Heroic and Inspiring

Book Reviews

All in My Stride, John Gilmour's Story:  Changi to World Champion
by Richard Harris
Hesperian Books, Perth, 1999, $20.00

All in My Stride, the story of veteran runner John Gilmour, as told by well-known WA journalist Richard Harris and published by Perth's Hesperian Press, is a truly inspiring book.  It is one of those handful of books that every Australian should read.

For me, it completely eclipses the much-praised A Fortunate Life as a great Australian story of the triumph of the human spirit over odds.  Read it, and you will have a great deal of trouble feeling sorry for yourself again.

Harris has told Gilmour's story in the first person, and the book is the result of a close and happy co-operation between the two.  It seems the best way to do his story justice since like many truly great men Gilmour is also very modest.

Born in Scotland in 1919, John Gilmour came to Western Australia as a child with his family in the Group Settlement scheme.  His first years here were spent in a windowless tin hut at Rosa Glen in the South West, where his family worked clearing a block with primitive, back-breaking toil.  They eventually moved to the metropolitan area and he left school at 14.

Despite the Depression and all the limitations of life, Western Australia in the 1930s -- and this is by no means the only book I have read which captures this feeling -- seems to have had a lot of happiness.  Gilmour was making a name for himself as an outstanding runner.  He and his friends joined the Army Reserve and when the Second World War broke out he joined the 2/4 Machine Gun Battalion, fated to be captured at the fall of Singapore.

Of 976 men in the battalion, 400 were killed in action or died in Japanese hands.  They had only a week's fighting, but enough to make the machine-gunners especially hated by the Japanese.  Gilmour spent 15 months in Changi, and was then sent by sea, in an old ship under submarine attack, to work as a slave-labourer in Japan.  By this time he was almost blind from malnutrition.  He had seen many of his mates die from starvation and disease or tortured to death.  Chinese who tried to help them were killed slowly with bayonets.  "Sometimes when we were marching to work we would see Chinese heads impaled on steel picket fences".  His eyes were covered with styes and he had dysentery.  To add to his mental strain and suffering, his brother was also a prisoner.

It seems typical of Gilmour's greatness of spirit that, amidst all the almost unimaginable horrors he lived through and describes, he goes out of his way to praise those Japanese who did treat prisoners humanely:  "He was tough but he looked after us", he says of one.  Another was "one of the most decent men I ever met".  He also mentions that crews of German warships based in Japan intervened to protect the Allied prisoners.  Once he recalled waking after being tortured:

The "hospital" was one room.  There were six of us patients lying on mats on the floor.  I was in a lot of pain from a foul blow.  But I was still alive and determined to return to Australia one day.  I dreamed of how I would run barefoot through the pine forest at Melville but when I opened my eyes all I saw was a man with a fixed glass eye watching over me with sympathy and concern.  It was "Nelson", the Japanese guard with an artificial arm.  He'd come to visit me.  With his good hand he gave me a packet of cigarettes.  I accepted them with thanks.  Not that I ever planned to smoke them ...  But the pack of cigarettes was worth half a bowl of sugar -- maybe a small bowl of peanuts -- and that's the kind of trading that enabled me to stay alive.

Meanwhile, prisoners working on the wharves were able to do their bit for the war effort by creatively sabotaging the cargoes they were unloading.  Gilmour's proudest moment was to destroy, at incredible risk to himself, a major Tokyo Steel furnace by contriving to have a heavy naval shell loaded into it.  The whole plant was wrecked.  Weirdly, the only punishment for this was a slap across the face and "We had to sign a paper saying we would never sabotage anything in Japan in future".  Gilmour was regarded as a "yoroshi" (good) worker and apparently the Japanese thought it was an accident.  The prisoners were all very near death when the atom bombs ended the war.

Gilmour, who had begun the war as one of Australia's most promising young athletes, ended it a physical wreck, beaten, tortured, traumatised and permanently almost blind.  He was helped off the ship at Fremantle weighing 41 kilograms.  He was, he says, glad his eyes were so bad he couldn't see the look on his mother's face when she saw him.

The first part of the book is a tremendous story of survival.  The second part is equally one of tremendous achievement.  "Not being able to see" as he put it, "is definitely a handicap in running".  He resumed his athletic career while convalescing, against the advice of a doctor who told him:  "Your body has already suffered too much punishment".

Gilmour says:  "Over the years I've had numerous falls, run into wire, torn the seat out of my shorts through misjudging a barbed-wire fence, but ...  whenever I fell on my back I'd tell myself:  "Get up, Gilmour.  In no way is running a race going to defeat you after what you've been through" '.  He began serious competition running again in 1946, representing Western Australia in National Championships.

My time over the 15 miles that year was 1:28:36.  As a veteran, 20 and 30 years later, I ran that distance four or five minutes faster ...

Gilmour proved not only one of our greatest sportsmen, but as a veteran he has proved an astonishing achiever and may be held up as an inspiration to veterans, to the blind, and to anybody capable of understanding heroism.  He received the Order of Australia in 1979 and has a vast array of sporting awards, but, probably because he is a Western Australian, his recognition beyond the sporting area has been modest.

At the age of 60, Gilmour was putting up Olympic times and could have represented Australia at the Olympics.  He celebrated his 60th birthday in Hanover by winning every event at the World Games from the 800 metres through the marathon in "a rampage unequalled in the masters' track and field," with new world records in four of five events.  He took 19 seconds off the 1500 metre record, running it in 4 minutes 32 seconds, the first 60-year-old to break 4.50.  As reporter John Woods wrote:

In the 5K your correspondent had the honour of being placed in the fast heat, and Gilmour just nipped him at the wire by two feet.  Of course, your correspondent then completed the race by running two more laps!

He was, Woods commented, "the most unobtrusive champion at the meet".

Perhaps ironically, at the veterans' athletics in Japan in 1982, as Gilmour recounted it:  "the Japanese veterans seemed more intent on encouraging me than concentrating on their own performance ...  after the race I was surrounded by Japanese men of my own age and older.  They wanted me to autograph their program.  Maybe I'd met some of them during the war".  As usual he won his age group for the event and the Japanese gave him "a gold medal big as a frying pan".

At the age of 80 he is still breaking International records, and one imagines that if he ever slows down it will simply be under the weight of medals and International awards he has won:  "I have yet to burn out.  Burning out is in your mind through listening to others talking instead of your own body.  You burn out when you're looking for an excuse ..."

This nearly blind old man still has what seems a young athlete's body, buoyed up by an utterly unquenchable spirit.  If Gilmour's survival in the war is the first part of this book, and his athletic achievements the second, it is that great spirit that is the third part of it, uniting the rest of the story.  Also -- and perhaps this is the most important thing of all -- it is the story of a good man, modest, unassuming, a devoted husband and father who has put a tremendous effort not only into his own sport but into helping people.

As he says here, "I hope my story will encourage others".  Herb Elliott, in the foreword to this book, rightly says that his life is one that shows us how to deal with hardship and obstacles.  As an indomitable inspiration, I think it is possible to see him in the same light as Douglas Bader.

John Gilmour was at the Hollywood Repatriation Hospital in the 1950s (since he could not see to drive, he worked there as a gardener), and while I have always followed his career with admiration, it needed this book to tell us -- not only us in Perth -- what a Man he is.  Here is a real Australian hero for the world.

While this heroic story is Gilmour's, great credit must go to Richard Harris for having told it so well, and to Hesperian Press for having published a truly magnificent book, a classic and a tonic to read.  Forget "Chariots of Fire".  What a film this could make!