of sporting Scots. She certainly believes that Dundee itself could do more to honour a man who was once one of its most famous citizens.

“I phoned the local museum and asked if they would be interested in putting on an exhibition, seeing as this is Olympic year,” she explains. “But they said they couldn’t because they were doing stuff about the Queen’s jubilee.”

This did not go down well. “Dinnae get me started. I’m very anti-royalist.”