Opening Wembley’s Olympic Games, 75 years ago today – 29th July 1948

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

 

 

1. Local club athletes escorting the Olympic Torch through Wembley Park. (Source: Brent Archives)

Today marks the 75^th anniversary of the opening ceremony of the 1948 Summer Olympic Games, which was held at Wembley Stadium, so I thought you might like to get a flavour of that day. The lighting of the Olympic flame was actually the climax of the ceremony, so I will start at the beginning.

 

2.     Opening Ceremony programme. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

The ceremony began at 2.30pm, and all the tickets had been sold, so people began arriving for the event well before it started. Most came along the recently opened Olympic Way.

 

3.     Crowds heading to the stadium for the Opening Ceremony, 29 July 1948. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

The ceremony got underway with the teams from the 59 nations taking part in the Games entering the stadium. Greece, as the originator of the ancient games, led the way, followed by the others in alphabetical order, with Great Britain, as the hosts, bringing up the rear.

 

4.     The Czechoslovakian team parading round the athletics track, followed by Denmark.
(Screenshot from a colour film of the 1948 Olympic Games)

 

Each team was led by a Boy Scout from a Wembley troop, carrying a banner with the nation’s name. Other local scouts were sitting on the grass beside the track, ready to play their part later in the afternoon. 

 

5.     The teams assembled in the centre of the stadium. (Screenshot from a colour film)

 

As the teams reached the back straight, they were guided into position, so that they formed columns behind their name and flag. All 59 national flags were also flying from flagpoles around the top of the stadium, as they would throughout the Games. It was a hot and sunny afternoon, and the temperature in the centre of the stadium was around 35ºc. The first casualty of the Games was the scout holding the banner for Bermuda, who feinted and had to be helped by local St John’s Ambulance Brigade first aiders. Another scout was brought in to take his place.

 

6.     King George VI declares the Games open. (Image from the internet)

 

At 4pm, King George VI, who had taken the salute from the Royal Box as the teams paraded past, declared the fourteenth Olympiad of the modern era open. The Boy Scouts around the track then released 7.000 pigeons from wicker baskets The pigeons, symbolising peace, circled the stadium several times to get their bearings, then flew away to their home roosts.

 

7.     Some of the pigeons flying above the stadium. (Screenshot from a colour film)

 

Anticipation was now rising, as the Olympic torch relay, which had begun at Mount Olympus in Greece 12 days earlier, was nearing the stadium. The torch had arrived at Dover the previous evening, and runners had carried it through the night, along a route designed for it to arrive at the stadium at 4.07pm!

 

 8.     Map of the torch relay route, from a 28 July newspaper. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

Large crowds of local people, and a 21-gun salute (which helped to scare the pigeons away from the stadium!), had greeted the Olympic torch as it was carried up Olympic Way. The relay torch (later given to the Mayor of Wembley, and now in Brent Museum) was used to light the ceremonial torch which took the flame into the stadium.

 

9.     The Olympic torch relay on its final leg up Olympic Way. (Image from the internet)

 

A Cambridge University athlete, John Mark, had the honour of carrying the torch into the stadium. After a steady run around the track, with the 80,000 crowd and several thousand competitors watching him, he ran up a short ramp and lit the Olympic flame.

 

10.  John Mark lighting the Olympic flame at Wembley. (Image from the internet)

 

A massed choir sang the Olympic hymn, and then the flag-bearers from the 59 competing nations gathered round a rostrum, from which Donald Finlay, the Great Britain team captain, took the Olympic oath. On behalf of all the competitors, he swore to take part in the Games ‘in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.^’

 

11.    Donald Finlay taking the Olympic oath at the Opening Ceremony. (Image from the internet)

 

The Opening Ceremony concluded, and the stadium was made ready for the start of the athletics events the following day. 

 

12.  The Starter, getting athletes “set” for a heat of the 100 metres on 30 July.
(Screenshot from a colour film)

 

“Wembley’s 1948 Olympic Games” had begun! I wrote a short piece earlier this month about an illustrated talk with that title I was giving. I will be presenting the talk again at a Brent Libraries “coffee morning” event, at Ealing Road Library on Tuesday 3 October, 11am to 12noon. If you are interested, and are free that day, you will be very welcome to come along. Check the Brent Culture Service Eventbrite site nearer the time, to reserve your place.

Philip Grant.

 

112 years on – the Olympic marathon race through Wembley, 1908

 A guest blog by Philip Grant on the anniversary of the Wembley Marathon

The afternoon of Friday 24 July 1908 was hot and sunny, not the best of conditions for running 26 miles from Windsor Castle to the White City. But that was what 56 athletes from 16 different nations set out to do, at 2.33pm, for the honour of being the Olympic marathon champion.

  A map of the Olympic marathon course, from "The Times", July 1908. (Source: British Newspaper Library)

More than a century later, Joe Neanor, a keen runner, came across a short piece of film from 1908, showing a scene of the Olympic marathon race actually shot on the route, and not at the finish in the stadium. Being curious, he ran the whole 1908 course (in stages) to discover where the film was taken. When he had found the spot, he put together this video, and loaded it onto the internet:

After putting his video on YouTube, Joe sent Wembley History Society a link to it – watch his short film, and you will understand why! It is certainly the oldest piece of film that I am aware of showing Wembley, and the people who lived here in Edwardian times. The scene shown is at the western end of Wembley High Road, near the top of Ealing Road.

Joe was amazed at the number of people watching as the race went by. On the day after the race, “The Times” had said:

“… over all the last part of the course, when one got on to tram-lines and between rows of houses, the spectators were packed as tightly as possible, and then only leaving a part of the road open, but enough to ensure no discomfort to the competitors.‟

One reason for the crowds was probably because tickets to watch the Games in the stadium were expensive. As the Olympic marathon race was along public roads, people could watch it for free. There was no radio or television in 1908, but plenty of coverage of the events in the newspapers, which most people could afford (the “Daily Mirror” only cost a halfpenny then!). The route of the race, and expected times that the runners would arrive, had been well publicised.

The Italian "winner" of the marathon, and crowd of spectators in Harlesden. (Brent Archives image 1034)

There is some confusion over the name of the Italian runner, seen in the video, who was ‘First in the Stadium’. I have always referred to him as Pietro Dorando, which is what the newspapers at the time called him, but the official Olympic Games records have him as Dorando Pietri. I suspect that the (all British) officials at the 1908 Games may have got his first and surnames the wrong way round!

The race at the 1908 Olympic Games was the one which really made the marathon event famous worldwide, especially because of its dramatic finish. If you don’t know the story, or want to discover more about the 1908 Olympic marathon race, details are available in the Brent Archives online local history collection (just click on the “link”).

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.

OF – a little word makes a big difference.

Guest post by Philip Grant

A couple of months ago I was walking along Empire Way, for the first time in a while, when a new street name caught my eye: 

Palace Arts Way street name sign

Many people, new to the Wembley Park area, might wonder who or what “Palace Arts” is or was, and why a road should be called that. As someone with an interest in local history, I realised that the road is by the site of the former 1924 British Empire Exhibition Palace of Arts building, so why was the “OF” missing from its name?

I wrote a joint email to Quintain’s Wembley Park company and to Brent Council’s street names department, asking whether there was a mistake on the sign, and if not, why the “OF” was missing from the name. Brent replied promptly, saying that Quintain had submitted the naming application in 2015, and that all proposed names are subject to consultation with the emergency services (they sent me a copy of the London Fire Brigade guidelines on street names) before being approved. 

It was a couple of months before I received a full response from Quintain, but when I did it was clear that they had asked for the street to be called “Palace of Arts Way”. Brent had declined to accept that name, and they thought this was because “OF” was not permitted as a word in street names. Having checked the L.F.B. guidelines, there is no mention of “OF”, although it does say that new street names should not begin with “The”. It appears that the reason the name was shortened may be because the guidelines suggest that names of more than three syllables (before the suffix “Road”, “Street” or “Way” etc.) should be avoided.

Guidelines should be respected, but they are not strict rules. No doubt I am biased over this particular name, but surely common sense and respect for the heritage of Wembley Park should allow an extra, two-letter, syllable in this case? Just speak the names out loud. “Palace of Arts Way” has a soft flow to it, and would take no longer to say in a 999 call than “Palace Arts Way”, which has a hard sound between the first two words that forces you to take a short break in speaking them.

Why all this fuss over a little word? What is special about the Palace of Arts which means that it should be remembered in a street name? Let me share at bit more Wembley history with you.

As with much of Wembley Park’s story, it involves the British Empire Exhibition, which was held in 1924 and 1925. Like its larger neighbours, the Palaces of Industry and Engineering, the Palace of Arts (seen here in a postcard from the time) was one of the big reinforced concrete buildings showing off the best that Britain had to offer.

Palace of Arts 1924 postcard

A full range of arts and crafts were on show in the building’s many galleries, including paintings by leading British artists from the 18^th century onwards, and furniture in room settings from the same period up to the 1920’s. There was a sculpture gallery, and rooms displaying works by artists from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Burma. Other exhibits showed the development of architecture, pottery, paper-making, printing and bookbinding. One room sold works by current artists and craftspeople, with nothing costing more than half a guinea (now 52.5 pence, but worth rather more then), showing that art could be affordable to the general public.

One of the main attractions was Queen Mary’s Dolls House, which visitors had to pay an extra 6d (2.5 pence) to see - more than 1.6 million did so in 1924, with all the money going to charities nominated by the Queen. The project to make this was begun in 1921, with the 8ft 6in x 5ft x 5ft high mansion designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Hundreds of companies donated 1/12^th scale working models of their products (including piano-makers Broadwoods, who had a works in Kingsbury at the time). Leading artists created miniature paintings to decorate the rooms, and top authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling hand-wrote short stories and poems in tiny books for the dolls house’s library.

Packing up Queen Mary's doll house 1920's

After the Exhibition, the Dolls House was moved to Windsor Castle (where it can be seen today), with money from visitors to see it still going to charity. Although some of the Exhibition’s buildings were demolished after it ended, the Palace of Arts survived. It was used mainly as storage space for Wembley Stadium, and especially for the Empire Pool / Wembley Arena after that was built across the road in 1934 (you need somewhere to put the sections of the banked timber track, that you use for your annual six-day cycle race, for the other 359 days!).

Palace of Arts as BBC Broadcasting Centre for 1948 Olympics

 The building got a new lease of life in 1948, when the facilities at Wembley were used to host the Olympic Games. The BBC took over the building to provide the broadcasting centre for radio presenters and journalists from around the world who came to cover the Games. It continued to be used as the main base for the BBC’s outside broadcast unit until the Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush opened in the 1960’s. After that, the ageing structure began to fall into disrepair and, although it was a “listed building”, permission was given to demolish it in the early 2000’s. 

Palace of Arts awaiting demolition 2002

Basilica, Palace of Arts, November 2004

For a number of years the site remained derelict, and many local residents will remember the last, forlorn surviving part of the “Palace” alongside Empire Way. The Basilica had been a wing of the original building devoted to religious art. Before this part of the building was finally demolished, several beautiful mosaics were carefully removed, and one of these can now be seen in Brent Museum.

Cedar House, Emerald Gardens, on site of Palace of Arts

Quintain finally got round to developing this area of their Wembley Park estate around 2013. The blocks of apartments on the site are now called Emerald Gardens, fronting onto Engineers Way opposite the Arena. I admit that “Palace of Engineering Way” would have been too much of a mouthful, but I still think the little road along the back of Emerald Gardens should have been called “Palace OF Arts Way”.

Philip Grant