The Empire Pool / Wembley Arena Story – Part 3

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

1.     The Empire Pool in 1948, looking towards Wembley Park Station. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

Thank you for joining me for the third part of this article. If you have just come across it, you may like to read Part 1 and Part 2 first. We have reached 1948, when Wembley had just played host to the 1948 summer Olympic Games, and the swimming pool had been used for the last time. Now the indoor arena would be used not only for sports, but also for a variety of other entertainment events which Sir Arthur Elvin (knighted by King George VI in 1947, for his efforts to stage the Olympic Games at Wembley) brought to the Empire Pool.

 

2.     Programmes for the Skating Vanities and Aqua Parade shows.
(From the internet and courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

Two of the early shows imported from America added a new twist to the Empire Pool’s programme. “Skating Vanities of 1949” featured singers and dancers on roller skates, not on the ice. The 1950 “Aqua Parade” brought its own pool, and was a variety show starring Buster Crabbe (an Olympic swimming gold medallist from 1932, who went on to play Tarzan in several 1930s movies) and Vicki Draves, who had won both the women’s Olympic high and springboard diving events at the Empire Pool in 1948.

 

It was not long before Elvin was putting on his own entertainment shows. The Christmas / New Year period had been the traditional time for pantomimes, and working with the theatrical producer, Gerald Palmer, the Empire Pool staged its first musical pantomime, “Dick Whittington on ice”, from Boxing Day 1950. It was a gamble, as the show cost £100,000 to produce (about £2.9m today), but 600,000 people went to see it over its nine-week run, and Wembley’s ice pantomimes became an annual event.

 

3.     Cover and “stars” page of the Dick Whittington programme. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

1950 also saw the first visit to the Empire Pool of the Harlem Globetrotters. Their blend of basketball skills and comic trickery in the matches they played proved very popular, and they would return to put on their shows for a week in May or June each year right through until 1982! Sometimes the matches at Wembley were televised, and I can remember enjoying the antics of “Goose” Tatum and “Meadowlark” Lemon on a black and white TV set. Their performances helped to popularise basketball in this country (and the Empire Pool hosted the men’s and women’s national basketball finals from 1973!).

 

4.     A Harlem Globetrotters poster and Meadowlark Lemon in action, 1960s (From an old book)

 

5.     Programme for one of the shows put on at the Empire Pool in 1956. (From an old book)

 

Sir Arthur continued to work hard, putting on sports and entertainment events at the Empire Pool well into the 1950s, but his health was deteriorating. He was persuaded to take a break, and go on a cruise with his wife, but in February 1957 he died on board the S.S. Winchester Castle, off the island of Madeira. A bust of “Mr Wembley”, as he had become known, was placed on the wall of Wembley Stadium in his memory (it is now inside the new stadium).

 

6.     The bronze bust of Sir Arthur Elvin. (Image from the internet)

 

Although professional boxing matches had been one of the early sports to be featured at Wembley’s indoor arena in the 1930s, only amateur boxing had been held there since the war, with the ABA Championships taking place there every year from 1946 onwards. This was because Elvin had disliked the violence of some of the professional bouts he had witnessed. However, after his death the promoter, Harry Levene was quick to stage regular boxing events at the Empire Pool, featuring some big-name fighters.

 

7.     Programme for the Cooper v. Folley boxing match in 1958. (Image from the internet)

 

Henry Cooper’s World Heavyweight title eliminator against a top American boxer, Zora Folley, (above) was his first at the Empire Pool. He would have 14 more bouts at Wembley (including a famous one in the Stadium in 1963!) in an illustrious career, before he retired from boxing in 1971. A few months after that October 1958 event, the arena saw the start of something new.

 

8.     The young Shirley Bassey, and a second S.O.S. event in 1959. (Images from the internet)

 

March 1959 saw the first one-night popular music show at the Empire Pool. The Record Star Show was a charity event, organised by Vera Lynn’s Stars Organisation for Spastics. It featured top acts, including Petula Clark, Lonnie Donegan and a 22 year-old singer from Cardiff, Shirley Bassey, who had just had her first number one hit, “As I Love You”. The show was a big success, attracting a paying audience of 9,000 people, and a second event, the Starlight Dance, was held later that year. Similar multi-performer concerts continued into the 1960s, with events like the annual New Musical Express Poll Winners’ All-Star Concert.

 

The early 1960s also saw Associated Rediffusion (a subsidiary of the British Electric Traction Group) purchase Wembley Stadium Ltd for £2.75m. They already had the Independent TV franchise for broadcasting weekday programmes to the London area, most of which were televised from the former Wembley Park film studios. One of their most popular (at least with the younger generation!) shows was “Ready, Steady, Go!” When that programme staged its “Mod Ball” in 1964, Rediffusion’s nearby Empire Pool was the ideal venue.

 

9.     Mod Ball programme, and photograph of the event in the Arena. (From an old book)

 

 

10.  Mod Ball performers, at the back of the Wembley Park studios in 1964. (Image from the internet)
(How many of them can you recognise, sixty years on?)

 

With so many top British singers and groups in the 1960s, you might think that one of them would be the first to have their own show at the Empire Pool, London’s biggest concert arena at that time. Instead, it was the American pop group, The Monkees (which included the British singer/actor, Davy Jones), who took that first step in 1967, in what would go on to become one of the main features of the building’s future use.

 

11.  Ticket for a show by The Monkees at the Empire Pool in July 1967. (Image from the internet)

 

But sport was still an important part of the events staged in Wembley’s indoor arena. The Horse of the Year Show first took place there in 1959, and continued as an annual fixture in its programme right through to 2002. However, ice hockey, which had been one of the original sports that Elvin built the Empire Pool for, ended its run with the Wembley Lions final game there in December 1968 (the Monarchs having merged with the Lions in the early 1950s).

 

12.  Horse of the Year Show programme and showjumper in action, 1970s. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

From the late 1960s and into the 1970s sponsorship played an increasing part in the staging of big events. 6-day cycle racing returned to the Empire Pool as the Skol-6, sponsored by a brewery with a new brand of lager to promote. From 1976, a top men’s professional tennis competition, the Benson & Hedges Championship, brought world-class players such as Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Boris Becker to Wembley, courtesy of a tobacco company.

 

13.  Skol-6 poster and photograph. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

The 1970s also saw a string of changes to the building. In 1974, the temporary floor over the swimming pool was removed, and a permanent arena floor installed. In October 1976, Sir Owen Williams’s 1934 building was given Grade II Listing heritage status, for its architectural and engineering merit. And from 1 February 1978, the Empire Pool name was confined to history, with the building to be known in future as the Wembley Arena.

 

Do you have memories of going to events at the Empire Pool / Wembley Arena? If so, please feel free to share them in the comments below. And please join me here again next weekend, for the final part of this story.

Philip Grant.

New building on the Preston Road Library site – and a famous name!

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

The new building on 2 February 2024.

 

It was September 2016 when Brent’s Cabinet decided to redevelop the former Preston Road Library site in Carlton Avenue East for a block of flats, with space for a community library on the ground floor. In November 2022, a Council press release celebrated the topping-out ceremony, “New community library and 12 council homes rise up out of the ground”, attended by Cllr. Muhammed Butt, who ‘accepted an engraved trowel on behalf of Brent Council gifted to him by John Bolton, director of Kier Construction’, and some of his Cabinet colleagues.

 

Now it finally looks as if the building, which has a controversial history, is nearing completion! However, it is not that history, or the architectural merits (or otherwise?) of the new block in its 1930s suburban setting, which is the main point of this article. It is the name of the building that I want to share with you - Henry Cooper House.

 

Why name the building after a famous British boxer? I’m sure it must be because he lived in the Preston Road area for fifteen years from 1960 to 1975, a time which included the height of his boxing career. He is mentioned in Part 4 of The Preston Road Story (published on Wembley Matters in 2020), along with information about the library and Preston Community Library, which began with the support of the hundreds of local residents who had objected to Brent Council’s plans to close six of its twelve public libraries in 2011.

 

Henry Cooper in 1966. (Photo from “Henry Cooper – the authorised biography”)

 

Back in November 2018, Wembley Matters shared the news that a blue plaque to Sir Henry Cooper hand been unveiled above the shop at 4 Ealing Road, where he’d owned and run a greengrocer’s shop between 1965 and 1968.

 

Henry Cooper at his shop, and the blue plaque now above it.

 

As a result of Wembley History Society being asked to support the efforts of a local resident, who was successful in commemorating Sir Henry with this blue plaque, I researched and wrote about his life and local links, and also gave an illustrated talk about them last year, to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of his legendary boxing match against Cassius Clay (now better known as Muhammed Ali).

 

A ticket for the Clay v Cooper fight at Wembley Stadium in June 1963. (Image from the internet)

 

But Henry did not only live in Wembley, at 5 Ledway Drive, for fifteen years. With his wife, Albina, they raised a family here. I wonder whether they took their sons, Henry Marco and John Pietro to their local Preston Road Library, after it opened in 1964? 

 

Albina and Henry at home with their sons in, late 1960s. (Image from the internet)

 

The naming of the new building as Henry Cooper House was news to me. I only found out last week, when a local resident tipped me off about it, but it came as a pleasant surprise. I hope that all twelve of the new Council homes there will be let to local people in housing need at genuinely affordable rents!

 

And I wonder if Brent Council will invite Henry and John Cooper to the official opening of the building named after their father?

Philip Grant

The Wembley Park Story - Part 5

The fourth part of Philip Grant's series on the history of Wembley Park

Thank you for joining me again, on our journey through Wembley Park’s history. Part 4 is here, if you missed it. We are moving into times within the life of many of you, so please feel free to add your own memories to (or correct, if necessary!) anything that I write from now on.

1. Wembley Park, seen from above the station, late summer 1948. (Britain from Above image EAW018314)

After the Olympic Games, in the summer of 1948, Wembley Park returned to “business as usual”. The Palace of Industry was a warehouse for His (then Her) Majesty’s Stationery Office, storing stocks of its publications, from Acts of Parliament to the Highway Code, and millions of envelopes and paperclips for the Civil Service. A wide variety of businesses used other surviving buildings in the former (British Empire) Exhibition grounds.

2. Two adverts from the early 1950's for businesses at Wembley Park. (Brent Archives – local directories)

The Empire Pool’s swimming bath was never used again after the Olympics, and the arena became a year-round sports and entertainment venue. The Wembley Lions ice hockey team played there throughout the 1950s, but ice pantomimes also began here in 1950. Other regular annual fixtures from that year were the All-England Badminton Championships and the Harlem Globetrotters basketball matches. Six-day cycle races, and amateur and professional boxing, also featured in the programme, together with the Horse of the Year Show from 1959.

3. Harlem Globetrotters basketball and six-day cycling action at the Empire Pool, 1950s. (From old books)

In 1955, a second television channel was launched in Britain, funded by showing adverts. The ITV franchise for weekdays in the London area was awarded to Associated-Rediffusion, who bought the former film studios in Wembley Park Drive to use for making programmes. They soon had more ambitious plans, and built the largest TV studio in Europe, next door to their existing premises. Wembley Park’s Studio 5 opened in June 1960 with “An Arabian Night”, a spectacular 3-hour show which was broadcast live across the whole ITV network.

4. A cutting from the "Wembley Observer", about plans for the new studio. (From the late Richard Graham)

More building work was going on nearby, with several new office blocks appearing on either side of Olympic Way, close to Wembley Park Station. Apart from that, however, much of the former British Empire Exhibition site remained in drab industrial and commercial use, with firms such as Johnson Matthey & Co (metals) and Fisher Foils among them. Even the former Neverstop Railway station in North End Road was used, as a car repair workshop.

5. South Way, Wembley Park, looking towards the stadium, 1960. (Brent Archives online image 4841)

6. North End Road in the 1960s, with the old Neverstop Railway Station, and Danes Court flats beyond.
(Wembley History Society Collection - Brent Archives online image 9502)

My own first memory of Wembley is arriving on a chartered train, packed with boys from East Sussex, in April 1959. Schoolboy football international matches had begun at the stadium in 1950 (women’s hockey internationals, to attract groups of schoolgirls, started the following year), and I was one of the 95,000 who had come to watch England v. West Germany. We won 2-0, but I have fonder memories of another Wembley match between the two countries, seven years later, which I saw (in black and white) on a television set at home with my family!

7. A 1963 poster and 1966 programme for famous events at Wembley Stadium. (Internet / Terry Lomas)

Wembley Stadium had been fitted with a new roof in 1963, so that all spectators would be undercover. This did not apply to events where part of the crowd was “on the pitch”, such as the memorable boxing match in June that year. Henry Cooper, who lived in Wembley, knocked down Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammed Ali), but still lost the contest. The 1960s also saw a new sport come to Wembley Park, with the opening of a 24-lane ten pin bowling alley, the Wembley Bowl and Starlight Restaurant, between the arena and Empire Way. This was converted to a Squash Centre in 1974, and later to a bingo club.

8. Wembley Conference Centre, in Empire Way near Wembley Hill Road, c.1990s. (Image from the internet)

Sir Arthur Elvin had died in 1957, and by the 1970s his Wembley Stadium company had become a subsidiary of the British industrial conglomerate, BET. They set about adding to Wembley Park’s attractions, with a new hotel, large exhibition halls and the Conference Centre. This opened in 1977, just in time to stage the Eurovision Song Contest. It hosted many other major events including, from 1979, the Benson & Hedges Masters Snooker Tournament. From the 1970s, the stadium car parks were home to the popular Wembley Stadium Sunday Market.

9. Wembley Stadium Sunday Market, c.1990s. (Image from the internet)

Popular music shows at the Empire Pool had begun in 1959, with the first single act concert by The Monkees in July 1967. Wembley hosted its first Stadium concerts in the early 1970s, and within a few years had become one of the “must play” venues for top performers on their tours. In July 1985, it staged the Live Aid charity concert, raising funds for famine relief in Africa, watched on television by an estimated 1.9 billion people around the world. The “Free Nelson Mandela” 70^th birthday concert in 1988 helped to bring about his release from prison, and Brent’s Mayor was able to welcome him to Wembley for an anti-apartheid concert in 1990.

10. The logo for Live Aid in 1985, and the 1988 birthday concert for Nelson Mandela. (From the internet)

The former Palace of Engineering was demolished in the early 1980s, to make way for more modern commercial and retail buildings. Under the planning agreement for this development, Brent Council adopted Olympic Way (a private road, built by Wembley Stadium in 1947/48) as a public highway. In 1991, when Wembley was a key part of England’s bid for UEFA’s Euro ’96 football tournament, the Council decided to pedestrianize this main route to the stadium.

As part of this scheme, a wide subway was created under Bridge Road, to give people on foot a safer journey to Olympic Way from Wembley Park Station. The walls of the subway were decorated with specially designed ceramic tile murals, celebrating sports and entertainment events from the history of the stadium and arena. Named “The Bobby Moore Bridge”, the new structure was opened in September 1993, by the widow of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning captain, who had died from cancer a few months earlier.

11. Two of the tile mural scenes in the Bobby Moore Bridge subway. (Photos by Philip Grant, 2009)

Wembley Stadium had been made all-seated (following the report on the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy), so that when Euro ’96 was staged in June 1996 it had a capacity of 76,500. England played all three of their group-stage matches there, including a 2-0 victory over Scotland. Wembley also saw the host nation’s quarter and semi-final games, and the final, won 2-1 by the reunited Germany v. the Czech Republic, after beating England on penalties in the semis.

12. Fans heading up Olympic Way for the England v. Scotland match, June 1996. (Image from internet)

Even before Euro ’96, Wembley Stadium was showing its age, and with its cast reinforced concrete structure, it was difficult to make major improvements. In 1995, the Sports Council announced that it would hold a competition to decide where a new National Football Stadium should be built. The prize would be £120 million, of National Lottery funding, towards the cost of building the new venue.

As well as other English cities, a number of boroughs in London wanted the new stadium sited in their area. Luckily, they were persuaded that Wembley had the best chance of success for the capital, and the final competition shortlist was between bids from Birmingham, Manchester and London. In the end, it was the world-famous name of Wembley, and the heritage of “the Venue of Legends”, built up since 1923, which won the day!

Next weekend, in the final part of this series, we will reach the 21^st century, and see how the new stadium, and other developments, changed the face of Wembley Park. I hope you will join me then.

Please feel free to add your memories, questions or comments in the box below.

Philip Grant.

Henry Cooper of Wembley - new article available online

Guest post from Local Historian Philip Grant

A few weeks ago, Wembley Matters broke the news that a new Blue Plaque (the first in Wembley for 40 years) had been put up in Ealing Road, remembering former resident, professional boxer and greengrocer, Henry Cooper LINK .

Now an illustrated article, “Henry Cooper of Wembley”, is available online, for anyone who wants to find out more about the life of the man, his links with Wembley and the reason that the commemorative Blue Plaque above his former shop at 4 Ealing Road is a deserved memorial to him. You can find it on the local history articles page of the Brent Archives website LINK .

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A new Blue Plaque in Wembley – remembering Henry Cooper

Guest post by Philip Grant

For the past 40 years, Wembley has only had one Blue Plaque commemorating a famous former resident*. This week it got its second!

Thanks to the efforts of local resident, Tony Royden, the plaque was installed on the wall above a shop at 4 Ealing Road, near the junction with Wembley High Road:

        A new Blue Plaque in Wembley – remembering Henry Cooper

Photo of the plaque, courtesy of Tony Royden

As well as fighting some of his most famous boxing matches in Wembley (at Wembley Arena, and most memorably against Cassius Clay - later known as Muhammed Ali - in front of 55,000 people at Wembley Stadium in 1963), Henry Cooper lived at 5 Ledway Drive (near Preston Road) from 1960 until 1975.

He is probably less famous for his three years as a greengrocer (while still British and Commonwealth Heavyweight Champion), at the shop which he opened on 9 November 1965. His former home is a bit off the beaten track, so the plaque above the shop is a much better location to publicise this famous Wembley resident.

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Cuttings on the shop’s opening from the “Wembley Observer” and “Wembley News”, November 1965

* If you don't know who Wembley’s first blue plaque commemorates, or where it is, you can find the answer on the Brent Archives website LINK .

Philip Grant

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