Joe Birrell 1930 – 2024
We have received sad news of the death of Joe Birrell, who taught PE and Mathematics at Lancaster Royal Grammar School from 1979 to 1990. He was a popular teacher, and modest about his own sporting achievements.
Joe was an outstanding athlete who ran for Great Britain over 110m hurdles in the 1948 Olympic Games. His Olympic selection followed victory in the AAA national championships at the age of 18.
He went on to complete military service and studied at Loughborough College. He lived in Uganda and Kenya with his wife and taught PE and Maths before coming to LRGS.
Joe Birrell recalled the 1948 Olympics for the Sunday Times:
"My Olympic invitation arrived, in the post, only a fortnight before the Games. Once selected, I travelled to London by train; it was an eight-hour journey. I was wearing the lucky pair of shorts my mum had made and a pair of spikes the school had bought. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t considered to have any chance of winning.
"At the Olympics we had to use starting blocks, which I had never seen before. And I had never run on a proper cinder track. I came fourth in my first-round heat at Wembley, my fourth race at international senior level. Injury stopped me competing at the 1952 Games.
"The opening ceremony sticks out. It was an incredibly hot day. At Wembley, the British team, as the host country does, marched out last. Thousands of pigeons were released in celebration — we later learnt they had been pinched from Trafalgar Square! The best thing was the really great food parcels we received. This was the time of rationing, remember, and to a certain extent some of us probably ate too much.”
He added this remarkable memory:
"When I lived in Uganda, I ended up running the national basketball team. One day, in the late 1960s, Idi Amin, a few years before he became president, asked me to teach him. For 40 minutes, with his entourage watching, he shot at the basket; he would miss and I’d have to rebound the ball into the net. “This is marvellous,” he said. “I want you to coach my army to do this.” Now, I’d known of an American peace corps soldier who had refereed one game with that army and was beaten up when he tried to reason with them about the rules. Thankfully, three weeks after I met Amin, I went to the UK on two months’ leave. By the time I returned to Uganda, he had forgotten.”