that would overturn the rules by which we wage wars, run races and live our lives.
As the twentieth century was born, the British were at war with the Boers in South Africa. The theatre of that war was visited by those great chroniclers of Empire and chivalry, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. It brought fame to Robert Baden-Powell and sowed the seeds of the Boy Scout ethos that was to influence generations, who would die in far fiercer conflicts to come. And it set the stage for the young Winston Churchill, who witnessed the very rules of war mutate as he galloped through the century from horse to Spitfire.
The real spirit of the age was the way in which so many questioned the patterns of Old World thinking. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. A quarter of the world’s land mass, and a quarter of the world’s population, owed allegiance to the Union Jack. Occasional setbacks such as the British defeat by the guerrilla tactics of an amateur army of Dutch settlers in the Boer War could be taken in their stride, but other nations were confident of taking up the challenge to British supremacy. Increasingly, Germany posed as the new strong man of Europe, and across the Atlantic America was confident that she would soon outstrip Britain as the most powerful nation on earth.
Sport, like every other aspect of life in the new century, was in a state of revolutionary change; already the hard edge of professionalism was cutting into the character of games codified by the Victorians to help civilise the gentleman amateur. Spectators who could pay their monies at the turnstiles were becoming central to the progress and conduct of team sports, and winning became more important than taking part. The spoils of victory could make you rich, or turn you into that strange new twentieth-century beast – the celebrity.
In 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s dream of resurrecting the ancient Greek Olympics was realised. He had in mind conduct and rules for competitors that embraced fair play yet prepared them to be physically fit for the battlefields of the future. The objective of this French aristocrat was to promote a vision of sport uncorrupted by the real world. De Coubertin saw sport as pure, unsullied by professionalism, nationalism and the drive to win at all costs.
But these were never the values of the ancient Greek Olympics. Rather, they were the romantic and mythological values of the European middle classes, practised by the gentlemen amateurs who prided themselves on playing the game. Despite de Coubertin’s idealism, however, the nations of the world refused to play the game on the Olympic track or in the trenches.
On the very eve of those 1908 Games, world leaders met at The Hague to lay down the laws of war. They thought they could civilise war, come to terms with the industrialisation of war machines – which now included weapons of mass destruction, bombs, balloons, the aeroplane and poison gas – and prescribe codes of conduct for struggles yet to come. Also there at The Hague in May 1907, the International Olympic Committee was eager to take on board British proposals for the future conduct of the Olympic movement, and following the Games in 1908, the British sporting authorities, appalled by the rows and rivalries that had nearly wrecked the Olympics, commissioned a sixty-page report to defend what the British regarded as the laws of sport.
Conan Doyle, who was knighted for writing a history of the Boer War, was fiercely critical of the way the Boer had used dirty tricks in South Africa. He believed soldiers should stand and battle cleanly in a fair fight and scorned the part-time guerrilla or the invisible sniper.
At the Olympics, which he attended as a reporter for the Daily Mail, he was equally critical of those who tried to cheat or bully their way to victory. But cheating and bullying, particularly by what the British knew as ‘athletics’ and the Americans as ‘track and field’, was to be so fierce that the London Olympic Games of 1908 were to be remembered as ‘The Battle of Shepherd’s Bush’. The fallout from those Games was to haunt sport for one hundred years and give us the sporting archetypes recognised today.
These were never quaint nostalgic Games. Instead, they brutally foreshadowed the path Olympic sport was to take in the future. The most immediate legacy from 1908 came from the Marathon course that gave birth to the standard marathon distance now accepted worldwide. But the most enduring legacy came in the way sport was to be defined throughout the twentieth century.
That hoaxer who turned up in London in 1948 was an embodiment of the myths and mysteries that surround the 1908 Games. Here was a man trading on somebody else’s fame, somebody else’s legend. He knew that those Games were still alive in folk memory and, in victory or defeat, what lives on is greatness; we thirst for legends. The Games of 1908 were packed with legends and the hoaxer realised that in Dorando he had the perfect example of one money-spinning legend – the sporting celebrity.
Baron de Coubertin fought in vain to keep the Olympics free from professionalism, nationalism and winning at all costs, but these Games were ferociously competitive and soon descended into international uproar. Too many, it seemed, believed in the great fallacy that sport is first and last about winning. It never is – it’s about style and it’s about glory. Some of the athletes who lined up for the gun in 1908 realised that truth.
The winners and losers might have caught an echo of that sentiment in the words of the American sports writer and poet Grantland Rice, penned while the scars of the 1908 Olympic Games were still painful and raw:
When the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks – not that you won or lost –
But how you played the Game.
Wyndham Halswelle peeled off his shirt and twisted it between powerful hands until the sweat splashed dark patches like blood on the parched, dusty track. He smiled at the man screwing his eyes up at a watch.
‘I can win this, even here,’ he said. ‘About the only thing that can stop me is a bullet in the back – I can beat them all.’
‘You can,’ said the trooper, ‘but it’s not the Dutchmen you’ve got to worry about, it’s the men who line up alongside you.’
Wyndham Halswelle, young, strong and a soldier, knew all about winning; it had filled his life for as long as he could remember. He searched for the smell of it, the secret of it everywhere. He saw the prospect of winning on the flags of armies, in the stride of an athlete, in the courage of a statesman and in the physical perfection of a warrior.
Halswelle was born on 30 May 1882, at No. 4 Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, in the heart of the great British Empire. He was born into a city that seemed to rule the world, a city full of energy that could inspire great literature and a tumult of ideas. Here was the Westminster that laid down the laws that echoed around the world. But here too, just a few miles to the east, was Whitechapel, home of Jack the Ripper, where a man might tear your life and your dreams apart under the cover of darkness.
Halswelle’s father was an artist and a prosperous one. His mother, Helen, came from a traditional army background. She was fiercely proud of her grandfather, Nathaniel Gordon, a major general in the Indian Army, who carried his scars and his medals with pride.
There was much talk of military tradition, of Scotland and of his father, Keeley Halswelle, who earned his living as a watercolourist and had exhibited in London and Edinburgh. Keeley travelled frequently to Paris and Italy, looking for the light and for
