WHEN he was a teenager living in Buxton, keen sportsman John Tarrant took up amateur boxing.

He competed in a few fights, accepted £17 expenses and then quit when he was 19, deciding that, in future, running would be his sport.

That £17 was to haunt John for the rest of his life.

He declared his takings to the athletics authorities who deemed that the money made him a professional.

They gave him a lifetime ban from all competition in Britain and overseas.

His tragic and intriguing story is a tale of one man's unflagging determination to fight the injustice of the establishment.

John, better known in the 1950s as "the Ghost Runner", became a national hero.

After being banned from the world of amateur athletics – unfairly, he and many others thought – John began to turn up at events in disguise.

He embarked on a one-man campaign to evade stewards and run with no number on his chest. And, even when he started late, he often managed to streak ahead of the rest of the field.

Inevitably, the British public loved him. He was the archetypal underdog who simply wouldn't lie down and admit defeat.

During the 1950s, the working classes in the UK had emerged from the Second World War with a new revolutionary spirit. Tired of living in a society in which the odds were so firmly stacked against them, working class heroes were rising up everywhere, both in literature and in the real world.

It was during this period that John first began to recognise his potential. It became increasingly clear that he was endowed with an outstanding talent for running which held the promise of Olympic glory and honours.

John's early life was very tough.

A working class boy from London, he and his beloved brother, Victor, lost their mother to TB when they were still young.

After spending several years in a tough children's home in Kent, the brothers eventually went to live with their newly-remarried father in Buxton.

Here, as a young teenager, John strived to find his feet.

However, he made the fatal error which was to cost him his Olympic dreams forever.

As a youth, he accepted that £17 in expenses for competing in a local boxing match.

At the time, John had not even considered the consequences. His boxing career was extremely short-lived – a teenage pursuit which he had quickly dropped, realising that his sporting interests lay elsewhere.

But the Amateur Athletics Association (AAA) chose to view it differently. They regarded the payment as proof that John had worked as a professional athlete and issued him with a lifelong ban from the sport at the age of 20 – with no right of appeal.

John's open and honest nature had cost him his future and it was a bitter pill to swallow.

Author Bill Jones summed up the dilemma John had faced, and the unfairness of the decision the AAA made.

"Everyone knew the amateur rules were rotten, designed and policed by people of 'gentlemanly status' who eyed the working man's need for cash with disdain and suspicion," he said.

"The problem in the 1950s was that no-one knew how to get rid of them.

"In the late 19th century, any athlete found to have taken cash faced court action and six months' hard labour. Things had mellowed by Tarrant's day, but not much."

Angry but undeterred by the ban, John carried on training, daily running through the Derbyshire hills with a rucksack full of rocks in the hope that he could persuade the AAA to change its mind.

It was a forlorn hope and, finally, in the summer of 1956, his anger and frustration peaked.

In August that year, he turned up unannounced and uninvited at the Liverpool marathon, an event full of top-flight runners, where he calmly stepped into the field sporting a pair of old worn-out plimsolls and a plain running vest with no number.

For 20 miles, he streaked ahead of the field then, just as suddenly and quietly, he disappeared.

The national press loved the story, especially the left-wing tabloids and, within 24 hours, he had become a working class hero. John was dubbed "the Ghost Runner" and was eventually tracked down to his Buxton home and identified.

Bill's book, The Ghost Runner, The Tragedy Of The Man They Couldn't Stop, describes how, for the next two years, the Ghost Runner gate-crashed prestigious races all over Britain, playing cat-and-mouse with angry officials who were armed with photographs of him in an attempt to thwart his efforts.

It was John's way of protesting against the bizarre and outdated rules which deprived him of a career and Britain the potential glory of his Olympic medals.

He arrived at many race meetings in disguise. He would dismount from Victor's motorbike, whip off his coat and hat to join the other runners in the field.

He always set off a few seconds behind the rest yet soon took the lead, much to the delight of the cheering crowd who watched the hapless stewards trailing behind him.

Bill describes John as a mild-mannered man who bore his cross well. But, over time, his protest became more of an obsession, even taking precedent over his working life.

In 1953, John had married his sweetheart, Buxton girl Edith, or Edie, Light, one of the eight children of Harold and Ellen Light. Harold was odd job and delivery man at the town's outfitter's, Potters.

The young couple went on to have son Roger. John took a lowly paid position as a caretaker at the Territorial Army centre in Hereford where he had moved to be near brother Victor. The job allowed him to run. He would use the training ground in the mornings and would usually clock up a good 30 miles before beginning work.

Eventually, in 1958, the AAA offered a compromise to John in which he was allowed to run in Britain, but never for Britain. His hopes of competing in the Rome Olympics in 1960 were dashed for ever.

Bill's book describes how John, though tired from his efforts and a battle with stomach cancer, still managed to carve a place for himself in the record books, this time taking a new direction.

In 1960, he established two world records for endurance runs – one at 40 miles and another at 100 miles, which he completed in just over 12 hours of non-stop running.

In South Africa, he openly flouted apartheid rules by running as the only white in outlawed black races. Describing him as a "ghost among ghosts", Bill reveals that John is still a hero over there today – long after he succumbed to his stomach cancer in 1975.

Bill's book is a tragic, poignant and touching portrayal of one man's battle to have his talent recognised and the petty rules held by the AAA at the time over-turned.

He may not have achieved all his aims but his efforts certainly won him a moral victory and a great deal of notoriety and support.

Bill, a former documentary maker for Granada TV, came across the tale and was moved to commit it to a novel.

The recognition is long overdue but it is welcomed by John's widow, Edie, who still lives in Hereford where, as a result of recent publicity, the local council is now considering erecting a statue in honour of the long-suffering Ghost Runner.

The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop, by Bill Jones (Mainstream, £12.99), is available at www.mainstreampublishing.com