‘Those were the days----------’

Life before Electronics and Computers

There seems to be a current fashion on TV to take groups of people back to relive life as it was in the past. Well how about life in Orienteering before the advent of electronics and all its spin-offs.

Our sport relies on measuring accurate elapsed time and clear evidence that each competitor has completed their course correctly. Remove the now familiar SI or EMIT systems as well as the map and course drawing programmes of OCAD and CONDES and you are back to a challenging and labour intensive manual system. The amazing thing is that it worked, which is a tribute to a vast amount of work by almost all active (willing!)members of each club and on the national scene events as big as the JK worked on just such a system.

Once the club had got permission to use a suitable area it had to be mapped from first principles, usually with a willing volunteer going out with a 1:25000 OS map, a measuring tape and a compass, progressively building up a map from paths, fences, tracks, distinct vegetation boundaries, streams, and ditches from which you could extend to refining contours and adding more detail. All this had to be ‘drawn up’ and this was done by hand, using special pens on plastic film. Each colour had to be drawn in black, on a separate sheet of tracing film with precise register holes made so that each colour could be accurately overlain onto the others to enable a 5 colour O map to be printed. Clearly you needed to know your printer, who had to be able and willing to print to both an accurate and correct colour standard.

Now, probably several months later, the club had the map and the Planner could go to work. This bit is still much the same job except that there was no central support and guidance as to the technical standard of each course. Control sites in all but very informal events meant the installation of one or more large wooden stakes often requiring blows from a large mallet before the chosen pin punches were screwed onto the woodwork and O flag hung. With a range of up to 10 courses the Planner had to prepare accurately punched ‘Control Cards’ for each course for the use of the Controller and the Results team in verifying that each runner had completed their course.

On the day of the event, unless it was a major one, entry was all on the day. Upon arrival you went to Registration, which consisted of a line of suitably labelled cars each handling 2 courses. Selecting your chosen course, you paid your entry fee, your name was added to a Start list, and were handed a ‘Control card’ on which was written your name and start time. You were also given a blank map of the competition area and the Control descriptions for your chosen course. Registration was a long and unsung task, often leading to near hypothermia for the Registration team with constantly open car windows and variable weather. If the club was putting on a ‘Badge Event’ ie level B, pre-entry was the name of the game. You entered by post using, we hoped, a ‘Standard BOF entry form’ and enclosing 2 stamped addressed envelopes, one for final details and control cards and one for results, sending the entry to the address of the ’willing’ volunteer ‘entries secretary’. Once received, envelopes had to be filed in order, entries put into a start list, and details written onto control cards. Entries came in all shapes and sizes with some people insisting on using worse for wear second hand envelopes. Entries frequently topped 400 so this was a major back-room job and the entries secretary also had to field phone calls and queries.

Control cards were made of card, which wasn’t the best material for wet weather, and many people chose the strengthen their card with sticky backed plastic after they had written the control descriptions onto the cards. Soaked cards were also a potential nightmare for the Results team faced with soggy Control Cards, the only solution being to take them home and dry them out in the oven! This was before the discovery of ‘Tyvek’ waterproof plastic.

The Start was usually a series of taped lanes for each course and a Starter with a watch, synchronised with the Finish. You handed in your completed ‘Control Card ‘ stub and were started at each minute interval with a blast on the Starters whistle and ran, now under race time to ‘Master Maps’ where you copied down your chosen course as fast and accurately as you could. Rain could make this difficult even with with a plastic sheeting ‘lean to’ and it was as well to have your own waterproof pen/pencil with you because of crowding round maps.

Now you were off on your course and apart from remembering to punch your control card and also pushing the button on your stop watch at each control to record your splits, things haven’t changed except that if you were on a longer course you might come to 2nd Master maps about half way round. By now you were well warmed up (sweaty)and were faced with copying a further set of controls onto your map in race time. There was usually a plastic sheet lean-to but if it was raining the process became really stressful as you tried to write on a soggy map, also contending with equally stressed fellow competitors!

Click to enlarge

So you have now punched the final control and find yourself following a taped funnel which is progressively narrowing until it forces you into single file as you approach the Finish banner. As you cross the Finish line a marshal shouts ‘Now’, which is the cue for the timing marshal, ‘Scribe’ in my diagram, to write down your time on a list that had previously been prepared with sequence numbers written down the side of the page, so you may be recorded as No 56 with a time of 58mins 45secs. The clocks that were used, which were synchronised with the Starters watch, usually were digital and had a short term memory capacity of about 10 times so the ‘Scribe’ had a chance of keeping up with a rush of incoming runners. As each sheet is completed it is passed back to the Results processing team.

Finishers have to be kept in strict finish order by a further marshal as they make their way up the funnel to be given a numbered cloakroom ticket by a further marshal. On reaching a table each finisher hands in their Control card together with their ‘cloakroom’ ticket and these are stapled together before being passed back to the Results processing team.

Now in possession of the Control card with its attached numbered ticket, a member of the processing team writes each competitors elapsed time onto the control card matching the cloak room ticket number with the time shown against that number on the timing sheet. Once this has been done all the data for a competitor is in one place with one exception, the Start Stub which was collected on the Start line and filed in time and course order before being sent to the Results processing team. This was the only safety check available to ensure that all competitors had been accounted for.

From this point a member of the results team used a ‘Master’ control card for each course to check that each competitor had visited and punched at each control. This was then passed to the group who had to do the maths and subtract the start time from the finish time to get a figure for the run time. In a busy tent this was a very demanding bit of mental arithmetic as you were using minutes and seconds. In many events this process could not be completed on the day and many hours were spent on dining room tables checking cards and times. Assuming that all went smoothly the final process was to file all control cards for each course in time order ready for the results list, at the same time stapling the stubs in results and course order on a ‘washing line’ display in the event assembly area.

You can see from the diagram that the size of the Finish and Results team was large and the pressure was usually so great that shifts had to be changed particularly for the ‘Scribe’ and the Control Card calculating teams. The really amazing thing is that in those days you just did it and actually enjoyed much of the work as you came into contact with many club members who you might not know very well.

How about WIM running a ‘Retro- event just to show everyone how it was done!!!!

John Warren