Barry Pope
Barry talks about playing sport at school

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Yeah, well when I came to school the athletics track had just been completed and they allowed the school to use the athletics track for training on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Wednesdays and Thursdays, I think it was, to start with. But then, later, every day of the week, and we used to train over there and it was a cinders track, what they call a cinders track, which was very hard on your feet and I was running in plimsolls at the time, which is what we used to have. Didn’t have trainers then or baseball boots as some people used to wear, and it wasn’t until my third year that I actually managed to get a pair of running spikes to run in. But we had the use of all the equipment and it was fairly popular.

I mean the school athletic team was fairly good, fairly high standard, and some of us were picked off to go and train at Epsom’s track with a national coach. We used to have our school’s sports days over there and we had district sports over there as well. There was two of us picked at that time - one for throwing the javelin and one for sprinting, which was me. The trouble was he got me to throw the javelin as well and I wasn’t very good at it. I threw the shot for the school, I was the school champion at shot for a short while. Hundred metres I ran, two hundred, long jump. Yeah, so you could do a wide variety of things.

I ended up as Prefect and I ended up doing very well in athletics. We used to get badges for everything you did for the school. For every sport you did you got a separate badge that went on your coat. So you’d have a Prefect’s badge and then you’d have football, cricket, basketball, swimming, hockey - I think they did hockey, the girls did hockey - and tennis we had. And I had most of those and I was part of a team of four that held the district record at relay running and hundred metres, which used to be called the hundred yards when I ran it. Now they call it the hundred metres. I did very well in sports at school, very well.