London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
Today’s Londoner isn’t a Londoner.
And today’s pedestrian was anything but pedestrian.
There’s your man.
Captain Robert Barclay Allardice.
Never heard of him?
Excellent.
That’s exactly how we like them.
London Walks doesn’t pull rabbits out of hats. Rabbits are ten a penny.
We pull dodos out of hats.
And today’s dodo could walk.
Good grief, could he walk.
Captain Barclay was one of the most famous sportsmen in Britain in the early nineteenth century. People bet fortunes on him. Crowds followed his exploits. Newspapers reported them. His name was synonymous with feats of almost deranged physical endurance.
And now?
Nothing.
Gone.
Pfft.
History has put its coat on, slipped quietly out the side door and neglected to leave a forwarding address.
So let’s go after him.
Because Captain Barclay belongs in a London Walks podcast for one wonderful reason.
Walking wasn’t what he did to get somewhere.
Walking was the event.
There was a name for it.
Pedestrianism.
And pedestrianism was big.
Really big.
Before football swallowed the sporting world, before television, before your Fitbit started nagging you because you’d only done 8,742 steps, people paid good money to watch other people walk.
Sometimes for days.
Sometimes for wagers.
Sometimes, in Captain Barclay’s case, apparently because nobody had taken him aside and gently suggested a nice cup of tea and a lie-down.
He was born in Scotland in 1779, at Ury in Kincardineshire, into a family in which being absurdly strong appears to have been regarded as perfectly normal.
One ancestor was said to be so powerful that his sword was too heavy for ordinary men.
His grandfather was known as ‘the Strong’.
Not terribly subtle, that.
You can imagine the introductions.
‘This is Robert.’
‘Which Robert?’
‘The Strong one.’
‘Ah.’
And Captain Barclay’s father was a famous walker himself.
He walked from Ury in Scotland to London.
Five hundred and ten miles.
In ten days.
So young Robert Barclay wasn’t growing up in a household where anybody said, ‘Shall we get a cab?’
And London enters the story early.
He was educated for a time at Richmond School and at Brixton Causeway.
Brixton.
There he is.
Our Scottish superman has entered the orbit of London.
And then, aged seventeen, he decides to have a little walk.
Not along the Serpentine.
Not a pleasant constitutional round St James’s Park.
He takes on a wager on the London to Croydon road.
The challenge?
Walk six miles in an hour.
The stake?
One hundred guineas.
At seventeen.
Think about that.
Most seventeen-year-olds would regard six miles in an hour as an unreasonable demand even if there were a nightclub at the other end.
Captain Barclay does it for money.
And that was only the warm-up.
This is where pedestrianism gets wonderfully strange.
Because the Georgian and Regency worlds adored wagering.
They’d bet on horses.
They’d bet on boxing.
They’d bet on cards.
They’d bet on elections.
They’d bet on how long something would take.
How far a man could walk.
How long he could stay awake.
Probably whether a bishop could climb a tree while carrying a haddock.
It was Britain.
Somebody would have taken the bet.
And Barclay became one of the great wagering athletes.
In 1801 he walked ninety miles in twenty-one and a half hours.
Ninety miles.
Think London to Birmingham territory.
On foot.
And the wager was five thousand guineas.
That wasn’t beer money.
That was a colossal sum.
And then came the performance that made his name.
Newmarket.
One mile.
Every hour.
For one thousand consecutive hours.
Let me say that again because the first time the brain tends to refuse delivery.
One mile.
Every hour.
For one thousand hours.
That means forty-one days and sixteen hours.
Every hour, day and night, Barclay had to get up and walk his mile.
Finish it.
Rest.
Wait.
And then do it again.
At two in the afternoon.
At two in the morning.
In sunshine.
In darkness.
When his feet hurt.
When his legs hurt.
When the last thing in the world he wanted to see was another ruddy mile.
Off he went.
Again.
At the beginning he was doing the mile in under fifteen minutes.
By the final week it was taking him about twenty-one minutes.
His weight dropped from thirteen stone four pounds to eleven stone.
And here’s the bit I love.
Five days after finishing it, he set off to join the WOL-khuh-run
Walcheren expedition.
Of course he did.
What else are you going to do after walking a thousand miles?
Have a weekend in Brighton?
No.
Off to war.
This man didn’t have an off switch.
There’s a wonderful glimpse of what an ordinary Barclay day could look like.
Ordinary, that is, if you happen to be Captain Robert Barclay and have apparently been assembled from oak beams.
In 1808 he got up at five in the morning.
Walked thirty miles while grouse shooting.
Had dinner at five.
Walked sixty miles home.
Sixty.
Got back.
Dealt with some business.
Then walked another sixteen miles to Laurencekirk.
Went to a ball.
Danced.
Walked home.
And then spent the following day partridge shooting.
He’d travelled about 130 miles and gone without sleep for two nights and three days.
I’m exhausted telling you about it.
You rather hope somebody at the ball said, ‘Robert, sit down.’
And he said, ‘Sit?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s that?’
But our Captain Barclay wasn’t simply a freakishly gifted walker.
He becomes part of another great sporting world.
Prize-fighting.
Bare knuckle boxing.
Now we’re really in Regency England.
The Fancy.
The bruisers.
The crowds.
The side bets.
The aristocratic backers.
The fists.
The blood.
And one of the biggest sporting stories of the age.
Tom Cribb against Tom Molineaux.
Cribb was England’s champion.
Molineaux was an American, a formerly enslaved Black man who had crossed the Atlantic and become a formidable prize-fighter.
Their first great contest in 1810 came desperately close.
Cribb was overweight and badly prepared.
Enter Captain Barclay.
He takes Cribb up to Scotland and puts him through the Barclay treatment.
And you already know what that means.
It does not mean a scented candle, yoga mat and herbal infusion.
This is Captain Barclay.
The poor man probably woke Cribb before dawn and said, ‘Good morning. We’re going for a walk.’
‘How far?’
‘Yes.’
Cribb was transformed.
He came back leaner, fitter and much better prepared.
The second fight against Molineaux in 1811 ended decisively in Cribb’s favour.
And then London went potty.
Cribb came home a hero.
By one contemporary account, when he reached Holborn the crowds were so dense the street was almost impassable.
Think about that.
Holborn.
Packed.
Jammed with Londoners trying to get a look at a prize-fighter.
No television.
No radio.
No sports pages dropping instantly onto a phone.
Just word travelling through the city.
Cribb had won.
Cribb was back.
And London poured into the street.
And behind that triumph, quietly but crucially, was our pedestrian.
Captain Barclay.
The walker had helped make the fighter.
Barclay had become not merely an athlete but one of the pioneers of systematic athletic training.
And he wrote about it.
His book was called ‘Training for Pedestrianism and Boxing’.
That’s a title.
No messing about.
No ‘Wellness Journey’.
No ‘Unlocking the Inner You’.
Training for Pedestrianism and Boxing.
Get up.
Walk.
Hit somebody.
Next question.
And then London brings our man back.
Hyde Park.
Imagine the scene.
Regency London.
Hyde Park.
Carriages.
Horsemen.
Fashionable society.
The great green lung of the West End.
And somewhere in it, Captain Barclay is lining up for a two-mile race against an officer of the 7th Dragoons.
By this point Barclay is a sporting celebrity.
The walking man.
The endurance phenomenon.
The human machine.
And he loses.
Two miles.
Hyde Park.
Defeated.
And that appears to have been more or less the end of his great pedestrian career.
There’s something almost beautifully neat about that.
The man who could walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours is undone by two miles in Hyde Park.
London.
It’ll get you in the end.
And what a strange sporting world this was.
Today we talk endlessly about elite athletes shaving hundredths of seconds from records.
Recovery schedules.
Nutritionists.
Sports psychologists.
Heart-rate zones.
Marginal gains.
Captain Barclay’s marginal gain appears to have been:
‘Do an absolutely ridiculous amount of walking and see what happens.’
But don’t make the mistake of thinking these Georgian pedestrians were comic figures.
They were serious athletes.
They attracted crowds.
They generated enormous wagers.
They were part of the emergence of modern organised sport.
And Captain Barclay was one of the giants.
Literally and figuratively.
He also served in the army.
He farmed.
He bred cattle.
He hunted obsessively.
He travelled to America.
He became involved in politics.
He even made a claim to not one but several Scottish earldoms.
Because apparently merely being Captain Barclay wasn’t enough.
Why stop at walking a thousand miles when you can also pop along to the House of Lords and say, ‘Excuse me, I think I might be an earl.’
The claims eventually went nowhere.
Which is perhaps the one journey Barclay couldn’t complete.
He died in 1854.
And the manner of his death?
A horse kicked him.
There’s a certain grim irony there.
After all those miles.
All those impossible wagers.
All that punishing exercise.
All those sleepless nights.
All those hunts.
All that boxing.
All that bodily punishment.
In the end, the horse won.
But here’s the thing.
Stand in Hyde Park.
Walk the old road south towards Croydon.
Think about Brixton.
Think about Holborn packed with Londoners celebrating Tom Cribb.
Think about Regency London’s obsession with sport and wagering.
Think about the world of prize-fighters and pedestrians, when an athletic celebrity could become nationally famous simply by doing something apparently impossible with his own body.
And remember Captain Robert Barclay Allardice.
The man who could walk a thousand miles.
The man who trained England’s champion prize-fighter.
The man who danced after walking more than a hundred miles without sleeping.
The man London has almost completely forgotten.
Pedestrian?
Not remotely.
And that’s the lovely thing about history.
Sometimes you reach into the hat.
You expect a rabbit.
And out waddles a dodo.
Wearing walking shoes.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
Streets ahead.
But not so fast. Aren’t you forgetting something? Yes, that’s right. We’ve got a word to do.
I think the word mile will do nicely. It’s cognate with the word millennium. A millennium is a thousand years. So the root word for mile is the old Roman or Latin word millia. Thousands. As in milia passum. Thousands of Roman paces. For the record, the ancient Roman mile was equal to one thousand double paces – one step with each foot for about 4,860 feet. That’s about 400 feet shorter than a statute mile. And as for the word pace – as I said its Latin ancestor is passus. A step. From pandere, to stretch.
And just to tidy up.
The Romans gave us the mile. The English farmer stretched it.
The culprit, or perhaps the hero, was the furlong, literally the ‘furrow-long’, the length of a ploughed furrow.
By 1593 England had decided that a mile should be eight furlongs. That made it 5,280 feet, roughly 400 feet longer than the old Roman mile.
In other words, England wanted its roads and its ploughed fields to speak the same mathematical language.
A wonderfully muddy English contribution to metrology.
There you go, you’ve just marched back across a couple of millennia of linguistic history. And into the bargain stretched your vocabulary.
See you, tomorrow.