The Olympic idea was a mixture of fair behaviour, chivalry, achievement, competition, and theatre, and has been equated with world peace. The classical components of education - musical and gymnastic - were applied to early British education by the muscular Christians in the shape of mind, body, and soul. The harmonious, all around person - athletic, intellectual, and spiritual - was the objective. Ideally it should still be so. It always was, and still is, the core of English traditional education.
In 1612 Robert Dover began the "Robert Dover's Olympic Games" in the Cotswolds. A Cambridge graduate, Dover arrived in Saintbury from Norfolk. Although 1612 is thought to be the best guess as the start date, there are suggestion that it could have been as early as 1596 or 1602. Certainly the word Olympic was in use. In Shakespeare's Henry VI we read "Such rewards as victors weare at the Olympic Games." Dover's games included horseracing and coursing, running, jumping, throwing the sledge-hammer, and pitching the bar; there was wrestling, quarter-staff fencing, dancing, card games, and chess. Women participated. So did poets - and it was thought that Shakespeare had seen the games.
In 1832 the Olympic scene was London. At his Chelsea Stadium the Baron de Berenger instituted an Olympic Festival. In 1838 he repeated the event and, in a letter to Bell's Life, he wrote: " Permit me to announce directly what, to most of the patrons of the Stadium has been known long since, that I am organising trials of skill on a grand scale, not only in rifle-shooting, archery, carousel riding, fencing, pistol-shooting, gymnastics, sailing, rowing, cricket, etc., to commemorate Her Majesty's (Queen Victoria) coronation by rewarding the victors with suitable prizes. Accordingly, an entire week will be devoted to daily public contests to be called 'The Stadium's first Olympic Week.' Think of this as you pass by Stadium Road in Chelsea!"
There are some more bizarre Olympic connections too. In many parts of Britain athletes ran naked as in ancient Greek festivals. A 17th century manuscript states: " Theire exercise for a greate part in ye Gymnopaedia or nake boy and ould recreation among ye Greeks, and this in foote races . . . for two or three miles with many hundred spectators and ye bette very small."
In the 1700's Cambridge University students were involved in some sort of Olympic Games held on the Gog Magog Hills. In 1862 and thereafter there were Olympic Games at Liverpool. The most significant Olympics to take shape in Britain however was at Much Wenlock in Shropshire. In 1850 the local doctor and magistrate William 'Penny' Brookes established his Much Wenlock Olympian Society. Olympism was one sector of study in an all-around education aimed particularly at agricultural workers. Brookes conducted a life-long crusade for physical education for all; he used the term PE long before it was common parlance. He carried on his own research vis-a-vis physical and mental relationships in his local school. The programme of the annual games included cricket, 14-a-side football, high and long jump, quoits, hopping and running races for the under sevens (with money prizes!), putting the stone, hurdles, a wheelbarrow race, and chasing the pig! The high point of the games was tilting the ring on horseback and later, the Pentathon, a five-event test of skill and endurance. At the peak of the Much Wenlock Games large crowds of three to four thousand people watched the spectacle. A strong team always arrived from the GGS (German Gymnastics Society).
The Shropshire Olympian Association in 1861 was a logical extension. Then in 1865 came the National Olympian Association. This was the work of a unique triumvirate: Brookes, John Hulley from the Liverpool Olympics and YMCA stable, and Ravenstein from the London German Gymnastics Society. There was also Ambrose Lee of Manchester reflecting the deep historical roots of Manchester's current Olympic bid.
The committee of the first National Olympic Association contained, among others, delegates from the Thames Rowing Club and the Birmingham Athletics Institute. The first committee of the British Olympics Association in 1905 was led by a famous rower, Lord Desborough, winner of the 1892 Diamond Sculls at Henley. In such ways the history of British, organised, Olympism goes back a long way.
However, all this was a national crusade. Brookes was eager to internationalise the initiative. He also remarked that the revival of the Olympic Games would lead to an "expression of interest in the importance of compulsory physical education in the school" and that the proposed festivals "would make a profit - to be distributed among the participating nations once organisational costs had been defrayed." This was an astonishing and brilliant anticipation of today's Olympic solidarity.
The most famous visitor to Brookes at Much Wenlock was Pierre de Coubertin who was both Hellenophilic and Anglophilic. He was much taken by the role of the games in English boys' education and in classical Olympic ideas. De Coubertin was also a keen rower. He made it possible for French crews to row at Henley and perceived the orgainsational structure of the regatta as a model for his concept of the Olympic Games. In 1892, in a speech at the Sorbonne, he said: " Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands. That is the true free trade of the future and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of peace will have received a new and strong ally. It inspires me to touch upon the further step I now propose and it in I shall ask again that the help you have given me hitherto you will extend again, so that together we may attempt to realise - upon a basis suitable to the conditions of our modern life - the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games."
De Coubertin and two others then set about organising an international meting for 1894 - again at the Sorbonne - to found the International Olympic Committee. The two others were Professor Wiliam Sloane of Princeton University and Charles Herbert, Secretary of the (British) Amateur Athletics Association. A powerful British delegation turned up in Paris. The Hon. Members included the Prince of Wales and Lord Aberdare whose son was a member of the IOC in 1929, and whose grandson is currently President of the MCC. It was the largest overseas delegation .
Recent research has shown the de Coubertin, Sloane, and Herbert were all devout charter members of the International Peace movement. This probably explains the presence of M. Elie Ducommun, President of the International Peace Bureau, at the 1894 congress. It is pertinent to record this fact ten years after the death of the great British Olympian and Nobel Prize Laureate, Philip Noel-Baker. It is astonishing that his front-line peace work began with the formation of the Friends Ambulance Units to work in Serbia in the First World War. And now Serbia needs such help once again.
Olympism still has much to do as an instrument for peaceful understanding in the world.
Peace, voluntary service, self-generating economy, education and development, and fair play. Theses are the elements in Olympism for which we must continue to strive. They are still enshrined in the Olympic Charter. These are the threads that run through the British contribution to the growth of the modern Olympic movement.
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