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How it started

The Metropolitan Cross Country League was formed on 23 March 1966 at a meeting of interested clubs at the Primrose Public House in Bishopsgate, London.

The eight clubs attending were Ealing Harriers (now Ealing, Southall & Middlesex AC), Essex Beagles (now Newham & Essex Beagles AC), Hampstead Harriers (now Barnet & District AC), Highgate Harriers, Ilford AC, Polytechnic Harriers (now Kingston & Polytechnic AC), Thames Valley Harriers and Woodford Green AC (now Woodford Green with Essex Ladies AC). Hillingdon AC was asked to join the League for the first season.

The first fixture of the League was held at Chingford Row/Hainault Forest on 29 October 1966 with over 260 runners competing in the two races.

The Seniors & Juniors race over 5 miles was won by Bob Ellis of Thames Valley Harriers and a 2 ½ mile race for Youths and Boys was won by David Williams of Woodford Green AC. Thames Valley Harriers won the team events in both races and went on to be crowned the inaugural League champions in both age groups. In the initial seasons, four matches were held.

Early Year 1960’s and 1970’s

After the first season in 1966, Hampsted Harriers resigned in 1967 and were replaced by Shaftesbury Harriers (now Shaftesbury Barnet Harriers). 

Essex Beagles (now Newham and Essex Beagles) resigned in 1968 but rejoined in 1988. Verlea AC joined in 1969, London Irish AC in 1971, North London AC in 1975 and Borough of Enfield AC in 1976.

In the initial seasons, four matches were held. This was increased to 5 for the 1971 season when a Colt event was also introduced.

In 1979 a Veterans category was added to the league, as an increasing body of veteran runners competed—initial 3 to score.

One of the main interests in the league is that we were the only cross-country league in the Country to score 12 men in the senior/junior race, making each match a ‘glorified mon match’ when all can run whatever their ability with a chance of scoring for their club. We scored 4 in each of the other races.

Three from the Missing Years – By Alastair Aitken

In the missing years, there were three outstanding British runners I noticed that had won Metropolitan League races, since I ran the very first one, for Highgate Harriers in 1966 in Hainault Forest writes Alastair Aitken.

Malcolm Thomas (TVH). It was 1972. When he won the notoriously hard, senior National Cross Country in a blizzard that year at Sutton Coldfield. At Parliament Hill on 28th October 1972, he won a Metropolitan leaguer senior race in 26:54, from Dave Bedford (Shaftesbury) 27:32, then came Hugh Starkey (Shaftesbury), Gug Ogden (Highgate), John Brown (Hillingdon) and Mike Barrat (Ealing) a ‘prolific Liddiard Cup winner’.

Now, the same afternoon Dave Bedford went on to win the London Colleges League. also at Parliament Hill Fields in 29:33 from the leading Cambridge University runner Martin Dell (29:37).

The year of 1973 was significant for Dave Bedford, who was and is the only British athlete to break the 10,000m World Record (13th July 1973 with a time of 27:30.8).

On December 16th that year, over a slippery Ruislip course Hugh Starkey led for the first of two laps in the Met league race. That was before Bedford took over and won in 26:10; Starkey 2nd in 26:24 and Guest runner Mike Beevor 3rd in 26:40 . Pete Francis of Hillingdon was, officially 3rd and Shafteburys’ Richar Samuel next home. On December 30th at Hainault Dave Bedford won the Senior Met League race in 27:16 from John Brown of Hillingdon who ran 27:28 with Guy Ogden of Highgate 3rd in 27.56.

To see Richard Goodman (Shaftesbury Barnet)in full flow in the Metropolitan Leagues was something worth seeing as he first won a Met League race in the 17/15 age group then, in 2008 at Ruislip he started mounting up eight victories as a senior and in 2018 was his last win in the Metropolitan League at Wormwood Scrubs. Richard had been a good international Junior runner on the country and track. He ran 13:59.4 for 5000m in 2017.

Regards Alastair Aitken

Howard Williams

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1980’s to 1990’s

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2000’s

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Recent History

In 2015 Janice Bowman stepped in as league administrator covering for Gavin Collett and was officially appointed in April 2016 as the 3rd League Administrator. Major Carr took on the role as treasurer and Paul Holgate took over as results admin.

Jan started to build a new team to deal with the results as well as look at administering the website and social media feeds.

Charlie Bruce took over from Paul in 2018-19, James took over as web admin in 2018-19 and Neil Bowman joined the team in 2019.

James developed a backend online portal, for clubs to register their athletes rather than them filling our paper sheets and submitting these after each race. This was first used for the 2018 season.

This was a cornerstone to improving the results system, as no longer did the result team need to spend hours manually entering runners into the results systems. The runners were downloaded from the portal and imported into the Excel sheets.

The league also added a barcode to the numbers and started scanning these at the end of the finish funnel, in addition to writing them down.