Day, Beauchamp (Bert) Rochford (1881–1972), professional runner, was born 25 December 1881 at 14 Clarinda Park North, Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), Co. Dublin, son of Beauchamp John Day, gentleman, and Geraldine Isabella Day (née Rochfort). He was educated locally at Corrig School, where at seventeen he won the 100-yards race at the school sports in the tremendous time of 10.2 seconds. Running with the Haddington Harriers, he came to prominence at the Irish Amateur Athletics Association championships in 1900 when, at just eighteen, he won the 220- and 440-yard titles. Later that year he won the 440-yards at the Dublin Metropolitan Police Sports in 49.4 seconds, a time so quick that it was not believed. Although it was clearly a new Irish record, the timing officials amended his winning time to 50.8 seconds, making it the minimum measurable increment (0.2 seconds) inside the then Irish record of 51.0 seconds. He also raced in the north of England that year, winning several handicap races and defeating the English champion Alfred Tysoe over 440 yards, benefitting from an 8-yard start.
Despite his respectable upbringing, he was drawn into what was perceived as the ‘ungentlemanly’ sport of professional racing and shocked Irish athletics by turning professional in April 1901 even though it was said that he had been settled with a comfortable income. (Immediately prior to turning professional, he was working in Dublin as a bicycle agent.) He based himself in the north of England, which was a hotbed of professional running, and burst onto the professional racing scene in January 1902 by winning the premier event of the time in Britain, the Powderhall New Year Sprint in Edinburgh. Initially quoted at 20/1 in the betting markets, eventually going off in the final at 4/6, he won the 130-yards race in 12.6 seconds off a 10-yard handicap. Day’s backers were said to have won several thousand pounds from skilfully targeting a race that had been seen as too short for him.
Piecing together his professional career is difficult, not least because such runners often raced under assumed names. He was contracted for much of this time to gambling syndicates and participated in many exhibition and handicap events running under the instructions of his employers, which often meant strategically losing races. Professional runners made most of their money from betting on themselves (or others) to win. Noted for his geniality and for his clean-living lifestyle, he was at his best over 440 yards and considered a championship standard runner anywhere from 100 yards to 880 yards.
From 1902, he established himself as Britain’s best professional runner, winning numerous handicaps and also ‘matches’ against other leading runners. He won high-profile matches against Britain’s leading professional sprinter Bill Growcott over 120 yards in August 1903 and against the British amateur champion R. W. Wadsley over 220 yards in September 1903; in July 1904, however, he lost to the US champion Tom Keane over 130 yards at Oldham, in what was billed as a world title match. Increasingly, he found himself having to concede insurmountable starts in handicaps while other big names learned to preserve their reputations by not taking up his challenges. During 1905–6 he staged a series of crowd-pulling exhibition matches against trotting horses, generally winning over distances of 100 yards to 110 yards.
With professional running losing popularity in Britain, he arrived in Western Australia in autumn 1906 to take on the celebrated Australian sprinter Arthur Postle for the title of world professional sprint champion. The Australian newspapers were struck by Day’s gentlemanly manner, with one terming him a ‘Johnny English’ (Sunday Times (Perth), 28 Oct. 1906). For all that, a moderate brogue was detectible, and Day played up his Irish roots, often sporting a shamrock insignia on his race gear. His match with Postle was staged in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, a gold-mining area, and involved races over three distances: 75, 130 and 300 yards. On 5 December 1906, before a crowd of 20,000 people, Postle won the 75 by two yards and the 300 by three yards, and as a result the 130 was not run. Day’s defeat in the 300 came as a rude shock to the many local Irish who had backed him heavily. Disgruntled gamblers noted how he had come under the wing of the controversial Australian promoter Rufe Naylor, and some even claimed that Day was an imposter.
Day maintained that while he was fairly beaten in the 75, the partisan crowd had interfered with his progress in the 300 (Sport, 12 January 1907). A rematch was arranged over 200, 440 and 300 yards, distances more likely to favour Day. On 10 April 1907 some 8,000 spectators gathered at Boulder, Western Australia, to see Postle win all three races convincingly, with Day giving up before reaching the line in the 440-yards event. If he did not run to form in his contests with Postle, he performed impressively in numerous handicap races during his time in Australia. Prior to a 440-yards handicap held on 1 April in the Perth suburb of Claremont, he bet all his money on himself before learning to his horror that five other runners were also being heavily backed. A highly motivated Day proceeded to win in a time of 47.8 seconds, breaking the thirty-four-year-old world professional record by half a second.
Soon after his second defeat to Postle, he departed for New Zealand where he emerged victorious from his matches held in Dunedin (4 June) and Auckland (29 June) against the local champion Lachlan Campbell McLachlan; he won four out of the six races in distances varying between 175 yards and 440 yards. The New Zealand Athletic Union refused to sanction the second match. Progressing onwards to the USA, he participated in exhibitions and won his 100-yard match against W. D. Walker in Goldfield, Nevada, on 12 October, but what would have been a lucrative coup came unstuck when one of the principal stakeholders absconded owing nearly $2,000. He reached Britain in November 1907, bringing his fifteen-month-tour to an end.
There, he resumed his rivalry with Postle by defeating him on 17 August 1908 in a 440-yard race for the world title in front of a record crowd of over 15,000 people in Salford, winning easily in 49.2 seconds. The first man to beat Postle on level terms, Day’s victory was hugely popular in the north of England, allowing him to embark on a series of well-paid exhibitions. That November he defeated Growcott in another well-attended match for the 220-yard world title. A month earlier Day had won the Welsh Powderhall Handicap over 130 yards at Pontypridd, running off a handicap of three-and-a-half yards. Postle, who was running from scratch, had to withdraw from the final due to an injury but admitted he would not have beaten Day. Day’s matches against Postle and Growcott, as well as his participation in handicap races featuring Postle, Growcott and other internationally renowned athletes, revived interest in professional running in the north of England during 1908.
The next year he travelled to South Africa where he lost his 220-yards world title to Postle in a race in Johannesburg, held on 20 March 1909; shortly afterwards he also surrendered his 440-yards world title to Postle in the same city. Back in England that May, his defeat to Postle over 220 yards at Higginshaw, Oldham, aroused suspicion, as he had just run a much faster time in a trial.
Although he spent his best years ‘running to order’, which meant that his full potential was never fulfilled, the times Day ran suggest that he deserves to be considered as one of the greatest Irish athletes of his time, and as possibly the greatest Irish sprinter ever. Yet his achievements have not been properly acknowledged. The widely held view among the middle and upper classes that professional athletics was not respectable, coupled with the cult of amateurism and the rise of the Olympic games, has obscured the fact that the best athletes of this time were often professional. (It is hard to make direct comparisons as amateur and professional races were timed differently, with Day being of the view that amateur races were timed more generously.) Many Olympic champions subsequently turned professional, and professional running attracted tremendous interest and large crowds, particularly in the north of England, Scotland, the US and the southern hemisphere.
One consequence of this neglect is that little is known about his life once he faded from the professional athletics scene after 1910. He enlisted in the Sportsman’s Battalion upon the start of the first world war in 1914 and served on the front lines in France before being transferred to the motor transport division in September 1916, suffering from shellshock. By then he had married (September 1915) Hilda E. Baker from Fylde, Lancashire. They had a daughter, Enid, in 1916 and lived in the village of Bispham, near Blackpool. After divorcing his first wife, he married Margaret Barnes, a widow, in 1934, by which date he was living in Blackpool. Both his daughter Enid’s birth certificate (1916) and his second marriage certificate (1934) refer to him as being of independent means. He was resident in Argyle Road, Blackpool, when he died in Rossall Hospital, Fleetwood, on 17 November 1972. His death certificate describes him as a retired executive officer.