John Disley, who has died aged 87, belonged to the generation of runners who revived British athletics after the second world war. He won a bronze medal in the 3,000m steeplechase at the Helsinki Games in 1952, and would probably have started as favourite in the same event four years later in Melbourne had he not been taken ill. “I knew it was my chance and it had gone,” Disley said 50 years later, in an interview for the British Museum archive. So it was that the seminal moments in Disley’s sporting career were not in running, but in getting others to run.
He was the co-founder with Chris Brasher of the London Marathon, first staged in 1981 and now one of the world’s most popular running events. The idea of a marathon in the capital had been born in 1978, when Disley, along with Brasher, joined Ranelagh Harriers, a running club based at the Dysart Arms pub in Richmond, south-west London. That autumn, two club members competed in the New York Marathon and came back raving about the event. The following year Disley and Brasher took part. In 2002, Disley recalled of his run: “I was so engulfed in this noise, this excitement. We came back and said ‘Well, if the Americans can do it, so can we.’”
Disley and Brasher proved to be an irresistible combination. It was their affinities that had drawn them together; mountain-climbing, orienteering, hiking, running. But it was their differences that made the partnership remarkable. The separation of functions was intuitive: Disley created the London Marathon course and took care of all attendant issues, while Brasher managed the race itself. But it was the emotional counterplay between the two men that brought balance. Brasher lit fires; Disley dampened them down.
Within two years of their trip to New York, they had the London Marathon off the ground, attracting more than 20,000 applications in the first year even though they could accept only 7,000 competitors. It is a testament to both that there were more than a quarter of a million applications for this year’s race, the 36th London Marathon.
Disley was born into a Welsh-speaking family, the only child of Herbert and Marie Disley, in the north Wales village of Corris, where slate mining was the sole source of work. As a boy he played on the hills above the quarries. When mining waned in the 1930s, the family moved to live near Oswestry, Shropshire, and Disley attended the high school there, running to and from school rather than spending the bus fare.
It was only when he started at Loughborough University in 1946 that he ran on a track for the first time. When Geoff Dyson, soon to be the national coach, told Disley he would make him into a champion steeplechaser, he did not even know what that was. “You didn’t argue with Geoff Dyson,” he said later. “If he’d have said ‘lie down, I’m going to let the steamroller run over you’, I’d have done it.”
Disley progressed quickly and was selected to run the steeplechase in the Helsinki Games when only 23. Tactically, he did not run a great race in the final, having identified the German Helmut Gude as the man to beat. Gude had been ill and Disley, ignorant of that fact, followed him at the back of the field until Dyson, when he realised what was happening, screamed from the trackside: “For God’s sake start running.” Disley picked up for third place and almost made second, but the winner, Horace Ashenfelter, an American FBI agent, was gone beyond recall, breaking the world record by more than three seconds.
Four years later the Melbourne Olympics should have presented Disley with the perfect opportunity for gold. In 1955 he had been unbeaten. In September of that year, in Moscow, he had also broken the world steeplechase record – or so he thought until he arrived back from the Soviet Union to discover that Jerzy Chromik, of Poland, had already broken the record in Brno, Czechoslovakia, by a greater margin 11 days earlier. News travelled slowly in those days.
The British steeplechase team for the Melbourne Games in 1956 was a strong one; all three Britons, Disley, Brasher and Eric Shirley, reached the final. There was a British victory, but it was Brasher who took gold, not Disley – he had been suffering from viral pneumonia beforehand, “bluffed” his way on to the team plane by claiming to have made a recovery, and finished sixth.
Melbourne was Britain’s most successful Olympics for 32 years, but it did not pass without incident off the track. The team’s grievances on various fronts almost caused a strike and led to the formation of the International Athletes Club, which acted as an athletes’ trade union for many years. Disley, one of its instigators, was the inaugural chairman.
After Melbourne, he returned to his job as chief instructor at the national mountain climbing centre at Plas Y Brenin in north Wales. In 1958 he married the athlete Sylvia Cheeseman (also a bronze medallist at Helsinki) and started work as a schools inspector in Surrey. The day job, though, was only part of the story.
At an event in Sweden in 1955, Disley had stumbled across an orienteering race. He took part and, although he finished well down in a field of 60, was hooked. He initially tried to set up competitions in Wales, but found few people were prepared to pay for a new ordnance survey map for each race. Only when photocopiers became readily available did the sport become viable.
Disley’s first orienteering events were held in 1964 in Peaslake, Surrey, where he assembled “thinking” runners to take part and attracted athletes of the calibre of Roger Bannister, Bruce Tulloh, Martin Hyman and Brasher. By 1967 the British Orienteering Federation had been formed, with Disley as its first secretary, and the Olympic silver medallist Gordon Pirie as its first men’s champion. Orienteering was, in many ways, a proving ground for what Disley did later with the London Marathon.
For eight years from 1974 onwards, Disley served on the Sports Council as a vice chairman when Denis Howell was the sports minister. Their politics married in many ways; Disley was a Labour party member. They had just one real quarrel, when Howell, a smoker, would not impose the sporting ban on tobacco sponsorship that Disley was strongly advocating.
Disley was appointed CBE in 1979 and stepped down from the Sports Council in 1982 – by which time another project, the London Marathon, had already taken over his life.
He is survived by Sylvia and their two daughters, Emma and Kate, and by five grandchildren.
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