Benjamin Howard Baker

Benjamin Howard Baker is arguably Britain’s finest ever all-round sportsman, and yet his life and competitive career has never previously been written about at any length. He twice competed at the Olympic Games as a high jumper and held the British record for a quarter of a century. He also set an English record for the triple jump and was a fine hurdler and very capably threw the discus, hammer and javelin. He played in goal for Chelsea and for the England professional and amateur international teams. He was also a water-polo goalkeeper and came close to England selection in that game. He was a title-winning tennis player. He was a star turn as an exhibition swimmer and diver. He played cricket at the highest club level. He rowed, sailed, boxed, and ran round the streets at night to keep fit long before jogging became a popular pastime. His achievements covered an era in Britain when the whole nature of sport was being transformed – from before World War One until the 1930s – and he remained, remarkably, an amateur throughout, playing League and international football just for the fun of it. His flamboyant goalkeeping antics for Chelsea made him a favourite with the crowds of 60,000 or more who regularly watched him at Stamford Bridge. His favourite party-trick was a high kick which set the chandeliers jangling at the numerous social receptions to which he was invited. He was so famous in his native Liverpool that express trains from London were stopped specially at his nearest station to let him off. He lived to the age of 95, regretting only that he never had the opportunity to try the ‘Fosbury Flop’ high-jump technique invented more than 40 years after he retired. No such sporting life as Benjamin Howard Baker’s will ever be led again.


Bob Phillips has spent his working lifetime in journalism and press relations and for 17 years was a member of the BBC Radio athletics commentary team, covering all the major events in the World, including the Olympic Games. In recent years he has written a number of books about various aspects of sport, including an account of the 1948 London Olympics which was described by one of Britain’s most renowned sports columnists as ‘unputdownable’. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of the multiple Olympic gold-medal distance-runner, Emil Zátopek, and of a history of the progress towards the first sub-four-minute mile. Athletics has always been his major sporting passion, though cycle-racing comes close, and he competed as a runner himself at every distance from the sprints to the marathon, running the London Marathon on two occasions, at what he describes as a consistently modest level. After a dozen marathons, he turned to time-trial cycle racing and his proudest claim is to have once won the Merseyside veterans’ 25-mile handicap trophy. In his earlier journalistic career, he worked for newspapers in London, Coventry and Liverpool and now lives with his wife in south-west France, where he cycle-rides six days a week and enthusiastically supports the local wine industry.