June Foulds-Paul

June Foulds was brought up by her grandparents under the illusion they were her real parents. Her birth-mother died when Foulds was eight, and she was led to believe that this woman was her older sister. She only found out the truth three years later when her grandmother also died. Now being raised by her grandfather, he was keen for her to have an interest other than hanging around with other kids on the streets, and so she joined the Spartan Ladies Athletics Club at the age of 15. That was in 1949, and the following year she was the WAAA 100 metres champion. She retained the title in 1951 and won it a third time in 1956 when she was also the 220 yards champion.

Foulds made the first of 15 international appearance in her inaugural competitive year, 1950, when she anchored the sprint relay team that won the gold medal at the European Championships in Belgium. She also won the individual 100 metres bronze medal. Foulds won a sprint relay bronze at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and shortly afterwards married Olympic fencer Raymond Paul. She gave up running for a while and pursued a career in the media and both she and Paul became well-known celebrities, and she even hosted a television programme. After returning to the track, Foulds-Paul as she was then known, added a sprint relay silver at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and in 1958, won another relay gold at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff. However, her career ended a month later after she pulled an Achilles tendon during that year’s Europeans in Sweden. She retired and had two more children with Paul before their marriage ended and she then married pop singer Ronnie Carroll, in another high-profile wedding.

As he came to the end of his pop career, Carroll was offered a job running a hotel in Madagascar but that fell through, and the couple decided to go to the Caribbean island of Grenada along with her five children (one of them being the three-time Olympic fencer Steven Paul), where they ran a beach nightclub, Sadly it failed, and they were declared bankrupt in 1974. Foulds returned to England and with another marriage over, was looking for a way of supporting her family, so she took a stall on the newly opened Camden Lock market in London. After realising there was not a food stall on the market, she opened one and this led to her opening up other food outlets around London under the style of “Mother Huffs”. Her food stall played a pivotal role in the development of the Camden Lock market. Her third husband, albeit for a brief time, was Eric Reynolds, one of the founders of the market.

Personal Bests: 100 – 11.6 (1956); 200 – 23.7 (1956).