David Billington

Who? David Billington was the fastest mile swimmer in the world in the early 1900's. He hailed from Bacup which is just up the road from Rochdale, in fact he lived on Rochdale Road. His mile record was broken in a weird manner by Syd Battersby (although Wiki names him Thomas Battersby). The 1908 Olympics were held in London and, surprisingly for those days, the events were metric so the 'mile' was, in fact, 1,500m. The pool was 100m long in the middle of the track and field stadium which was surrounded by the velodrome! I'll post pictures of it sometime. The spectators for the swimming events were in the order of 70,000+ which is still the world record for a pool event.

Henry Taylor (GBR), who hailed from Chadderton, just down the road from Rochdale stopped at the 1,500m finish, but Battersby swam an extra 100 metres after the finish to complete the mile. His time over the mile was 24:33.0, beating the standing record of 24:42.6 minutes set by David Billington in 1905. Now, 1,600m is actually the metric equivalent of an imperial 1749.8 yards which is a tad short of an actual mile of 1,760 yards (not a USA NCAA 1,650 yard 'mile') so how it was ratified as a world record is anyone's guess.

There are also some rather strange results when googling him.

AND!! Good grief! I just read one of the linked pages in this blog and found this:

1891....1a, Rushtons St Houses

Which I think is where he was born. Whoo-whoo-whoo .........