News and Forthcoming Events
Radio 4’s And The Academy Award Goes To (Paul Gambaccini) this week covered the background to the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. The film follows competitors to the 1924 Paris Olympics with which Shropshire's Wenlock Olympian Games has a connection.
On the boat crossing the Channel with Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell (left) was twenty-year-old Harold Langley of Birmingham’s Sparkhill Harriers (photo included in Born out of Wenlock, plate 23 copyright Wenlock Olympian Society).
Langley competed in Paris in the triple jump. Although he was unplaced, his inclusion in the team alone was a triumph for the Wenlock Olympian Games. Langley was the first Wenlock Olympian Games competitor to compete also at the Pierre de Coubertin-revived Olympic Games (first held in 1896 – 46 years after the first Wenlock Games and 6 years after Coubertin visited Much Wenlock and met Dr Brookes).
The previous year, Langley had competed in the 67th Wenlock Olympian Games in Shropshire, when 3,000 spectators had seen him win the 1923 Pentathlon. Langley went on to act as a Field Judge at the post-war London ‘austerity’ Olympics of 1948.
Olympic Outsiders
Much was made in Gambaccini’s And The Academy Award Goes To (which can be found here on iplayer) of the theme of the outsider triumphing against the odds – both with regard to Harold Abrahams who faced anti-semitism, and Chariots scriptwriter Colin Welland who had moved from acting to scriptwriting and won his 1982 Oscar from well outside the Hollywood pale.
Dr William Penny Brookes (1809-1895 standing with medals centre cover, below) founder of the Wenlock Olympian Games was also an outsider (besides thinking outside the box). He sought to offer athletics to the labouring man who needed it so much more than the public schoolboy in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Boys at Britain's private schools were the only ones at the time to benefit from sport at school.
Brookes’ National Olympian Association – an extension of his work in Shropshire and founded in November 1865 - was ultimately crushed by the Amateur Athletics Club (founded in December 1865, later recreated as the AA Association). The Club was led by gentlemen Oxbridge amateurs who didn’t feel that Britain’s athletics should be headed, and its rules administered, by a Shropshire doctor. They felt that ‘London as a centre is as essential to its success as Newmarket to a Jockey Club.’
Brookes’ attempt to standardise rules nationally and to stage annual national games was undercut by the AAC who gazumped his date for the first National Championship by weeks and threatened to disqualify any competitors who competed in Brookes’ Games. Brookes’ NOA was not of London (although its first games were held at the Crystal Palace in 1866) and Brookes and his collaborators were not gentlemen, which in the class-dominated nineteenth-century rendered the NOA illegitimate. This is the more subtle allusion of the book’s title Born out of Wenlock.
Olympic Legacy
Besides doing much to secure the inclusion of sport in all primary schools in England and Wales, Brookes’ legacy has far outlived him.
The first Wenlock Olympian Games medal winner to go on to win a medal at the modern Olympic Games is Alison Williamson. In 1981, aged 10, she won silver at Wenlock in the archery competition. At the Athens Olympics of 2004, she won bronze. She most recently competed at London (Lord’s Ground) in 2012.
The Wenlock Olympian Games are still staged annually at Much Wenlock, Shropshire. In 2012, young sportsmen and women from Brazil competed, symbolising the handover from London to Rio.
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For five firsts of the Wenlock Olympian Games that give an idea of the scope of the remarkable Dr Brookes’ work, see the News item for 30th March 2012.