William Penny Brookes and his Olympian Games

This thesis investigates the life of Victorian doctor, William Penny Brookes, the genesis of his Olympian Games, and their significance in sporting history. In 1850, Brookes set up Wenlock Olympian Class, later Society, the first formally constituted athletics club outside educational and military organisations, and was the first person to lead a committee of lower-class men in its management. Post-ancient Olympics the club’s Wenlock Olympian Games was the first known muliti-event meeting instituted for competitions in serious sports. Of significance to Brookes, the word ‘Olympian’ also embraced contests in intellect and industry, fine arts, and military disciplines. The study interrogates the evolution of Brookes’s several concepts into national Olympianism during the second half of the nineteenth century, and considers the importance he attached to physical education. A biographical methodology underpins the examination, and draws on the archive of primary evidence held by Wenlock Olympian Society, in particular Minute Books 1 and 2. These record the vast majority of his public addresses given over a period of forty five years and consequently, have enabled his spoken words to be preserved in print. Sporting scholarship largely overlooks Brookes’s work as, up until recently, Wenlock Olympian Society’s archive was inaccessible for reasons detailed in this study. Additionally, Pierre de Coubertin, credited as the originator of the open international Olympic Games, not only failed to acknowledge the old doctor’s contribution to their establishment, but promulgated his own reimagined version of Olympic history. The evidence questioned in this thesis demonstrates that Brookes was a visionary whose ideas were the catalyst used for development by others, but rarely acknowledged. Specifically, he was the first person to conceive the idea of an ancient Olympic Games revived as an open international meeting, and sought to promote the idea for others such as Coubertin, to bring to fruition

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wolverhampton

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Cromarty, Helen Clare

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Forbes, Alison

• William Penny Brookes
• olympian
• Wenlock
• sport
• arts
• olympic
• Pierre de Coubertin
• Shropshire
• Victorian
• working-class

Licence

• https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstreams/369af2d5-b376-4c34-9fe7-44151a3e3b2a/download