A Peckham bus driver, who came to London from the Caribbean in the ’50s, was a weightlifting champion and set a new British record.
Blair Adelbert Blenman (23 November 1932 – October 1999) was a British Olympic weightlifter who worked at Peckham garage as a bus conductor.
Mr Blenman’s story is one of the many being celebrated in Transport For London’s (TfL) exhibition for Black History Month – to highlight people’s stories from the African and Caribbean diaspora who lived in and contributed to Britain.
Born in 1932 in Bridgetown, Barbados – he moved to the UK after the Second World War.
Mr Blenman, known as Conductor Blenman, was part of a wave of new recruits to London Transport from the Caribbean from the late 1950s onwards – making him part of the Windrush generation.
As well as serving London passengers, he was often featured in the London Transport staff magazines for his passion outside of his day job – weightlifting.
In 1958, at 24 years old he represented Barbados in the Empire Games in Cardiff and won a gold medal in the middle-weight event by lifting a total weight of 795 pounds.
Then in 1960, he represented Great Britain in the Summer Olympic Games, which took place in Rome.
He was reportedly selected just days after his success in the British championship in Leeds. After lifting 805 pounds, which is equivalent to 57.5 stones or 365 kg, he raised the national record by five pounds.
He was forty-five pounds in front of his nearest rival.
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Unfortunately, despite training ‘really hard’ he didn’t come away with a medal, which would have been his second.
As well as competing at an international level, he ran weightlifting classes for other bus drivers.
Referenced in one of the staff magazines printed in the 1960s, weightlifting was the ‘off-duty sport of more than thirty central bus drivers: “Twice a week they practice their skills and train hard for honours at the Johanna Street school, near Waterloo station,” it reads.
By 1965, Mr Blenman had retired from competitive sport but continued with bodybuilding exercises. He believed there were two purposes of weightlifting: to train for competitive sport, like him, but for most athletes, it was a practice they engaged with to develop the body.
Interestingly, there’s even an account of him making his West End stage debut with four other central busmen in the weightlifting class.
The staff magazine of 1965 states that the producer was looking for five ‘muscular, strong men’ to take part in a production of Kismet. It continues: “Casting these roles posed a problem for producer Miss Bertha Peek until she visited the floor beneath her dancing class at a Southwark school.
“There she found driver Blair Blenman putting the members of the central bus weightlifting club through a variety of lifts and snatches with weights of up to 340 pounds. The busmen readily agreed to take part in the show.”
They performed it at the old Scala Theatre, just off Tottenham Court Road, which was demolished just a few years later in 1969 after being destroyed by a fire.
Blair Blenman died in 1999 aged just 66 but his cause of death is not listed.
Look out for more stories like this on TfL tubes and buses throughout Black History Month.
