Walker aims to raise £50k for bereavement charity

He is the managing director of one of the biggest kitchen appliance companies in Britain — and certainly understands what it means to be boiling hot. But Stephen Johnson’s life in August is set to be very different, as he aims to raise at least £50,000 by walking the equivalent of 35 marathons — on his own, in 35 degree heat, in Spain.

Jewish News caught up with the 55-year-old MD of Quooker on “day five and a half, on the coastal path between San Pedro and Malaga”. Johnson is devoting every day in August to this extraordinary challenge, walking what he reckons is around 1,000 miles to raise money for the national charity, Grief Encounter.

As he explained: “When I was only 18 months old I lost my mother, who died when she was just 25”. Throughout his life, he said, he had had an interest in trying to support those who had had a similar loss — and when he learned that every year in the UK, just over 46,000 children experience the death of a parent or carer, Johnson decided to act.

“I wanted to support children and to find a charity that did it,” Johnson said. “I’m a keen supporter of The Fed and the Friendship Circle in Manchester, but I wanted to do something for children, and Grief Encounter was an amazing fit for me”. The charity provides help and counselling wherever it is needed for children and young people who have lost someone close to them.

This is a project which has been long in the making. Johnson trained for nearly a year before beginning his August walk, with the aim of walking 46.3 kilometres a day to echo the number of bereaved children. He also wanted to honour his late mother and to try to rebuild a picture of her, speaking to her friends and thinking about Sandra Johnson as he pursues his solitary marathon challenge. “I wanted to recognise her importance in my journey”.

Every day, Johnson walks for between nine and 10 hours in the blazing Spanish heat. He chose August to carry out his venture because it is normally a quiet month for his Quooker business; the company makes kitchen taps which provide constant boiling water. While he is pounding the Spanish streets, Quooker is running a raffle back in Knutsford, Cheshire — “anyone who donates £10 to the cause gets a chance to win the cost of their tap purchase back”.

The only thing Stephen Johnson is not looking forward to, on his Marathon Man challenge, is the prospect of breaking in new pairs of shoes, with possible attendant blisters, and he doesn’t yet have the faintest idea how many pairs he’s going to go through. All he’s focused on at the moment is racking up the steps and working out ways to persuade people to donate. In almost every way, he has the hottest feet in town.

• Click here to donate to Stephen’s walk for Grief Encounter