Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  No new venues were erected for the 1948 Games. An old, weed-infested velodrome in Herne Hill in south London was spruced up and made fit for the cycling competitions; basketball was found a home at the Harringay Arena; the shooting went to Bisley, the rowing to Henley, as expected, and the yachting was sent off to Torbay in Devon. No money was spent on an Olympic village to house the athletes. Male competitors stayed in military camps in Uxbridge, West Drayton and Richmond, while female competitors were housed in London colleges. Local athletes stayed at home and many commuted to the Games via public transport. As food and clothing rationing were still in force, competitors were encouraged to buy or make their own uniforms. Athletes were, however, provided with increased food rations, which amounted to around 5,500 calories a day instead of the normal 2,600. They were also provided with free (presumably clean at the outset) bed linen. Towels, however, were not provided and all athletes had to bring their own or borrow someone else’s wet one. In the true spirit of the Games, which sadly has long since slipped away, many countries contributed to help increase provisions, with Denmark providing 160,000 eggs and the Dutch sending over a hundred tonnes of fruit.

  The Games opened on Thursday 29 July, a hot and brilliantly sunny day. Army bands began playing at 2 p.m. for the 85,000 spectators in Wembley Stadium with their heads covered if not by hats then by what passed in those days for conventional beach headgear – handkerchiefs knotted at the four corners or carefully folded copies of the Daily Mirror. At 4 p.m., the time shown on Big Ben on the London Games symbol, King George VI, wearing naval uniform, declared the Games open. He was not parachuted into the stadium, as his daughter was to be sixty-four years later, and Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service, which had come into being just twenty-four days previously, remained unreferenced in an opening ceremony during which 2,500 pigeons were set free and the Olympic flag was raised to the top of its 35-foot (11m) flagpole at the end of the stadium.

  To everyone’s relief, the king managed to get through the briefest of opening remarks without a stammer before gratefully handing over to the Archbishop of York to give the dedication address. In those days nobody seems to have wondered if that might offend the Catholics, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus or the Buddhists in attendance. Indeed, the Games took place during Ramadan, but not one of the 228 Muslim athletes voiced an objection. Most people only saw what happened at Wembley Stadium that day on a newsreel in their local cinemas. What they tend to remember of the event is the entry into the stadium of the handsome, blond twenty-two-year-old John Mark from Surbiton, bearing the Olympic torch. Mark had recently competed in the quarter-mile event for Cambridge in the Varsity match. It had been rumoured in the days leading up to the opening ceremony that the torch might be carried by the Duke of Edinburgh on the grounds that he was both handsome and of Greek extraction. Fortunately, considering the language that might have been heard had the flame not lit on command, the honour went to the 6 foot 3 inch Mark who was training to become a doctor at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.

  What the crowd didn’t know was that the previous runner with the torch, inspired by the densely packed cheering crowds, had run so quickly that he had arrived at the stadium five minutes too early. He and Mark had to sit in the dressing room with the torch while the order of ceremonies proceeded along its pre-arranged schedule. Four o’clock was the King’s Speech, at 4.01 p.m. the flag would be raised, at 4.05 the pigeons would be released (presumably some way distant from the royal party) and at 4.07 Mark would enter the stadium with the flaming torch aloft – which is exactly what happened. Mark entered the stadium to the sound of rolling guns and excited acclaim from the sweltering spectators, held aloft the flaming torch, climbed the steps towards the cauldron, saluted the crowd and then turned and lit the Olympic flame. Any uncomfortable thoughts that might have flickered across people’s minds that this was Britain’s version of a celebration of Aryan supremacy were immediately extinguished when the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards struck up ‘God Save the King’, the national anthem was sung and all the athletes turned and marched out of the stadium, led by Greece and tailed by the hosts. The hot weather was a talking point for the first-time visitors to Britain who had been expecting rather cooler temperatures. Just south of Wembley, the heat created a crack in an aqueduct carrying the Grand Union Canal over the North Circular Road. Water cascaded over the edge, causing a major flood on the road below. On Monday 2 August, the heavens opened and the athletics heats had to be delayed as men with pitchforks went round the track pricking the ground to allow the water that had collected in large puddles to run away, but the competition soon restarted.

  The hundred tonnes of fruit was not the only contribution made to the Games by the people of Holland. It was the Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen who proved to be the star of the competition. The thirty-year-old ‘Flying Housewife’ and mother, who had survived the traumas of Nazi occupation, won four gold medals in the 100m and 200m, 80m high hurdles and the 4x100m relay. Her extremely narrow victory over twenty-one-year-old Dorothy Manley, a shorthand typist for the Suez Canal Company from Woodford Green, in the 100m, was greeted most sportingly by the home crowd whose desire for a British gold medal was not clouded by jingoistic myopia. Manley cried on the podium, not out of the frustration of defeat but out of the exhilaration and emotion of the moment. When the winner returned home to a delighted Netherlands, the people of her country honoured her with a bottle of advocaat and a bicycle. History does not record whether or not she attached a shopping basket to the front, but either way it is a comforting reminder that the purpose of competing and the reward for winning Olympic glory were not always commercial contracts and endorsements worth millions of dollars.

  Although Leni Riefenstahl had provided the enduring images of the 1936 Berlin Games with her remarkable film Olympia, the London Olympics of 1948 were the first to be transmitted on British television, as the BBC paid 1,000 guineas (£1,050) for the broadcasting rights. Television was still regarded by the BBC as a very junior service compared to BBC Radio, which had emerged with great distinction from the war. When the television service reopened after the war it was with a smaller budget than it had been awarded in 1939. As a consequence, one of its ‘major new series on the BBC!’ for the 1946–7 season, How to Furnish a Flat, had to be cancelled – according to a programme planning committee report – ‘owing to the unavailability of the furniture’. Nevertheless, one of the dominant cultural strands of the second half of the twentieth century was the increasing power and influence of television. It will be seen in future chapters how it was television which crucially affected both the way sport has grown and the way in which it has been consumed in this country.

  Back in 1948, the Olympics certainly promised those who would have been bitterly disappointed at the cancellation of such a ‘ground-breaking, BAFTA award-winning, iconic series’ (copyright BBC Publicity) as How to Furnish a Flat some form of compensation in the shape of the Games of the XIV Olympiad. Of course, only those fortunate enough to afford a television and live within a twenty-five-mile radius of the transmission station at Alexandra Palace in north London could actually enjoy the spectacle. Nonetheless, this new medium helped to promote the Games in a way never seen before by the British public, as the spirit of the event captured the nation. It was just a different spirit and a different nation in 1948 from what it had become by 2012.

  A total of 4,104 athletes were to take part from a record number of fifty-nine nations although only 385 of the competitors were women. This was in keeping with the tenor of the times. Even during the war, when women were everywhere encouraged to contribute to the war effort, their male employers were exhibiting some reservations. One official piece of advice to the latter included: ‘Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowance for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.�
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  Possibly even in the middle of the 100m dash.

  Even in the brave new world brought forth by the 1944 Education Act which theoretically provided equal facilities for boys and girls, many schools for girls rejected athletics, which it was thought might damage female internal organs. Women were therefore permitted to take part in only nine events which, oddly, included the shot putt but excluded the possibility of swimming further than four hundred metres. All equestrian, shooting and rowing events were also forbidden to potential women entrants.

  The athletes of Germany and Japan were not invited for fairly obvious reasons, although German prisoners of war were involved in the make-do-and-mend activities that prepared the facilities. Indeed, photographs of the time show them putting the finishing touches to the old Empire Way leading from Wembley Park Tube station to the stadium. The road was later renamed Olympic Way even when the stadium was still called the Empire Stadium. The Soviet Union was invited but declined to send any athletes to compete, which was perhaps as well because the Allied Berlin airlift of much-needed supplies had started at the end of June in a response to the Russian attempt to blockade West Berlin. The first of what would become familiar Cold War standoffs was underway and the Olympic Games in particular and sport in general were integrally involved.

  The Games ended on Saturday 14 August, the same day that the final Test match against Australia at The Oval started – and almost finished after England were bowled out just after lunch for fifty-two. The first innings only lasted that long because play had begun half an hour late. In the end, after the Australian opener Arthur Morris had made 196, a higher total than either of England’s innings in the match, the final Test finished twenty minutes into the morning of the fourth day. Bradman’s memorable two-ball duck and John Arlott’s famous commentary on his last brief appearance at the crease were probably what most people remembered from this match, but the series as a whole had been a triumphant success.

  English cricket benefited from the crowds and the financial returns, cricket supporters benefited from some superb cricket played by a very talented Australian side that included Lindwall, Miller, Johnston, Morris, Barnes and young Neil Harvey as well as the incomparable Bradman. Unfortunately, Bradman had won his battle of wills with Miller and, despite the widespread joy with which the Australians were greeted by crowds who were thrilled to watch cricket in the sun, Bradman’s attitude ensured that in future the Ashes Tests reverted to the grim, attritional character that would scar them for years to come. There was just a chance in those post-war years that sport could become a torchbearer for the sort of society that visionaries like Miller dreamed about. It seems unfair to blame Don Bradman for the fact that that never happened: indeed, when he sailed away from the shores of Great Britain at the end of the 1948 tour, it was with loud hosannas ringing in his ears.

  The distinguished lawyer Sir Norman Birkett, a much-admired after-dinner speaker in addition to his many other accomplishments, wrote later of the tour:

  The great crowds… gave utterance to their deep-seated satisfaction, after years of darkness and danger, that cricket had once more come into its kingdom in these great and historic encounters. For not the least of the deprivations of war is that the glory and grace of cricket depart… To see the Australian team emerging once more from the pavilion after the years of war was to be filled with thankfulness and pride and happiness, and not a little emotion.

  The wider revision of that 1948 tour was still some years distant and, much as England yearned to regain the Ashes, when the Australian cricketers sailed home at the end of their nearly six-month-long tour they took with them the thanks of a grateful nation and left behind the warmest of memories as well as a sober realisation that English sport was essentially in the doldrums. Their cricketers had been predictably walloped down under in 1946–7, but a team containing Hutton, Washbrook, Edrich, Compton, Evans, Bedser and Laker had been no match for the Australians in home conditions and until a new generation of players emerged (as it would with May, Cowdrey, Tyson, Statham, Trueman, Wardle and Lock) there was little prospect of the Ashes coming home – although, of course, by tradition the Ashes never leave the hallowed precincts of Lord’s.

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  The football team which we had left at a seeming peak of glory after demolishing Italy in Turin was starting to show disturbing signs of fallibility. On the occasion of the receipt of Billy Wright’s infamous ham, England had only managed a scoreless draw with Denmark and even that result seemed in danger in the eighty-ninth minute when the Danish outside-right Johan Ploeger appeared to have scored the winning goal, only to see his effort ruled (somewhat dubiously) offside. The Danes were all amateurs who had finished third in the Olympic Games in London six weeks previously. Indeed, this was their first match against professional opposition. It was as if England had been held to a draw by the Isthmian League amateurs of Walthamstow Avenue. Goalkeeper Frank Swift, after captaining his country for the second time, admitted that standing on the goal line was no position from which to do the job properly and he duly resigned. Billy Wright, who had already been the captain of Wolverhampton Wanderers for over twelve months, was appointed in his stead in the haphazard but endearingly bumbling manner described at the start of the book.

  Wright saw his job as captain quite clearly:

  The captain of a football team is first and foremost the ‘foreman’ of the side on the field. His team-mates may often turn to him for guidance and the captain should always be ready to give it. In fact, one needs to be father, mother, friend and team-mate all rolled into one. There has been considerable criticism of my captaincy because I do not make a habit of shouting at players on the field… I appreciate that if there is one thing a player dislikes more than anything else it is to be shown up in front of thousands of spectators… My decision was to encourage my players quietly and above all else to try and set them an example. I have never regretted it… I feel the best way a skipper can inspire his team is to roll up his sleeves and by personal effort set an example the rest of the side can follow.

  Wright surprisingly indicated that he did much more than exchange pennants and spin the coin at the start of the match when he revealed two dramatic substitutions he made on the field without reference to Walter Winterbottom. During the match against Scotland at Wembley in 1951, Wilf Mannion was carried off with a fractured cheekbone after only eleven minutes. Indeed, so badly was he injured that he had to be taken to hospital, accompanied by Winterbottom. Rather oddly, it appears from Wright’s account that the manager left no instructions for how England should play with the ten men remaining. Left to his own devices as captain, Wright transferred Tom Finney from the left wing to play at inside-right in order to continue the supply of passes to the potential match-winner Stanley Matthews at outside-right, leaving debutant Harold Hassall of Huddersfield Town to look after the left-hand side of the forward line by himself. It did little good as Scotland ran out 3–2 winners and Wright himself gave, by his own estimation, his worst ever performance in an England shirt.

  Initially, however, it appeared as if Wright’s captaincy methods would be effective. Although Wolverhampton didn’t win either the league or the Cup in 1946–7, his first season as captain, they competed successfully and it was clear that Wolves would be a force in post-war domestic football. In international terms, his captaincy could not have started more promisingly. Normal public service was resumed in October 1948 when, in Wright’s first match as captain, England beat Ireland at Windsor Park 6–2 with a hat-trick by Mortensen and a rare goal by Matthews from a centre which curled against the far post and cannoned into the net off the head of the surprised Irish goalkeeper. Wales were then beaten 1–0 and Switzerland were demolished at Highbury 6–0 before Scotland came to Wembley in November and won 3–1 to clinch the 1948–9 Home Championship. It looked like the traditional England – Swift and Wright, Franklin and Cockburn, Matthews and Finney, Mortensen and Milburn – but the Scots were rampant and, of course, as not
ed previously, they won at Wembley on their next visit in 1951 after Wright’s attempt to repair the damage to the team caused by Wilf Mannion’s fractured cheekbone.

  Scotland would make a habit of spoiling an England party, but losing to Scotland in the Home Championship was not to be compared with losing to a genuinely foreign side on home soil and so far England had never suffered that indignity. Sweden, who had left Highbury with their tails between their legs after a 4–2 defeat at the start of the 1947–8 season, took their revenge eighteen months later in a 3–1 win in Stockholm and looked much more like the side that had won the gold medal at the London Olympics. Their innovative coach was the Englishman George Raynor whose mercurial career saw him coach Sweden to the 1958 World Cup Final but, bizarrely, start the following domestic season as the manager of Skegness Town. He returned to manage Sweden for the third time in 1961 and finished his managerial career being sacked by Doncaster Rovers. It was Raynor who, having secured a 2–2 draw with his Sweden side against the rampant Hungarians in November 1953, just days before Hungary were due to play England at Wembley, told someone at the English FA that the way to deal with the deep-lying Hungarian centre-forward Nándor Hidegkuti was to depute a man to mark him all over the pitch. The advice was, of course, ignored as if it had also come with the suggestion that Stanley Matthews should be the player to do it.

  By the end of the 1940s England’s football was starting to stagnate. The great pre-war players – Swift, Lawton, Mercer, Carter and Cullis – had either retired or were on the verge of doing so. Matthews, Finney, Milburn and Mortensen certainly had some of their best days ahead of them but, had the FA been able to see it, European countries who were also struggling to recover from the effects of the war were making significant progress because their administration was not as hidebound as it was in England. Disillusion with bureaucracy was ubiquitous in the Britain of the late 1940s. The persistence of rationing long after the war had finished made the Labour government of Clement Attlee extremely unpopular. The infiltration of government into every area of public life had negative as well as positive consequences.