The statue in Heaton Public Park.
Bishopbriggs Sports Centre was very well known to athletes. Home to many SVHC events (including a notorious Christmas Handicap in which the wrong man won!) and run by Strathkelvin District Council Leisure supremo Hugh Barrow, there was a figure of a running man on the canopy outside the main entrance. But who was the man? Was he an anonymous figure dreamt up by a sculptor or was he a real man? The fact is, he was a Clydesdale Harrier and the sculture dated from 1932. We investigated and the results of that investigation are reported here.
Bobby Gray
Bobby Gray was a member of Clydesdale Harriers in the 1930’s. A good but not spectacular club man whose real claim to fame came as a subject for a statue made of a new metal. Only three copies of the statue were cast. Everybody who visited Clydebank Public Library in the late 30’s or later knew of the statue which was one of the first things to catch the eye. Made of white plaster it was a copy of the others. The runner’s action was one of a man straining as hard as he could at the finish of a race and there were those in Clydebank and further afield who thought that it was a representation of Eric Liddell. Not so – he was a Clydesdale Harriers.
His name was Bobby Gray and his descendants included Walker and Fiona Cowan who lived in Bearsden and whose children, Colin and Lynn, were also club members in the late 1980’s and 90’s. Colin was a runner as an Under 15 and Under 17, while Lynn was a qualified Coach working with the new starts in the club – ie the Under 11’s and Under 13’s.
The story of the statue is told in brief by the website of Sporting Statues in Scotland as follows.
The plaster statue was created by John Longden who was a sculptor and also a Councillor and Baillie in Clydebank but it was copied and manufactured in a new material called sindal and not in bronze as stated above. The photograph above was taken in Heaton Park as was that below which was provided to the website by Fiona Cowan.
If there is any doubt about the whereabouts of the Heaton one, there is none of the other sindal statue is languishing. It was situated on the canopy outside the Bishopbriggs Sports Centre where it was regularly draped in a scarf on cold wintry nights – the photograph below has him in a rugby jersey. Hugh Barrow was i/c Leisure and Sport in the Strathkelvin District and based in the Centre. The following photograph and script show Hugh with the statue and say a few words about ‘The Runner’.
After some research with the help of Jennifer Lightbody of the West Dunbartonshire Library Archive, we now have more detail about the history of the statue. First of all there is this article from the ‘Clydebank Press’ of 29th April, 1932.
What was added by this extract? Well quite a lot of detail about John Longden and the fact that it had been submitted to the Royal Academy of Art in London but was not accepted because of publicity received in a ‘London Newspaper’, and that many photographs had been taken of the statue. One of these is shown below, and the caption tells us that it was delivered on 30th March 1932.
It is quite a story and was perhaps fitting that the Cowan family – Walker and Fiona Cowan, Lynn and Colin – were all associated with John Longden’s work almost 60 years later.