Frank Sandon

Frank Sandon swam for the Amateur Swimming Club (ASC) and was the son of Robert Sandon, an examiner of patents, and a former president of the ASC and treasurer of the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA). After attending boarding school, Frank was educated at Owen’s School, Islington, before going to Corpus Christi, Cambridge from where he graduated as a “Wrangler”, the name given to students who obtained their first-class honours in the third year of their undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge. At University, Sandon was a swimming Half-Blue in 1911 and 1912, winning the 440 yards freestyle title in the first of those years. He finished second in both the Southern area trial and the final trial at Southport for the 1912 Olympics, but not in his preferred quarter-mile freestyle; instead he entered for the backstroke. At Stockholm, Sandon reached the 100 metres back semi-final, finishing fourth.

After University, Sandon got a job as a clerk at the Home Office, but left in 1919 as it was not challenging enough for him. He decided that his vocation was in teaching, and he trained at the department of training for teachers at Oxford University. He then obtained teaching posts in Sheffield, and then within the London area at Greenwich, Highgate and West Ham, before being appointed headmaster of the Plymouth Corporation Grammar school in 1929. It closed in 1937 when Sandon became a secondary school teacher in the area. He remained in the Plymouth area until 1941 when he was offered the headmaster’s position of a county co-educational grammar school (now known as a secondary school) at Millom in Cumbria. Sandon published several books, including the 1920 publication “Every-Day Mathematics”. His younger brother Harold also swam for the Amateur Swimming Club.