The 1948 Olympic Games were the first of the postwar era. Britain was still suffering the after effects of the war. Rationing was in operation. Bomb sites remained throughout London and other major cities. Yet London took on the Games and staged them very successfully.
There was no election of London as the chosen venue. The idea had first been raised in 1937 by Lord Burghley that London should hold the Games in 1944. The International Olympic Committee decided without any vote that London should have the 1948 Games.
?The Games cost three quarters of a million pounds - about
The Independent
... the fascination of this book lies equally in the way it illumines the unknown or half-forgotten. ... richly readable ...
unputdownable
the unputdownable How London Rescued the Games by the venerable sporting historian Bob Phillips. It is dense in rewarding detail, never more so than in this single, short chapter headed 'The Cost and the Profit', the organising committee's closing budget report, published in 1951.
invaluable resource for future scholars
Phillips is a veteran athletics commentator and writer, and demonstrates his deep knowledge of track and field. He has also put in the hours in the newspaper libraries, and his meticulous clerking amounts to a 360-degree view of the Games which will be an invaluable resource for future scholars. He is particularly good on the machinations that led to the selection of a tall, blond and not particularly gifted athlete named John Mark to carry the Olympic torch around Wembley Stadium and light the flame, suggesting - with justification - that the public would have much preferred the weedy but infinitely more talented Sydney Wooderson.
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