Runner with real six-pack
QUESTION Did Olympic steeplechaser Andy Holden drink beer for energy?
JOHN Andrew ‘ Andy’ Holden was an international athlete and NHS dentist. Rather than drinking beer for energy, he had a passion for real ale.
Holden was UK record-holder for the 3,000m steeplechase and represented his country in five distance disciplines: roads, cross-country, fells, indoors and outdoors on track. He represented Great Britain in the 3,000m steeplechase at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, but failed to qualify for the final.
Raised in Leyland, Lancs, and a member of Preston Harriers, he went to university in Birmingham in the 1960s to study dentistry and settled in the Midlands, where he ran for Tipton Harriers and was a dedicated youth coach.
He competed at the highest level while enjoying more than an occasional tipple. He drank ten pints the night before winning the Bermuda marathon in 1979, a race that saw him break the course record and beat a world-class field.
His party trick was downing a pint while standing on his head! He achieved his ambition to run 100 miles and drink 100 pints in a single week.
Holden was committed to the NHS and campaigned against the privatisation of dentistry. He would go above and beyond for his patients.
When a terrified landlord refused an extraction, he followed him back to the pub, gave him a dram of whisky and pulled the tooth under the dartboard.
He died aged 65 due to poor health following an aortic aneurysm. Paul Smart, Lichfield, Staffs.
QUESTION Did any Britons fight on the nationalist side during the Spanish Civil war?
DURING the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, almost 2,500 men and women left Britain to fight for the Spanish Republican cause. The exploits of ideological young volunteers such as George Orwell, W. H. Auden and Laurie Lee are celebrated.
The story of their counterparts, foreigners drawn to fight for the nationalists, is ignored. They included White Russians, French and irish fascists, members of the Romanian iron Guard and a handful of Britons. Prominent among the British volunteers was Peter Kemp, a young Cambridge law graduate who was a staunch conservative and monarchist.
in November 1936, shortly after the end of the Siege of the Alcazar, a symbolic nationalist victory in Toledo, he broke off from reading for the Bar exam and travelled to Spain. He joined the Carlist Requetes militia under the nationalists and later transferred to the Spanish Foreign Legion, where, unusually for a nonSpaniard, he commanded a platoon.
Wounded several times, he fought until 1938 when a mortar bomb shattered his jaw and badly damaged his hands. He wrote about his rare, informal private meeting with Franco in his fascinating 1957 memoir, Mine Were Of Trouble.
in 1937, Welsh adventurer Frank Thomas made his way by train to Castile, where he enlisted in the Spanish Foreign Legion. He was badly wounded several months into combat, which he describes in his memoir Brother Against Brother.
Andrew Fountaine, future leader of the British National Party, also fought for Franco.
The largest group of foreign volunteers for the nationalist cause were 700 irish fascists led by Eoin O’Duffy, a former iRA commander who became enamoured with Benito Mussolini.
He headed the National Guard, popularly known as the Blueshirts. O’Duffy organised an irish Brigade to fight for Franco, stating: ‘it is not a conflict between fascism and anti- fascism, but between Christ and Antichrist.’
The brigade arrived in Spain in 1936 and became the 15th Bandera in the Spanish Foreign Legion.
They were not well received by Franco or his generals, being accused of drunkenness and rowdy behaviour. They saw only one offensive action in which they disobeyed orders to continue the attack, and soon left Spain. Sally Hillier, Winchester, Hants.
QUESTION Who was the first MP?
THIS is not a straightforward question to answer. it is impossible to discern and date the birth of an institution that has evolved over many centuries.
Parliament has its origins in the 8th- century meetings of the Witan in Anglo-Saxon times, a council of wise men composed of leading magnates, ecclesiastic and secular.
Many date the first English parliament to 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta. This established the rights of barons (wealthy landowners) to serve as consultants to the king on governmental matters in his Great Council.
As with the early Witans, the barons were not elected, but appointed by the king. The Great Council was first referred to as ‘Parliament’ in 1236.
A candidate for the first representative institution is the Model Parliament of 1295, an assembly called for by the great lawmaker Edward i.
it was the first to include not only members of the clergy and the aristocracy, but also elected members, two citizens from every city and two burgesses from every chartered town, to represent ordinary people. it established the pattern for future parliaments.
Historians will point out that knights and burgesses were in the parliaments of April 1275 and September 1283, but for the 1295 parliament, MPs were given ‘full power ( plena potestas)’ to bind their constituencies ‘to what shall be agreed on by the magnates’.
Grimsby MPs William de Dovedale and Gilbert de Reyner, and Colchester MPs Elias Fitzjohn and Hubert of Colchester can be considered among the first MPs.
Andrew Speight, Devizes, Wilts.
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