If my memory serves me well, it was around the early 1980s that the marathon fad hit these shores.
Many cities had a yearly marathon, including Dundee, and our streets were full of runners pounding the concrete in an effort to get fit and produce decent times for the big day.
However, according to Andy Walker, a son of Lochee was already gaining great fame by running this distance in the Commonwealth Games over a decade earlier in 1970.
Andy, a regular contributor to BwB, takes up the tale: “The 1960s had ended, and the Beatles were breaking up.
“It was 1970 and a football World Cup year.
“However, one man was oblivious to all this.
“Lance-corporal Kenneth (Kenny) Grant, of the First Battalion Black Watch Regiment, who was born in Tipperary, Lochee, was pounding the streets, roads, sand dunes and race tracks with a vengeance.
“He was in full training because he had been selected to run in the marathon at the Commonwealth Games.
“The reason for his total commitment was that he did not want to let himself down running in front of his fellow-countrymen attending the Edinburgh event.
“However, Kenny was not running for Scotland but for Gibraltar!”
Explaining this situation, Andy continued: “At his base in Gibraltar, an invite to anyone wanting to take part in qualifying events for the Games was posted in the NAAFI.
“Kenny was about to sit down for lunch when a sergeant approached his table and told him the commanding officer (CO) wanted him — now!
“Kenny was informed that, for a bit of good relations, he would be entering the marathon and, as always, he wasn’t to let the regiment down.
“The Scot wasn’t too downhearted as he was already the regiment marathon champion.
“Kenny put in a strong performance and again won the event.”
Circumstances were soon to move on apace, as Andy went on: “It was at the civic reception when he was handed ‘The Bombshell’ invitation to run at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.
“Surely a mistake? But no.
“The winner, under the Gibraltese Residency Regulation, was that anyone who had resided for over six months in the country was eligible to represent them.
“Kenny had been stationed in the country for six months and two weeks.
“Cue back-slapping all round and breaking out the vintage.
“Kenny, however, was not celebrating, and his stomach was in knots.
“The next day, Kenny went to his CO to try and have the request turned down.
“It was after a heated debate of Scotland v Gibraltar that his officer’s words began to sink in . . . ‘there was no guarantee that Scotland would pick him, and is it not a greater honour to be selected by another country’.
“By the following weekend, Kenny had decided he would run for his ‘adopted’ country.
“In the stadium, he rubbed shoulders with some of the greats in the athletics world.
“The crowd didn’t know he was a ‘boy fae Dundee’ as, in the programme, he was listed simply as K Grant (Gibraltar).
“Creditably, Kenny finished in the top half of the field in a race won by the great Ron Hill. What cheered Kenny up was the fact that he beat a Canadian, who was the current world champion.
“As he was on leave, many of his friends were still in the dark about his achievement.
“When he was asked where he got his tan, Kenny would reply: ‘Well, it wasn’t at Cranslea’.”
Kenny is pictured above working behind a counter in his shop, Frontline Surplus, which is in the Keiller Centre.
For the ‘uninformed’, Cranslea was the name of a farm which grew berry fields at the north-west of the city.
It was frequented in the summer up to around the 1970s by many Lochee residents eager to supplement their income by picking the fruit.
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