Bill Lucas
Olympic distance runner who won a DFC for his wartime service as a pilot with Bomber Command
BILL LUCAS, who has died aged 101, was a long-distance runner who was expected to bring glory to Great Britain in the 1940 Olympic Games in Helsinki. Instead, war intervened and he spent much of his twenties flying with Bomber Command in raids over Germany – a total of 81 by the time the conflict ended. As he put it: “Hitler deprived me of my best athletic years, so what did I do? I went out and bombed him.”
Eventually his opportunity to take part in the Olympics came at the “Austerity Games” in London in 1948. But by then he was 31, past his prime and, thanks to postwar rationing, underfed – he told of how his mother would get extra rations from the local butcher to keep his strength up.
The day before his 5,000m heat, Lucas took part in the opening ceremony, which involved catching a bus, a train and two Tubes to Wembley: “Then back home the same night and back again the next morning to compete. We wasted half our energy getting to the stadium.” He failed to qualify after being outrun by Erik Ahldén from Sweden and Emil Zátopek from Czechoslovakia, who later won a silver medal in the final.
William Ernest Lucas was born at Upper Tooting on January 16 1917, the only child of a bricklayer – also called William – who had been awarded the Military Medal during the First World War and had later worked on improvements to the Houses of Parliament, rising to become clerk of works. His mother, Mabel, was a seamstress.
He was educated at Hillbrook Road primary school and the local grammar school, where he played cricket and rugby. He qualified for a place at Christ’s Hospital, but his parents were unable to afford the ancillary costs and he instead left school at 15 to start in a succession of jobs in the City, including packing parcels for a trading company.
Before long his mother had secured an interview for him to be an assessor with the London and Lancashire, an insurance company based in Leadenhall Street. This had a thriving sports club that attracted the tall and skinny young man. Meanwhile, in 1936 he joined the Belgrave Harriers, the country’s biggest athletics club; he would serve on its committee into his nineties and remained a member until his death.
Lucas’s earliest races for the club were in the cross country, though he was soon a regular in the mile. In 1938 he took part in the AAA championship at White City, being beaten into second only in the last few strides.
He was called up in 1939, but ruled out the Navy because he disliked water and had been turned against the Army by his father’s tales from the trenches. He was nearly rejected by the RAF on account of having an enlarged heart and an uneven heartbeat, but convinced the medical examiner that these were normal conditions for an athlete.
He trained as a sergeant pilot, converted to bombers and in August 1941 joined No 9 Squadron to fly the Wellington. He later transferred to No 15 Squadron and continued to bomb targets in Germany and the French Biscay ports. At the end of his tour in November 1941 he began a two-year period as bombing instructor. On the night of May 30 1942 he bombed Cologne on the first “thousand bomber” raid. Sir Arthur Harris, the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, could only muster 1,000 bombers by using those on the bomber training units flown by instructors to supplement those on his squadrons.
“I didn’t feel anything,” Lucas said in 2016 when asked about his recollections of his bombing mission. “We had a target and instructions and you did it. I never thought much about the people below. You have to adopt a wartime mentality.”
In October 1944 Lucas converted to the Mosquito before joining No 162 Squadron of the Pathfinder Force. He attacked several German cities, many on the so-called “nuisance raids”. Small numbers of Mosquitos visited a number of German cities each night to drop a few bombs but, more importantly, to deny the factory workers their sleep and to keep the home defences on alert. These raids were often carried as a diversion while the main bomber force attacked a single target.
Lucas attacked Berlin on numerous occasions and in January 1945 was Mentioned in Despatches. At the end of the war he was awarded the DFC. He left the RAF in January 1946 as an acting squadron leader to return to his running and to his career in insurance, retiring in 1982.
His best year on the track was probably 1950, when he ran three-mile race in 14:11.6, coming fourth in the AAA Championships. He retired from athletics in 1954 and immersed himself in the sport’s administration. Three years later he was the announcer at White City when David Ibbotson brought back to Britain the mile record (Roger Bannister’s famous sub-four minute mile of May 1954 having been broken six weeks later by John Landy of Australia).
In later life Lucas served as president of the RAF Association in Haywards Heath. Until his death he was Britain’s oldest living Olympian, attributing his longevity to a daily tipple of whisky. But he still yearned for what might have been. “The biggest regret of my career is my lost Olympic years of 1940 and 1944,” he told Athletics Weekly. “Who knows what I might have achieved. Fantasy is a wonderful thing.” In 2007 he was granted the Freedom of the City of London and five years later was thrilled to use his two complimentary tickets to the London Olympics to watch Mo Farah win gold in the 5,000m.
Bill Lucas’s first marriage was in 1944; after the ceremony two families returned to find their homes flattened by German bombs. His second marriage, to Sheena Wilcox (née Robson), was in 1979. She survives him with two daughters from his first marriage.
Bill Lucas, born January 16 1917, died March 22 2018