Sporting Sons of the Empire

"England has led the way in manly sports. The games which her sons first played, or reduced to order by rules or regulations, have been adopted by many nations"
Evening Standard 24 November 1906

The 1906 British Olympic fencing team: Charles Newton Robinson, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, Edgar Seligman, Lord Desborough and Lord Howard de Walden snapped by their captain, Theodore Andrea Cook.

In Spring 1906 six British swordsmen went to Athens to defend the honour of their King and country in the Greek sponsored Olympic Games. One of them, Willie Grenfell, Lord Desborough, was the sporting hero of his day: the model of the kind of effortless sportsmanship his Edwardian contemporaries liked to think they gave the world. As a boy he played cricket for Harrow, he rowed for his university, Oxford; he crossed the English channel in a one man skull, he shot tigers, climbed the Matterhorn and twice swam across Niagara just below the Falls.

When the Italians declared they could no longer host the Fourth Olympic Games in 1906, Lord Desborough took up the challenge. He returned from his Greek holiday with the task of putting on the Fourth modern Olympiad of 1908. He had no budget, no principal venue and just under two years.

Back in London Lord Desborough made an alliance with Imre Kiralfy, the flamboyant Hungarian entrepreneur in charge of the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908. In just ten months Kiralfy built a state of the art stadium for the London Games at the White City he created to house the Exhibition.

Read more about White City.

Four years in advance of the third London Games in 2012, the projected cost of the 80,000-seater stadium rose to £500 million. For the first London games of 1908 Imre Kiralfy built his 68,000-seater stadium in 10 months for £85,000 (to get an idea of how that translates into modern values go to www.measuringworth.com).

The 1908 White City stadium was one thousand feet long and 593 feet wide - as broad as the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome and longer than the Colosseum. It had a cinder track, a turf track and around the outer edge of the arena, immediately below the seats, a concrete cycle track banked up at the curves to a height of 10 feet. They called the cycle track the 'mile a minute track' for on it, the designers boasted, '60 miles an hour could be attained with perfect safety'.

And in front of the Royal Stand, on the west side of the stadium, was a 100 metre long swimming tank, twice the length of the modern Olympic pool. The water was neither heated nor filtered and competitors described its consistency as being “as thick as pea soup”.

Nevertheless, the White City stadium was state-of-the-art for its time.