Norma Blaine MBE

Norma Blaine MBE

In 195,15 year old Norma was working in the bakery of Lewis’s department store. She joined her departmental team for a day out at the Lewis’s interdepartmental sports. A fellow worker, Mrs Penn (known as “Toddy”) who was a good sprinter at Birchfield, invited her down to the club, where she was introduced to Dorothy Nelson Neal, who got her race-walking. Within 2 years ”Nelson” had got Norma onto a committee or two, and by the late 1950s Norma had also completed her coaching qualifications, taking her coaching exam at Lilleshall.

Her race-walking was interspersed with cross-country, and although Norma says: ‘I took to walking better than running’, she got her first cross-country medal in a Turley Shield match run around the hockey pitches at Birmingham University, the same fields on which Phyllis Hall had run her memorable races in the 1920s. Toddy and Olympic javelin thrower Gladys Clarke were on hand to help the Birchfield girls with their kit, and ‘Nelson’ always insisted that they ‘wear thick knickers’ in the winter, and also pinned brown paper inside their vests, ‘so that the wind didn’t get to their chests.’

Norma was part of a very successful race-walking team throughout the 1950s and 60s.Individually, she won a novice race walk on the roads around Smethwick in 1952, with considerable support from her dad: ‘he was round every corner in Smethwick calling me on’. The walkers often trained from Marianne Lingen’s house in Pendragon Road, returning there for showers and a bowl of soup at the end of training, before Norma had to catch 2 buses home across the city.

Although Norma continued to race-walk into the 1960s, the focus of her work turned towards coaching and the development of women’s athletics in the UK. The women could not have wished for a more doughty champion, nor the under 15 girls of Birchfield for a more dedicated or caring coach. Norma has always preferred to coach the under 15s, handing them on to other coaches as they get older: ‘I like to see them progress, and then it’s up to them…’. Sue Scott, Mary Stewart and Denise Lewis passed through her training group as youngsters.

In 2010 Denise remembered Norma’s coaching style, as she nominated her as her unsung sporting hero:’Just a roll of the eye was enough to let you know you had stepped out of line…You need discipline in sport, and she definitely provided that, but she also has a heart of gold. She was so supportive, she wanted her girls to do well….She was always the first to put an arm around you when you didn’t do as well as you hoped.’

Despite holding down a demanding day-job for 40 years until her retirement. she’s been at the stadium pretty much every Tuesday and Thursday for over 60 years and followed Dorothy Nelson Neal into National Committee work and team management, as well as track judging. She is now President of Birchfield Harriers and in 2010 she was awarded the MBE for her services to athletics.

In her early years at Birchfield the men’s and women’s sections were run very separately. Norma remembers only seeing the men at handicap races during the summer, at tracks at Lichfield, Salford Park and the BSA. She has never been completely convinced that the merger of men’s and women’s athletics has been of benefit, and has seen little to make her change her mind since the first history of Birchfield Harriers was published over 20 years ago. Although she feels that the women’s sport has made some progress and is proud of that, she remains disappointed that: ‘the sport has never really amalgamated as such’. There’s no doubt that she will continue to fight the women’s corner at every level of the sport, and that she will have inspired another generation or two of women to keep pushing the women’s frontiers forward.