BEST known for running marathons in a diving suit, Lloyd Scott discusses football, firefighting and surviving leukaemia
Lloyd Scott’s life is peppered with incredible journeys: riding across Australia on a penny-farthing; running through Death Valley; a trip to the South Pole. But his life’s journey has been equally surprising.
Scott was born on October 13, 1961, in East London. His first job was goalkeeper with Leyton Orient. “The trials came up and my mum said to me, ‘Never leave yourself thinking what if.’ So I gave it everything I possibly could,” he says, “but I didn’t seem to get that break.” At 21 he changed career.
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Never the nine-to-five type, Scott was attracted to the Fire Service: “I applied the same sort of motivation and dedication to the brigade as I did to the football. But it all changed with the rescue of the boys.
“I’d been involved in a fire two months previously where a baby had died. When we found two boys trapped on the first floor of a maisonette it was foremost in my mind.” The boys were rescued, but to save them Scott had removed his breathing apparatus. The subsequent stay in hospital for smoke inhalation revealed that he had leukaemia. His only hope was a bone marrow transplant and, incredibly, a donor was found through the Anthony Nolan Trust. The transplant was in May 1989 and Scott met his donor, Andrew Burgess, six months later (the trust’s policy now is to allow two years between transplant and meeting). “Meeting someone who’s saved your life is not something many people do. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. It was like meeting a brother I never knew I had.”
Scott returned to the fire brigade, but fate stepped in: “On the first night back on duty my fire engine crashed on an emergency call. I fractured vertebrae in my neck and damaged my spinal cord. I thought, somebody’s trying to tell me something.”
He took up a full-time position with the Anthony Nolan Trust and got a grounding in the charity sector. At the same time his fundraising started to take the crazy turn that has made him famous.
“A lot of the challenge is turning a crazy idea into reality,” he says, emphasising that they take a huge amount of training and organisation. His next London Marathon is likely to have an Indiana Jones theme and he’d like to try cluster ballooning across the Channel on a deckchair, but he’s also doing more sensible things, such as getting his consultancy, That Bloke Ltd, up and running, and doing after-dinner and motivational speaking. Whatever happens, the next stage of his journey will be anything but dull.
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