South Africa's Newton

From Fletcher's Field, Montreal, over a 500-mi. irregular course of roads through Victoriaville. Quebec, Ste. Anne de la Perade, Joliette, and back to Montreal's baseball stadium runners plodded last week in a relay race. Eighteen thousand spectators cheered the winners. Swathed in wraps, Arthur Newton of Rhodesia, South Africa, and Peter Gavuzzi of Southampton, England, hurried away to get some rest. Their total time for the 500-mi. course was 48 hr. 4 min., but they had been fresh enough to do the final lap of 26 mi., in the fast time of 2 hr. 18 min. 40 sec., 4 min. 50 sec. ahead of the U. S. team of Joie Ray and Johnny Salo. Marathon followers took due note of the victory, recalling that small, wiry Gavuzzi had run two years ago in C. C. Pyle's Bunion Derby and had done well enough.

Arthur Newton's neighbors in South Africa remember only vaguely why he started running. It was some grudge he had against the government. Kaffirs had been given holdings too near his farm. He protested, but the government paid little attention. Through months of talking and brooding the thought of winning that case became a mania eating up all his other thoughts. By degrees it developed a corollary. He felt that to get the hearing he wanted he must attract attention, make himself famous by some remarkable exploit or else hurt himself so badly and spectacularly that the British Government in South Africa and the whole world would listen when he told what a spectacular injustice had been inflicted upon him.

Arthur Newton had never done any running. He was 40--already past the age for marathoners--yet the plan he decided on was to become the greatest runner in the world. One day he began to run around his farm. Round the fence he went, twice a day for as long as he could keep it up, in the morning and at night. The Kaffirs who had been allowed too near stared at the thin, sweating man running clumsily in his farm clothes under the glaring sun. He sent to Durban for shoes and shorts. In two years his fame had gone beyond the district and his running had improved. Nobody laughed when he asked for timekeepers in an attempt to break a world's record. Starting one hot July morning in 1923 from the Agricultural Show Grounds in Durban he broke the world's record for 50 mi. in 5 hr. 53 min. 5 sec. As soon as he had finished and found people gathered around him he began to talk about that matter of the Kaffirs.

Arthur Newton ran 20 miles a day to keep training. He wore leather socks next his skin. Every hour he drank a half-pint glass of lemonade containing eight teaspoonfuls of sugar, half a teaspoonful of salt, and cracked ice. Other records: London to Brighton--5 hr. 53 min. 43 sec., 1924; 100 mi. at Bulawayo, S. F.--14 hrs. 43 min., 1927.

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