A bus conductor at Peckham garage who arrived in London from the Caribbean in the 1950s went on to become a champion weightlifter and set a British record. Blair Adelbert Blenman, born on 23 November 1932 and died in October 1999, was a British Olympic weightlifter who also worked as a bus conductor in Peckham.
Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1932, Blenman moved to the UK after the Second World War. Known as Conductor Blenman, he was part of the wave of Caribbean recruits who joined London Transport in the late 1950s, placing him within the Windrush generation. While working on London’s buses, he also gained attention in staff magazines for his weightlifting achievements. At 24, he represented Barbados at the 1958 Empire Games in Cardiff and won middleweight gold with a total lift of 795 pounds. Two years later, he represented Great Britain at the Summer Olympics in Rome.
Blenman was reportedly selected days after winning the British Championship in Leeds, where a lift of 805 pounds (365 kg) broke the national record by five pounds. He finished forty-five pounds clear of his nearest rival, but did not reach the podium in Rome. Away from international competition, he also ran weightlifting classes for fellow bus drivers. A TFL staff magazine from the 1960s reported that more than thirty central bus drivers took up weightlifting in their spare time, training twice a week at Johanna Street school near Waterloo station. By 1965, Blenman had retired from competition but continued to compete in bodybuilding, describing weightlifting as both a sport and a route to greater strength and fitness.
He later made his West End stage debut alongside four other central busmen from the weightlifting class. A 1965 staff magazine reported that the producer of Kismet was looking for five muscular men and found them after visiting a school in Southwark. There, she saw Blenman coaching the Central Bus Weightlifting Club through lifts and snatches of up to 340 pounds, and the men were recruited for the production. They performed at the old Scala Theatre off Tottenham Court Road, which was later destroyed by fire and demolished in 1969.
Blenman died in 1999 at the age of sixty-six. No cause of death is listed.
The story of Blair Blenman is among those featured in Transport for London’s (TfL) Black History Month exhibition.
Peckham bus conductor was a 1960s Olympic weightlifter and set a British record – Southwark News
