Amateur athletics rapidly developed in the second half of the 19th Century in the North of England as factory-workers and the emerging middle classes sought respite on their Saturday afternoons off from their jobs in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. Cross-country running gained enormously in popularity from the 1870s onwards, though by then it was sprinters from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Durham who had made a deeper impression nationally. It was the objective of every runner with a real turn of speed to beat “evens” for 100 yards – in other words, faster than 10.0 seconds for a distance equivalent to 91.44 metres – and the task was made all the harder by the fact that timing in that era was almost always to the nearest one-fifth of a second, rather than one-tenth. So, in effect, sub-evens would require a time of 9 4/5.
The first man to have such a performance approved by the relevant authorities was an American, John Owen, in 1890. The first Britons to do so were Charles Bradley and Alf Downer in the same race in 1895. Bradley was a member of the Huddersfield Cycling & Athletics Club and was undoubtedly the finest British sprinter of his generation, winning the AAA 100 yards for four successive years, 1892 to 1895. Unfortunately, both he and Downer were then disqualified for life by the Amateur Athletic Association for accepting or demanding excessive payments of expenses.
There had been at least 60 performances by Britons at 10.0 seconds during the 40 years from 1855 onwards which have recently been carefully researched and can be regarded as being reasonably acceptable. Even so, the first of them to be achieved in the North of England were at the Durham University annual sports by students named F. D. Barker in 1863 and J. King in 1864, and these might just be generous quirks of local timing. Maybe of greater credibility is the 10.0 recorded by William Mitchell and John Trevor in Liverpool, also in 1864. These times were set successively in a heat and the final at the “Olympic Festival” held in the Zoological Pleasure Gardens on 9 July. This imposingly-entitled meeting was one of a brief but successful series which caused the athletics establishment in the South of England such concern about a shift of power regarding control of the sport that the first attempt at a national championships was held in opposition in London in 1866.
These championships, organised by the hastily-formed Amateur Athletic Club, were at first patronised exclusively by gentlemen athletes from the London area or from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and such exclusivity was reinforced by a rule banning “mechanics, artisans and labourers”. Undeterred, Northern athletes achieved striking success as soon as they spurned the snobbery, though their first wins in 1867, at the Beaufort House Grounds, in London, on 15 April, were not by sprinters. Thomas Farnworth, a Liverpool barman, broke down the social barriers by having the temerity to beat John Chambers, the meeting organiser and Cambridge University athletics manager, by half-a-yard in the Seven miles walk, and John Stone, from Newton-le Willows, won the Shot.
Farnworth’s historic success was not without controversy, as was to be graphically described in later years by Montague Shearman, the leading athletics writer of the era. Shearman by then had been a co-founder of the Amateur Athletic Association and himself a very capable sprinter, and author of a definitive history, “Athletics and Football”, published in several editions from 1887 onwards. Shearman complained that the style of both men was “an open undisguised run for the last lap-and-a-half, and if the judges had been up to their work both would have been disqualified”. Race-walking was rife with such issues in the 19th Century when a proper definition of the discipline wa yet to be agreed.
No such barbed comments were made by Shearman about John Stone (born 25 August 1842) and his much younger brother, Tom (24 January 1852 – 18 September 1897), who deserve credit as the only Englishmen of their generation, and for a generation or two to come, to challenge the domination of the Irish in the Shot put. John Stone was the first amateur to exceed 40 feet in the Shot, and Tom Stone was described by Shearman as being “a fine specimen of manhood, weighing 14 stone and being over six feet, but beautifully proportioned, and no mean performer at a sprint”. He went on to win the AAC shot in 1875, 1876 and 1877 and was the one Northern athlete to represent England in the first ever international match against Ireland in Dublin on 5 June 1876. He later emigrated to Canada, where he made a success in business and sports promotion but died at the age of 45.
The 1868 AAC meeting took place again at Beaufort House but was extended to two days, 19 and 20 June, and six of the 12 events were won by a trio of Northerners – the 100 yards and 120 yards hurdles by William Tennent; the High jump, Pole vault (then known as the Pole jump) and Long jump by Robert Mitchell; and the Shot by John Stone again.
The short-lived William Tennent, of Manchester AC (6 October 1845 – 5 July 1883), ran 10.0 in the heats of the 100, though that was deemed wind-assisted, and then won the final by one foot in 10 1/5 from Edward Colbeck, of London AC, with another Manchester AC member, William MacLaren (born 1850), 1½ yards further back in 3rd place. Tennent had run his first 10.0-second 100 yards at the annual sports at Buersil, Rochdale, the previous year, with MacLaren a yard behind in 2nd place, and the Manchester duo were also very capable hurdlers, as demonstrated by Tennent additionally winning the AAC 120 yards hurdles by half-a-yard from MacLaren.
Robert Mitchell, also of Manchester AC (14 July 1847 – 23 July 1914), was born in the parish of Goldshaw Booth, in the Pendle district of Lancashire, and in his prime stood 6ft 2¼in (1.88m) tall, which was exceptional for that era. Ho won 11 AAC titles in total and would have made a fine decathlete, but that event would not be invented until more than 40 years later. His AAC Championships wins included the Pole jump again in 1871, and among his successors were in 1873 Walter Kelsey, of Hull Cricket Club (born April 1851, died at the age of 43, 13 January 1895), and in 1874 Edwin Woodburn, of Ulverston Cricket Club (19.4.1850 – 9.7.1897, dying aged 47).
The South Lakeland market town of Ulverston was in Lancashire then, and Woodburn was the first amateur to make use of a climbing technique which had been developed in the 1860s by professionals in the various Lakeland sports. “The Field” magazine said admiringly of Woodburn that “when level with the crossbar he slides both hands a foot or so up the pole and thus gains additional height”. It would not be until 1920 that this acrobatic technique would be banned.
There had been further 10.0 timings at 100 yards in 1869 for, among others, another Durham University student, Charles Greenwood (1 March 1848 – 31 October 1911), and John Duckworth, of Haslingden AC (baptised 28 July 1844 – 8 May 1906), but the next Northern sprinter to genuinely emulate William Tennent’s competitive level was William Dawson, who was born in Bradford (3 December 1850 – 6 March 1916). He was public-school educated at Marlborough College and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was credited with 10.0 in his college sports on 11 March 1870, still aged only 19. Yet there were two others who finished only a yard behind, and it stretches belief that one college (though the largest in the university) should simultaneously produce three such exceptional sprinters. Then at the Oxford-v-Cambridge match on 7 April at Lillie Bridge, in London, Dawson was 3rd as John Wilson, of Oxford, won in 10.0 after there had been nine false starts ! Sprint starting was a haphazard affair until the crouch start was introduced to England in 1889.
Dawson’s best in 1871 was 10 1/5 in Leeds on 5 August and again at Hill’s Meadow, in Douglas, Isle of Man, four days later, but any shadows of doubt about his ability would soon be dispelled. Described in a highly complimentary front page profile in the Manchester-based weekly, “Athletic News”, in 1875 as being 5ft 8½in (1.74m) tall and weighing a little over 11 stone (70kg), Dawson enjoyed a perfect season in 1872, winning the Oxford-v-Cambridge 100 in 10 2/5 and the AAC “national” title in 10½ at the same Lillie Bridge track on 27 March by 2½ yards..
Dawson was then involved in a meeting that can reasonably be regarded as Britain’s first ever representative athletics match. It took place on 13 May at the Sheffield FC ground at Bramall Lane and was described in the prior publicity in the “Yorkshire Daily Telegraph” firstly as “London Athletic Club versus Gentlemen of the Northern Counties” and then as “North v South”. Whatever the precise status of the venture, Dawson won the 100 in 10.0, and if this is accurate timing then it was a remarkable performance because the weather that day was awful.
At the annual Huddersfield AC sports on 22 June, held on the Rifle Field, in Trinity Street, the surface of which was said to be “a trifling unevenness of ground”, Dawson won the 100 yards in a time which was, reported in the “Sheffield Independent” newspaper as “the fastest on record, a shade under 10 seconds”. The wind was “boisterous”, which may or may not have been some help to Dawson, and there was reckoned to be a favourable slope to the track, which certainly would have been of help. In any case, after 10 1/5 clockings in Bradford on 6 and 20 July, his amateur sprinting career seems to have come to an end. He presumably graduated from university and he then went off to seek his fortune.
As it happens, Dawson took a rather different direction regarding employment to his privileged fellow graduates who readily found appointments in the civil service, the church, law or school-mastering. He became a professional sprinter under the more proletarian name of “Bill Dawson”, and made sufficient of a reputation to move on to a new career as trainer to Stoke FC (later to become Stoke City). Apparently he admitted at the time that he knew nothing about football but knew very well how to get men fit.
Charles Pickering (22 February 1848 – 16 November 1925), who was a Manchester AC team-mate of William Tennent and William MacLaren, ran 10.0 at Knutsford on 30 July 1870. A much more firmly established 10-second man of this era, though, was John Charles Clegg, about whom Shearman enthused that “in the provinces he could almost count on sweeping the board at any meeting at all distances from 100 yards to 600”. Clegg (born 15 June 1850), who preferred the first name “Charles”, was a member of Sheffield FC (founded in 1857 before the Wednesday and United clubs, and still in existence over 160 years later) and ran his 10.0 on 20 May 1871 on the Ormskirk Grammar School grass track at the town’s annual sports. Two years later, in Leicester, he was timed in 9 4/5, which must have caused immense excitement among the onlookers that day, but the track was disappointingly found to be downhill. The following month he gave evidence of the versatility so admired by Montague Shearman in setting a World’s best performance for 600 yards of 1:15.0 (Bramall Lane, Sheffield, 7 July).
In 1874 Clegg was the only man in Britain to run a 10.0 for 100 yards, at Huddersfield on 20 July, and he was also the fastest at 440 yards, with 50.5 a fortnight earlier at Bramall Lane. Thus he can be regarded as one of Britain’s best sprinters and quarter-milers of the latter 19th Century, and yet far greater renown was to come to him in later years. Despite his athletic talent, he was a footballer first and foremost and one of only two Northerners chosen for the first England-v-Scotland international in 1872. He had an illustrious playing career at a time when football, as explained by Montague Shearman, was “rather a recreation and a means of exercise for a few old public schoolboys than a really national game”. Clegg became a leading referee (including the FA Cup finals of 1882 and 1892) and was in later years to rise to the highest levels of administration, appointed chairman and then president of the Football Association. In 1927 he was knighted by King George V and became Sir Charles Clegg. He died on 26 June 1937.
Athletics in England during the 1870s was an impromptu affair, with the AAC championships attracting only a handful of the leading athletes. The best men in the North and the South very rarely met, and for most of them the season consisted of a series of town or village sports meetings held usually on football pitches or show-grounds which might or might not provide a suitably even surface underfoot. There was no shortage of such promotions, and J.C. Clegg, for instance, won more than 100 prizes during his brief sprint career. The prizes – often silver trophies or sets of cutlery – were well worth having. In 1887 members of Salford Harriers won 146 of them, worth on average £6 each, which was equivalent to seven weeks’ wages for a local working man.
The formation of the Amateur Athletic Association was a true turning-point in developing the sport nationally. As the eminent athletics writer, Peter Lovesey, was to point out in his centenary history of the AAA in 1980, “A vital part of the agreement that sealed the foundation of the AAA was the commitment to the Championships rotating between the South, Midlands and North”. The first meeting in the North was at Southport in 1885, and by then there had been a handful of Northerners who had won AAA titles. The honour of being the first goes to Jack Concannon, of Widnes FC – not the current club, which was to be founded rather later, in 2003. Concannon, who had been born in about 1856, won the Steeplechase at the inaugural championships at the Lillie Bridge grounds on 3 July 1880. There was no standardisation of this event in those days and it was contested at every conceivable distance and over all manner of obstacles, with the AAA event consisting of eight laps, amounting to 1 mile 1440 yards, which Concannon won by 45 yards.
He was later to gain much wider acclaim as one of the first trainers to be appointed by a professional football club – and a highly successful one, too. He was in charge of fitness when the formidable Preston North End team won the Football League title and the FA Cup in 1888-89 and the League again the next season. It was said at the time that Concannon “ put the players through a physical preparation similar to that of professional boxers, runners and rowers”. That can be taken to mean that his training methods were nothing like as severe as those of the 21st Century, at least as far as runners are concerned, but undoubtedly a lot more demanding than those to which the “Proud Preston” players had previously been accustomed.
The next Northern winner at the AAA Championships, when they were staged at the Aston Lower Grounds in Birmingham on 16 July 1881, was John Raby, who had the distinction of finishing alone to win the seven miles walk, having set a pace which reduced his last remaining opponent to a state of collapse. Raby came from the market town of Elland, a few miles south of Halifax, and was described by Montague Shearman as “a tall, gaunt lad of the class which has recently received the franchise”. Shearman, writing in 1887, was referring to the Representation of the People’s Act of 1884 which had increased the number of voters (male only) to 5.5 million, though 40 per cent of men were still disenfranchised.
Raby was a rarity among race-walkers of that era because his means of progress was beyond criticism, causing even the sceptical Shearman to remark that Raby “walked in wonderfully fair style, with exactly the same action, in spite of his great speed, as an ordinary pedestrian on the road”. Race-walking in the 1880s, as you will understand from that observation, was a very much more sedate affair than it is 140 or so years later.. Raby turned professional soon after his AAA triumph, continuing to walk impeccably, and among his most notable achievements was to cover seven miles in a record-breaking 51:04.0 at the Lillie Bridge track in 1883.
There seemed to be a lull in the standards of Northern sprinting in those formative years of the AAA Championships and the region’s title-winners continued to be found in other events. The most famous of them was Tom Ray, who came from Ulverston, then in Cumberland, as had the 1874 AAC champion, Edwin Woodburn, and won the Pole jump in 1881 and repeated his success on five further occasions through to 1887. Between 1868 and 1888 Northerners in this event improved the best height on record (and therefore a World record, though none were to be officially recognised until 1914 onwards) on 23 occasions. Ray was responsible for 10 of them – the first at Ulverston in 1879 when he was still only 17 years old (born 6 February 1862, died 26 August 1904 at the age of 42), and he remains to this day the youngest ever male World record-holder.
Ray’s highest clearance was a seemingly modest 11ft 8in (3.55m) in 1888, but his was a notoriously dangerous event. Competitors used unbending poles made of ash or hickory with a metal trident on one end which were liable to break when planted into the takeoff surface, and both that and the landing-area were unyielding grass. Montague Shearman wrote that “we believe that Ulverston lads are often to be seen after their day’s work practising pole-jumping on the cinder-heaps which are a conspicuous ornament of that flourishing town”. Shearman’s word can hardly be doubted because he later became a judge and was knighted for his services to the legal profession, but he doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation for Ulverston’s Pole-jumping eminence.
Ulverston could not possibly have been the only 19th Century town in the North of England with plenty of cinders lying around, and Shearman’s explanation is as unfathomable as the reason for Finns in the next century excelling in the Javelin – it seemingly just became part of the culture. There was a somewhat similar AAA trend at 120 yards hurdles as the title was won in 1884 by Charles Gowthorpe (born 10 July 1861), of Nottingham Forest FC, and then by his clubmate, Charles Daft (born 23 July 1864), in 1885-86-90. Gowthorpe had also been Northern champion in 1883-84 in succession to another Nottingham Forest member, F.F. Cleaver. Montague Shearman probably found the simple explanation in this instance: “Here is seen the value of a ‘tradition’ in producing skilful performers. There were good hurdlers in Nottingham long before Cleaver”.
Another AAA winner in those early years to particularly catch Shearman’s eye was George Mackenzie Ross (born 2 March 1859), who won the Shot put in 1882 and was depicted by Shearman as being “not a very big man, nor yet very agile, but had enormous strength of arm”. Ross’s winning distance was 42ft 4in (12.90m), which may not seem much, but this was long before the days of weight-training (and steroids !) and his style was most unusual as he began his throw as if to bowl the implement. Though his name clearly suggests that he was of Scottish origin, he represented Patricroft AC, in Eccles, now part of Greater Manchester, and earned his living as a policeman at a time when size and strength were valuable personal assets in that occupation.
The choice of Southport in 1885 as the first Northern venue for the AAA Championships was a logical one, with Crewe following in 1887, Manchester (Old Trafford) in 1891, Huddersfield in 1894 and Manchester again (Fallowfield) in 1897. The Northern Counties Athletic Association had been formed by 13 clubs in 1880 and the first joint secretaries were George Duxfield and Thomas Fairbrother, who were both members of the Southport Athletic Society. Duxfield had said dismissively of many of the meetings held in the North up until then that they were merely “a peg to make money on”. Among the winners in 1880 at Southport at the first of what would be for many more years intermittent Northern Championships had been Jack Concannon in a three-lap Steeplechase, which included a 12ft-wide water-jump and 20 barriers in total, and Tom Ray in the Pole jump, who would repeat his success every year through to 1890. This even though his weight increased to nearing 15 stone, largely as a result of his over-enthusiastic beer-drinking.
Eventually another champion sprinter emerged from the North of England, though his roots were from a different continent entirely. Arthur Wharton had been born on 28 August 1865 in Jamestown, Gold Coast (now Accra, Ghana), of an affluent mixed-race family and came to England as a teenager to study theology at colleges in Darlington and then Cleveland. However, he was a natural sportsman and soon abandoned a religious calling to pursue a footballing career as a goalkeeper and then took up athletics in 1885. Within a year he had won the AAA 100 yards in a record-equalling 10.0 and he retained the title in 1887.
In his informative and entertaining centenary history of the Northern Counties AA, written in 1979, Edgar Illingworth, who was NCAA president the previous year, devoted much space to the rivalry between Wharton and a man who might have been an even better sprinter, Frank Ritchie, who was a prominent member of the Bradford rugby football club in the years before the Rugby League was formed. Apparently, Ritchie beat Wharton on five occasions during 1887, and was renowned for his fast start, but he was relegated to 3rd place on his AAA appearances in 1886 (behind Wharton) and 1888.
Wharton, like J.C. Clegg before him, was to become more famous for his footballing achievements than his track prowess. Though the various accounts of his life link Wharton with Preston North End, it was with Sheffield United that he made his one appearance to become the first black player in the Football League, and he subsequently kept goal for Stalybridge Rovers, Ashton-under-Lyne and Stockport County (in 1901-02). His later life was a sad one as he worked in a menial job in a coal-mine while living with his wife in the Yorkshire village of Moorthorpe, near Pontefract, and died in poverty on 18 December 1930. Belatedly recognised as a significant figure in football history, Wharton’s unmarked grave was provided with a suitable commemorative headstone in 1997.
Mention should also be made at this stage of the man who was responsible for one of the very finest performances of the 19th Century. Francis Cross ran the fastest ever 880 yards of 1:54 3/5 while an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, on 9 March 1888. The venue was the same Iffley Road track where Roger Bannister was to achieve the first sub-four-minute mile 66 years later, though in Cross’s day the cinders measured one-third of a mile in circumference. Cross had been born at Eccles on 14 November 1865 a son of John Cross, the owner of one of the largest cotton mills in Lancashire and MP for Bolton from 1874 to 1885. Thus there was no shortage of funds for the fees to send Francis Cross to Harrow School and then on to Oxford.
He won both the AAA 880 yards and mile in the same afternoon at Stourbridge in 1887, and also the Inter-Varity mile for four successive years, which feat was to be equaled by Bannister in 1950. Described in “Athletic News” as “a fine tall young fellow but not a particularly graceful runner”, Cross was also the Northern Counties’ mile champion in 1887 in Manchester, and he was an adept footballer who played for the London FA against Sheffield FA in 1892. He married the daughter of Lady Agnes Phillimore and lived in style as a prosperous farmer and landowner at the 17th Century Aston Tirrold Manor House, near Didcot, in Berkshire, concerning himself with local politics as chairman of the Wallingford District Council and writing on several occasions to “The Times” about agricultural matters. He died in 1950 – the same year as Bannister’s fourth Inter-Varsity win.
There were four exceptional and prolific Northern winners of AAA titles into the 1890s. The most durable of them was William Barry, who though an Irishman by birth, in County Cork in September 1865, spent his working life as a general practitioner in Southport and represented the local club while winning on eight occasions over a 10-year span – the Shot in 1889-91-92 and the Hammer in 1885-89-92-94-95. Standing 6ft 4in (1.93m) tall, he was nicknamed “Jumbo”, but that was a misnomer. In 1889 “The Illustrated London News” waxed lyrical and said of his AAA wins that “he fairly broke the ladies’ hearts – few of them had ever seen a finer man than this genial giant”.
Others, though maybe less dashing in appearance were sprightly enough on the track. Charles Bradley, the aforementioned Huddersfield sprinter, won the AAA 100 yards every year from 1892 to 1895 before the authorities caught up with him. Two members of the mighty Salford Harriers club were dominant at longer distances – Edward Parry. winner of the 4 miles (a standard event until replaced by 3 miles in 1932) and 10 miles in 1888 and the Steeplechase in 1890 and 1891, and Alfred Tysoe, the champion at 1 mile and 10 miles in 1897 and at 880 yards in 1899 and again in 1900.
Parry was also the finest cross-country runner of the age, winning the National title in 1888-89-90, while his club took the team title five times from 1888 to 1898, though Liverpool Harriers had actually been the first Northern club to do so in 1885. Another Northerner, George Crossland, won both the Northern and the National in 1894 and 1896, representing Salford Harriers and then Manchester Harriers, and even the Salford club centenary history of 1984 was at a loss to explain his unexpected emergence – “Where a runner of such prodigious talent suddenly appeared from is not recorded”. In 1894 Crossland ran 20 miles on the Stamford Bridge track in London in 1:51:54, which remained unbeaten as a World best for 63 years and would still be regarded with respect in the 21st Century.
Alfred Tysoe shares with John Rimmer, of Sefton Harriers and Southport AC, the prime honour of being the first Northern Olympians. The inaugural Modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 had passed largely unnoticed in Britain except for readers of “The Times” or those who happened to spot advertisements for a sightseeing and Games package tour in the windows of a Thomas Cook’s travel agency, as did one enterprising British competitor. The 1900 Games in Paris were more properly publicised and Tysoe and Rimmer were among a group of British middle-distance runners who collected a bundle of medals between them. Tysoe, who was Northern champion at 880 yards and the mile every year from 1897 to 1900, won the 800 metres and Rimmer the 4000 metres Steeplechase, and both were members of the triumphant GB quartet in the 5000 metres team event. Tysoe was a farm worker, born at Skerton, Lancaster, on 21 March 1874, but who tragically died of pleurisy within a year or so of his Olympic success, on 26 October 1901. By contrast, Rimmer, a Liverpool policeman, lived a full life (27 April 1878 – 6 June 1962).
Tysoe and Rimmer had actually been preceded as international representatives because four of the eight-man England team which met France in a cross-country match at Versailles in 1898 were from the North. The initiative had come from French officials who had ambitiously extended an invitation to their visitors – and probably wished afterward that they hadn’t ! The Englishmen took all of the first eight places, with Henry Harrison (Manchester Harriers) 2nd, John Marsh (Salford Harriers) 5th, Edward Barlow (also Manchester Harriers) 6th and John Crook (also Salford Harriers) 7th. Harrison had won the AAA 4 miles in 1896.
Mystery surrounds one other AAA winner from the North who was of particular note. He was W.J. Holmes, of North Lonsdale Harriers, who won the 880 yards in 1891 and 1892 by decisive margins, described by the knowledgable reporter for the “Athletic News” on the first occasion as “passing the others as if they were standing still”. Yet very little else is known about him, and his club, which was based in Barrow-in-Furness, is long since defunct.
Another AAA champion whose club had a short life was Fred Bacon, of Ashton-under-Lyne Harriers, which was in existence for only four years. Bacon, who had been born in Boxted, Essex, in November 1870, was a member while stationed in the army nearby and had five AAA wins at 1 mile, 4 miles and 10 miles during 1893-94-95. He ran the fastest ever mile by an amateur, 4:17.0, but then was caught up in the same expenses’ purge as Charles Bradley, which probably didn’t bother Bacon too much as in his first two races as a professional in Rochdale and then Dublin he won £200 (worth £83,000 in 2017 wages. He went on to enjoy a long and profitable career before becoming the trainer at Manchester United and helping them to two First Division titles, the FA Cup and the Charity Shield in the years up to 1912.
Professional athletics in the 19th Century was an altogether different affair, and the extent of its activities from the 1850s, when Manchester was the miling capital of the World, will be the subject of another article for the Northern Athletics website.
Note: an immense amount of work in researching performances of the latter 19th Century has been done by eminent athletics historians Peter Lovesey and Keith Morbey, whose handbook, “British Athletics 1866 – 1880”, was published by the National Union of Track Statisticians in 2016, details to be found on www.nuts.org.uk.
Bob Phillips
