Author Archives: Martin Polley

About Martin Polley

Sports historian, academic, and heritage enthusiast.

Triumphs, Heroines, and Heroes

I spent yesterday morning in a radio studio in Clerkenwell. This is not a normal way for me to spend a Thursday, but I was invited in to work on a fascinating project with Honda as part of their preparation for the Goodwood Festival of Speed, which starts next week. Honda had commissioned a poll of 2,043 adults from around the UK to find out about people’s favourite sporting moment, and the sportswomen and men who they see as ‘unbeatable’. There were a few qualifications – the sporting moments had to be British triumphs, while the heroines and heroes could be from anywhere. The poll led to the compilation of three Top 10 lists, and I was asked to front the publication of these lists through a series of radio interviews. I did 13 in all, including many BBC regional channels and a number of commercial stations. It felt a bit groundhog day after a while, as some of the interviewers inevitably asked similar questions, but it was a fascinating process, and it gave me the chance to reflect on the kind of qualities that people want in their sporting moments and icons.

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The ball from the 1966 World Cup Final, now in the National Football Museum in Manchester

Topping the list of Greatest British Sport Triumphs of Our Time was, inevitably, the England men’s football team winning the World Cup with their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966. This felt a little like when people compile lists of best albums or best movies of all time, and Sgt Pepper and The Godfather come out on top. I love both, but it sometimes feels like they are the starting point and then people go on from there. With 1966, though, there is an added dimension – after all, both The Beatles and Francis Ford Coppola made other things after those triumphs. For me, the appeal of 1966 resides not just in a fantastic match with all the drama you could want, but also in the way that it stands alone as the only major silverware that the men’s team has ever won. I was also intrigued by how this triumph still resonates for people lime me – anyone under 50, in fact – who have no personal memory of it, and have come to it only at second hand or through Baddiel and Skinner’s ‘thirty years of hurt’.

Beyond that, it was fascinating to see that the majority of the moments in the Top 10 were individual or pairs events rather than team events. England’s victory in the 2003 men’s Rugby Union World Cup came in at No. 8, and the epic Ian Botham Ashes series of 1981 was one place behind it, but the rest were not team events. Andy Murray’s 2013 Wimbledon win went straight in at No. 2, followed by Torvill and Dean’s Bolero routine at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, Roger Bannister’s sub-four minute mile from 1954, and then key triumphs for Steve Redgrave, Bradley Wiggins, and Mo Farah. Intriguingly, Francis Chichester’s 1966 solo circumnavigation of the world was at No. 10, an impressive feat that I for one had assumed many people had forgotten about.

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Martina Navratilova, winner of 18 Grand Slam titles

When it came to the heroines and heroes, lawn tennis legend Martina Navratilova and boxer Muhammad Ali topped the respective lists. The people who were polled clearly respected longevity and consistency in their sporting icons, as both of these athletes were at the top of their game for many years. It was refreshing to see only two footballers in the men’s list – Pele at No. 3 and George best at No. 7 – and also good to see aesthetic sports being valued, with Top 10 finishes for skater Jayne Torvill, and Olympic gymnasts Olga Korbut and Nadia Comeneci. Athletics was represented by Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, Roger Bannister, Paula Radcliffe, and Kelly Holmes, and many other household names, from Ayrton Senna to Steffi Graf, made good showings.

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The Greatest – Muhammad Ali

Of course, this kind of list making is essentially a bit of fun. Everyone will have their own favourite that gets missed, and everyone will have some alternative to the Top 10. The responses are incredibly relative, so sports that are huge in some areas (such as rugby league) got averaged out of the national picture – looking at this list, you would not know that Great Britain have won the men’s rugby league world cup three times, in 1954, 1960, and 1972). I was surprised to see no golfers in there, or anyone form the world of horse-racing, and disappointed (but maybe not surprised) that the 2012 Paralympics had not made a big enough impression on popular memory to be recalled. It is also obvious, but probably no great shock, that victorious England women’s teams seem to have had their triumphs forgotten. England women won the rugby union World Cup in 1994, and the England team won the women’s cricket World Cup in 2009, but they don’t get a mention. Indeed, it is perhaps ironic that as I write, the mainstream media is full of incriminations and navel gazing over one England team losing 2-1 to Uruguay in one World Cup, while paying virtually no attention to the other England team beating Ukraine 2-1 on the same night in their bid for 2015 World Cup qualification. No prizes for guessing which of these teams was made up of men, and which of women.

Overall, the lists showed an interesting mix of long and short-term moments, and icons from the past and the present. They suggest that the respondents value the Olympic Games, care about individual sports as much as team games, and hold such characteristics as longevity, dedication, character, and style in high esteem.

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London’s Olympic Pools: Lanes and Legacies

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Before my swim at the Aquatics Centre

During the recent school holiday, I went swimming with my 13 year old son. Not such a big deal  – except this time we went to the Olympic pool at the London Aquatics Centre. It was only my second time in a 50 metre pool – and as the first one was a splash around in the 1970 Commonwealth Games pool in Edinburgh when I was in the city on a family holiday in the early 1970s, before I has learnt to swim, it doesn’t really count. For my son, it was a first. We were both impressed by the whole experience – the size, the scale, the way the light fills the space now that the temporary seats have gone, the stunning curves of the Zaha Hadid‘s design, as well as the sense of distance that comes with a 50 metre pool for people like us who are used to only 25 metres. As well as the swim, I was most impressed with the way in which the Centre is being managed for its community. With prices that match those at other pools in the area, and with public access to the competition pool and the training pool, this is a great example of Olympic legacy at work. I remain to be convinced about the plan to turn the Olympic Stadium into a football ground, but my feeling is that they have got it spot on with the pool. They even serve hot Bovril in the cafe.

Swimming at the London 2012 site has led me to reflect on the aquatics sites for London’s previous Olympic and Olympian Games, and how far these sites added to the capital’s swimscape.

The River Thames at Teddington Lock

The River Thames at Teddington Lock

If we go back to the pre-Coubertin period, the planners of the National Olympian Festival of 1866 held their swimming events in the River Thames. They chose Teddington, where the lock, built in 1811, marks the end of the river’s tidal reach. Here, on a rainy and windy July evening, swimmers competed for the first medals of these first games to be staged by the National Olympian Association. With a moored barge marking the start, swimmers from London and beyond took part in three races – the quarter mile, the half mile, and the mile. Nothing was purpose built for this Olympian festival – the athletics took place the next day in the park at Crystal Palace, and the gymnastics and ‘antagonistic sports’ were at the German Gymnasium in Kings Cross. London’s first Olympian swimming event was thus a fairly modest affair, making use of a natural space where plenty of people regularly swam, and it is impossible to see any kind of impact on London’s swimming spaces.

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The opening ceremony of the 1908 Olympic Games, with the swimming pool in the background

In 1908, when London first hosted the International Olympic Committee’s Olympic Games, the British Olympic Association commissioned the world’s first purpose-built Olympic Stadium in the west London suburb of Shepherd’s Bush as part of the Franco-British Exhibition. The planners wanted to fit as many sports into the Stadium as possible, and the aquatic sports of swimming, diving, and water polo were part of this vision. Accordingly, engineer Paul Webster built an open air pool into the infield of the Great Stadium. Despite the running tracks and the cycling track being built to imperial distances, the pool was metric, a whopping 100 metres long, and a 10 metre diving tower that could be lowered under the water when the pool was being used for swimming and water polo. The pool – sometimes referred to as the swimming tank – was well placed for the crowds, but was clearly far from ideal for the swimmers. There was no heating and no filtration system, and the water was made filthy by some athletes jumping in to cool off, muddy legs and all, after their races. After the Olympics, the pool was used for various things, including an angling competition, and it served as an unintentional water obstacle for the Olympic rugby union, hockey, football, and lacrosse  competitions that took place on the in-field in October. However, with public baths al over London by this time, many with the all-weather advantage of being indoors and the water quality advantage of filtering, there was no significant demand for the pool. It was soon drained and filled in: and while the re-named White City Stadium had a long sporting afterlife when the Olympics had finished, featuring athletics, speedway, greyhound racing, football, and more, there was no to be no aquatic legacy of the 1908 Olympics.

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Empire Pool, Wembley

When the Olympics returned to London in 1948, there was no budget for significant new building, and the Games had to fit into the capital’s existing venues. With Wembley chosen as the hub of the Games, the planners were working around the presence of an excellent aquatics site. The Empire Pool had been built by Owen Williams for the 1934 British Empire Games, the second iteration of the series that has since evolved into the Commonwealth Games. It was already set up for up to 7,000 spectators, and positioned just yards from the Empire Stadium, it was the perfect fit. At the 1948 Olympics, not only did it host the swimming and diving, and the final stages of the water polo, it also did service as a boxing venue, with a ring erected on scaffold over the water – the perfect example of make do and mend that characterised these Olympics. However, just as the 1908 pool so very little post-Olympic swimming action. As Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis show in their Great Lengths, the pool had been a massive hit after the 1934 Empire Games, attracting huge crowds. It had also doubled up as a venue for ice skating and ice hockey in winter, with a rink being created on boarding placed over the pool. But it had closed during the War and it was only re-opened for the Olympics. The building, re-branded Wembley Arena, is still going strong, but its days as a swimming pool are long gone.

And so to 2012. These earlier Olympics took place in the years PL (pre-Legacy), when Olympics did not have to have plans for the city’s future built into them. They made no long-term impact on where Londoners swam. Now that we are in the legacy phase of 2012, it is useful to compare the Aquatics Centre with the earlier sites of Teddington Lock, White City, and the Empire Pool, and to see how making a community pool with the capacity for international competition was a great part of the project.

See you in the medium-paced lane sometime soon.

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Making Sport History: new book

Routledge have just brought out a new book in their series Routledge Research in Sports History. Edited by Pascal Delheye, it’s called Making Sport History: disciplines, identities and the historiography of sport. The collection brings together essays on different aspects of researching and teaching sports history, with authors from North America, Australasia, and Europe all contributing. My chapter, ‘History and Sport Studies: Some Methodological Reflections on Undergraduate Teaching’, is a personal reflection on the challenges and opportunities of teaching history on a Sport Studies degree course, where most of the students chose to give up History while still at school.

The book is now available from Routledge.

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Sport and Leisure history workshop

On Saturday 14 June, the University of Winchester will be hosting the Summer Workshop for the South of England Sport & Leisure History Network, part of the British Society of Sports History (BSSH). The event will bring together scholars who are working on a variety of aspects of sport and leisure history, in a friendly and informal atmosphere. The papers will be arranged around three themes: Leisure in Wartime; Leisure, Sex & Sexuality; and Leisure and National Identity. The full programme is as follows:

Rafaelle Nicholson (Queen Mary University of London), ‘Even the World of Sport Suffered a Feminine Invasion’: Women’s Sport in Second World War Britain

Simon Young (University of Winchester), The Moscow Olympics and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1975–1980

Michael John Law (University of Westminster), Sex in the Car Park: The Impact of Changed Mobilities on Sexual Behaviour in the Interwar Home Counties

Leo Bird (University of Sheffield), Innuendo and Double-Entendre in Popular British Comedy, 1945–1960: Moral Ambiguity in Post-War Britain

Rory Magrath (Southampton Solent University/University of Winchester), The Inclusive Masculinities of Premier League Academy Footballers

Geoffrey Levett (Birkbeck, University of London), George Newnes and Pierre Lafitte: New Leisure Journalism and National Identity in 1900s Britain and France

Dion Georgiou (Queen Mary University of London), Remembering ‘Cool Britannia’: National Identity, Race and Nostalgia on Britpop’s ‘20th Anniversary’

I’ll be rounding things off with the keynote on Football Diplomacy. The event is free (though lunch is not provided), and will run from 9.30-5.00. If you would like to attend, please email  bsshsouthcentral@gmail.com by Wednesday, 11 June 2014.

Follow @BSSHSouth on Twitter.

 

 

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In The Loop

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ARP women knitting, 1940

Over the last few years, I’ve been involved with In The Loop, a fascinating project run by Winchester School of Art on the history, politics, and practice of knitting. I first got involved when I gave a paper on sports-related knitting patterns at their inaugural conference in 2008, which ended up being picked up by other conference organisers – since then, I’ve given keynotes on this rather unlikely subject at conferences in Bolton, Brighton, Southampton, and Malmo, and written it up for an American craft magazine. Then, in 2012, I spoke at In The Loop 3 on knitting and the Olympic Games, a paper which I’ve also taken to the sources with a paper called ‘Sweaters and the Services’. I’ll be touching on the portrayal of knitting in wartime propaganda, on the wartime knitting boom, and on the representations of service men and women in patterns of the First and Second World Wars.AGM of the Knitting and Crochet Guild, and which forms the basis of my new article in a knitting-themed issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, out in March 2014. For In the Loop 2014, which takes place at Southampton and Winchester on 2-3 April, I’m moving away from sport but keeping a focus on knitting patterns as historical 

Click here for full details of In The Loop, and for the programme for the study days. Click here for details of the Knitting Reference Library at Winchester School of Art. You can also follow In Loop on @intheloop3.

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London 1908: the First Winter Olympic Programme

This weekend, winter sports fans will have their eyes glued on Sochi in Russia, where the 22nd Winter Olympics are due to begin. The Winter version of the Olympic franchise do not have the same global appeal as their Summer counterparts, as the twin constraints of geography and costs keep  many nations out: compared to the 204 teams that competed at London 2012, the most recent Summer Olympics, the last Winter Olympics in Vancouver attracted 82 nations. Still, the Winter Olympics have grown in appeal and scope over the eighty years of their official history, and they provide spectacle and drama in equal measure on the ice and on the slopes. The fact that this year’s Olympics have already attracted so much controversy, due to Russia’s human rights record, the Games’ environmental impact, and the country’s draconian treatment of homosexuals, is a sign of how big the Winter Games getting – they are now (rightly) as political contested as the Summer Olympics.

I’ve written about the Sochi LGBT debate for the Free Word Centre, although I am fascinated to see how it pans out now that the Games are on us and many people have made their sentiments clear: Barrack Obama’s decision to send Billie Jean King as one of his representatives is my favourite piece of provocation so far. What I want to do here is to think more historically about the prehistory of the Winter Olympics, particularly the series of sports that were held as part of the 1908 London Olympics under the name of the Olympic Winter Games of the Olympic Winter Programme.

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Poster for the 1924 Winter Sports at Chamonix

The official version has Chamonix 1924 as the first Winter Olympics, although it is well to remember, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) themselves point out,  that this appellation was granted only retrospectively: at the time, these sports that attracted competitors from 16 nations to the French Alps were simply held in conjunction with that year’s Paris Olympics. The 1928 Games at St Moritz were really the first to be organised under IOC auspices – and, of course, it is only from this period that we should refer to the other Olympics as the Summer Olympics: it’s anachronistic to apply this term to any Olympics before 1924. But Chamonix was not the first time that Olympic organisers had experimented with winter sports. Ice hockey featured in the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp (Canada won, of course), as did figure skating, in which five nations competed across singles events for men and women and a mixed pairs event. But it is to London in 1908 that we really need to look for the start of this prehistory.

 

The 1908 Olympics started on 27 April, with the opening matches in the racquets tournament at Queen’s Club. Events were then spread across May and June, with the main two weeks of stadium-based events running at the Great Stadium in the Franco-British Exhibition grounds from 13-25 July. Sailing and motorboating took place in July and August, and then there was a break until 19 October. It was on this day that the Winter programme was launched. The idea had developed during the British Olympic Council’s planning for the Games. Their minutes of 20 December 1906, for example, record the discussion of ‘the possibility of holding Olympic Skating Competitions in the winter of 1907-08’, and the planning for what they soon referred to as the ‘Winter Sports’ and the ‘Winter Games’ carried on as the Games approached, with the dates being set at the Council’s meeting on 15 November 1907: ‘The Winter Games were definitely appointed to commence on Monday, October 19, 1908’, and a Winter Games Committee was subsequently set up to plan the events. Figure and sped skating were both discussed, with the former kept and the latter dropped, and the Committee decided to hold the team sports played in Britain in winter as part of this experimental programme. Football, hockey, lacrosse, and rugby thus found themselves as part of the first Winter Games.

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Great Britain’s football team at the 1908 Olympic Games

The Winter Programme started at the Stadium on 19 October, as planned, with Denmark beating France B 9-0 in the football. Over the next two weeks, the team sports all took place. Great Britain won the football, beating Denmark 2-0 in the final watched by just 8,000 people. The hockey was also won by Great Britain, though this was a tournament in which England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales entered separate teams, all under the name of Great Britain, with France and Germany making up the numbers. The final saw England beat Ireland 8-1 in front of 5,000 people. The lacrosse tournament had an even lower profile: with only two teams involved, Canada and Great Britain, there was only one match, with Canada taking gold medal after a 14-10 victory. The rugby was similarly low-key, a two-team tournament between the touring Australian side and the British county champions, Cornwall, although the record books have to show this as Great Britain. Australia won 32-3. As well as these team sports, the Winter Programme involved boxing, a one-day tournament for five weight classes at the Northampton Institute in Clerkenwell.

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Madge and Edgar Syers

It is what happened at Prince’s Skating Club, Knightsbridge, however, that makes this Winter Programme of the 1908 Olympics so significant. For here, on 28 and 29 October, the figure skating took place, the first time in Olympic history that an ice-based sport had featured. Prince’s Club was a private members establishment which had been running since 1896. For the Olympics, it hosted four competitions: Individual events for Gentlemen and Ladies; a Special Figures event for Gentlemen; and Pairs Skating. The last of these was pioneering, not just for it being an ice-based sport, but as the first time that the Olympics had included a mixed-sex aesthetic sport. Inevitably, the competition was rather small: this was an expensive niche sport at the time, and only 21 competitors from 6 nations took part. However, this included leading figures in the sport, such as the Swede Ulrich Salchow (whose name we will hear a lot from Sochi as skaters attempt their double and triple Salchows), world champion every year  bar one between 1901 and 1911, and Madge Syers of Britain, whose entry in the 1902 men’s world championships had forced the International Skating Union to create a separate event for women. Over the two days of competition, the four gold medals went to Sweden, Russia, Germany, and Great Britain, Syers winning the Ladies’ event and also winning bronze with her husband Edgar in the Pairs. The skating events attracted a great deal of press attention, with pictorial features in many of the dailies and large technical coverage in The Field, and the Olympics certainly helped to popularise skating in Britain.

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Ulrich Salchow

It is impossible to claim that what happened in London in October 1908 was the first Winter Olympics. That phrase has no currency until the 1920s, when separate events, under the IOC’s auspices and featuring only alpine and ice-based sports, were first held. However, this Winter Programme was a crucial moment in Olympic history, not least for bringing ice into the equation. As historians, we should look back at this moment in the prehistory of Sochi 2014 for a reminder that the Olympics have always been experimental, and that the programme has never fossilised.

 

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Here Comes the Story of the Hurricane

(With apologies to Bob Dylan for the title)

Each year, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is updated to bring in famous and significant people who have recently died. This year’s intake to this essential reference work has recently been publicised in the press for its emphasis on what Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer called “rebels and mavericks”, including comedian Norman Wisdom, designer Alexander McQueen, and novelist Beryl Bainbridge. I’m delighted to have been involved in this process, as I’ve written the entry on the biggest sporting maverick amongst the new entrants, snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins (1949-2010).

Alex Higgins in 1968, at the start of his career

Alex Higgins in 1968, at the start of his career

Higgins was a fascinating person to write on, and a big change from most of my previous contributions to DNB, like athletes Jack London, William Applegarth, Donald Thompson, and Christopher Brasher. Only athletics promoter Andy Norman, a deeply controversial figure both inside and outside the sport, has provided such a challenge: how to represent a miniature biography in a balanced way without denigrating the achievements or glossing over the more difficult aspects of the subject’s personal life. As DNB editor Lawrence Goldman put it in his interview with Thorpe, “nobody would be kept out because they were disreputable”, and there were many aspects of Higgins’ life that fell into this category. His widely publicised drinking (before, during, and after  matches) and acknowledged cocaine use, his extra-marital affairs, his frequent rows with officials, journalists, and fellow players, and his violent outbursts that got him banned from the game all spring to mind. And he is a classic example of the importance of the controversial aspects of family lives that Goldman noted when he said  “Our job is to represent their marriages, their children and even their bastards”, especially as Higgins denied his paternity of one child. I’ve had to balance this with his achievements in winning the world title twice, and the immense popularity and goodwill that his inspired in his brief spell as the people’s champion. The pathos of his later years, when Higgins, in declining health, lived out his life in relative obscurity and died alone, adds another twist to the difficult life.

Alex Higgins in 2008, two years before his death

Alex Higgins in 2008, two years before his death

Like many academics, researchers, and readers, I value the DNB for the way in which it provides short lives and a way into the fuller biographies of thousands of famous and notable individuals. Its grouped lives, such as those of the 1930s Foreign Office Glamour Boys or the key figures in the Suffragette movement, are also models in collective biography. As a sports historian, I applaud the way in which the editors have broadened the Dictionary’s remit to ensure that key figures from all areas of popular culture are now included alongside the project’s more traditional concerns. Higgins, a figure who could attract television audiences of millions to watch his dynamic snooker, and who could command more column inches on the front pages of the papers than on the sports pages, deserves to be in there, along with the other “rebels and mavericks”.

 

Access: A brief extract from my piece on Higgins appears in The Guardian. The DNB is a subscription service, available here. Most university and public libraries in the UK subscribe to it – check with your institution.

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‘Inspire a Publication’: new chapter in Routledge Olympic Handbook

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Volume 2 of the Routledge Handbook of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is now out, edited by Vassil Girginov of Brunel University. It’s a fascinating project, with both volumes devoted to a diverse, wide-ranging, and critical discussion of the Games. Across the two volumes, themes include bidding, planning, legacy, celebrity, and protests, and the authors who have contributed include academics from a range of backgrounds. My chapter is called ‘Inspire a Publication: Books, Journals, and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games’, and is part of the section on Documenting the Games. Big thanks go to Vassil for his vision and hard work in managing this huge project.

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Apollo

ApolloTheatreStageDoorEvery year, my brother takes my children, my wife, and me to the theatre as a Christmas treat. It’s a lovely tradition that gives us all an annual highlight, as we experience the best of the West End as a family. This year, we all chose The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s famous novel about a boy with learning difficulties making sense of his world. We had all read the book, and were keen to see the acclaimed stage version. After meeting for dinner, we made our way through China Town in heavy rain, and got to the Apollo Theatre shortly before the curtain. Our seats in the dress circle gave us a good view of the stage, and gave us a great sense of the ornate Edwardian styling that still defines this beautiful theatre. Seeing such a modern play, with its set based on graph paper, its discordant sound effects, and its contemporary story of autism, in this heritage surrounding was a great reminder of the continuities and changes that characterise so much leisure and popular culture: the settings remain the same while the stories and the people change.

You probably know what happened next. Forty minutes into the play, I heard screaming and shouting from the upper circle, and saw the actors run to the back of the stage. It felt like part of the play, with its deliberately confusing and discordant effects. That feeling went within a second, as large chunks of debris fell past our seats in the dress circle and on to the people in the stalls, and as we were all enveloped in a cloud of black dust, a century’s worth of particles from the roof void released onto an unsuspecting crowd. The fabric of the theatre coated us, and we had no option but to inhale it.

The news channels have been full of the story, and I don’t need to narrate it here. Key personal details will stay with me forever, though. The calm but precise way in which my family got together and got out of the auditorium, along with the rest of the crowd, with no traces of panic anywhere. The sheer confusion over what we had just witnessed, and the fear that there would be many serious casualties in the stalls, where the debris fell. Helping a girl, clearly in shock and with a small but messy cut on her head, to get down the stairs. With my youngest son in shock, being among the first into the foyer of the Geilgud Theatre, where the front of house staff immediately took charge with water, tea, and blankets, turning the room into a refuge and triage centre for dozens of the Apollo audience. Distributing water and tea to the walking wounded from the stalls as they filed in with their faces and clothes black with dust, and blood already drying on their faces. The calm and patient elderly Japanese man who sat quietly waiting for triage with his right hand at completely There was something surreal about these moments, as the elegant surroundings of a West End foyer was quickly transformed into a makeshift centre for the injured, the shocked, and the confused. There was plenty of humour, too – the now clichéd joke about the show being so good that it brought the house down was doing the rounds in minutes, while others reached for the old chestnut of ‘But what did you think of the play, Mrs Lincoln?’ My top award for Blitz spirit goes to the man with the head wound who asked if I could pop some Scotch into the glass of water I was offering him. And over it all, the amazing work being done by the emergency services – there is nothing like a major incident to make you appreciate how staggeringly brilliant and selfless these people are.

I’m not the person to write the history of this event in which, miraculously, no-one was killed. All I can do is think about the shock of seeing an Edwardian theatre in the heart of London’s West End being turned into a disaster zone in seconds, and how the people of that historic entertainment community come together to deal with disaster.

 

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New book: Women, Sport and Modernity by Fiona Skillen

I’m delighted to see Fiona Skillen‘s first book has come out – Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain. It’s part of the new series of sports history monographs that Peter Lang are publishing in the series Sport, History and Culture, where it joins Dave Day’s Professional, Amateurs and Performance. The series is mainly dedicated to bringing expanded versions of excellent PhD theses to the wider audiences that they deserve, and it’s great to see Fiona’s work in this setting.

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