Man of Affairs and Lover of Games
Lord Desborough
“Always one thinks of Lord Desborough in connection with mountain peaks, sounding seas, wild deserts, winding country roads, smooth-shaven cricket greens, and the tree-shaded reaches of the river. He is a sportsman of the open air, the ideal Englishman – a man of affairs, a lover of games. The nation is fortunate in such a citizen.” – Fry’s Magazine, July 1906.
William Henry Grenfell, later Lord Desborough, was a distinguished British amateur sportsman, public figure and adventurer. He was born in London in 1855. He was the eldest son of Charles William Grenfell MP and Georgiana Caroline Lascelles. A very influential and popular figure in his time, he is now perhaps better known as the father of the war poet Julian Grenfell.
A man of great natural authority and practical good sense, he was widely respected for his sporting achievements and for his many contributions to public life. He was a man who could always “get things done”, and without his drive and organisational skills the London Games would never have opened on time.
Physically, he was a tall man, more than six foot, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. His photographs show he had a rather hard and forbidding look about him but, it was said, there was always “a pleasant gleam in his eyes, and a smile is never far from his lips” (Fry’s Magazine). He had a quick sense of humour and was a modest, friendly and generous man. After the London marathon, he sent flowers to Pietri wishing him a speedy recovery from his ordeal, and he personally paid for the gold medals of the American shooting team to be replaced after they had been stolen.
Willy Grenfell, as he was known, attended Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1879. He quickly showed outstanding sporting ability.
He represented Harrow at cricket, being awarded the school bowling and catching prizes, and won the school mile in 4 min 37 sec, a time which stood as a school record for more than sixty years. At Oxford he represented the university in rowing, fencing and athletics. Whilst at Oxford he successfully climbed the Matterhorn by three different routes.
He was a prodigious rower. He rowed for Oxford against Cambridge in the classic boat race in 1877 which resulted in a dead heat, and in the 1878 crew which won by ten lengths. He was elected President of the Oxford University Boat Club. After leaving the university he won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley in 1881. Later, he won the Thames punting championships for three successive years (1888–90). He stroked an eight in a boat from Dover to Calais in 1885, taking great care to ensure that each crew member had a jam pot to bail out water. In 1889 he sculled with two others from Oxford to Putney in twenty-two hours, a distance of more than one hundred miles, overcoming blisters and violent muscular contractions.
A strong swimmer, Desborough tested himself by swimming across the pool at the foot of the Niagara Falls in 1884, and then again in 1888, this time in a snowstorm. It was said that he repeated the feat to prove to a distinguished, but sceptical, American lawyer that he had in fact done it the first time. At one point in the swim he found himself being pulled by the backwash dangerously close to the falls which he saw above his head. But he struck out for the middle and finally reached the Canadian side. Even he admitted later that “I really did think something might go wrong” (Fry’s Magazine).
Asked later by a friend if his wife was proud of him, he replied, “No, not at all! She pretended to be terribly angry with me, and demanded to know why I had tried to make her a widow!” (Fry’s Magazine). For many years he was president of the Royal Life Saving Society, and as president of the Thames Conservancy Board – a post he held for thirty-two years – he arranged for all the river lock-keepers to be trained to save and resuscitate people in difficulty.
He was a very keen horseman, hunter and fisherman. As master of the draghounds at Oxford he kept his own harriers at his home, Taplow Court. Whilst hunting in the Rockies in 1888 he became lost for two days. Unperturbed, in the evenings he read the entire works of Milton by the light of a candle on a stick. He hunted tigers and elephants in India and at one time had to flee for his life when chased by a mad elephant. In the space of three weeks he caught one hundred tarpon in Florida in 1899, the largest weighing one hundred and eighty-two pound. During 1916, he made a strong contribution to the Venison Committee which had been established to overcome wartime food shortages, when he stalked and shot eighty stags.
As a fencer, he won the Foils at Harrow and Oxford. He represented England in four international competitions, including the Athens Games of 1906, where, though fifty years old and weighing fourteen stones, in the words of his team captain, “he fought like a Trojan”. He was the founding president of the Amateur Fencing Association.
At various other times, Lord Desborough was president of the Amateur Athletic Association, as well as president of the Lawn Tennis Association and the Marylebone Cricket Club, and a founding member of the Queen’s Tennis Club.
Given his family background, Willy Grenfell was always likely to play a prominent part in public life. On leaving Oxford he was immediately invited to stand as Liberal candidate at Salisbury and was elected to parliament in 1880. During his political career he served as private secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, but later left the Liberal Party to become a Conservative in protest over the Home Rule for Ireland bill. In 1905 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Desborough of Taplow.
Although Desborough did not reach high political office, and declined for family reasons the offer in 1921 of the Governor-Generalship of Canada, he was an extremely hard-working public servant. He was said at one time to be serving on no fewer than one hundred and fifteen committees! He filled almost all the important offices open to him in local government and local justice in the counties of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. The number of important public appointments he held and their variety is very impressive. He had also been president of the London Chamber of Commerce, the British Imperial Chamber of Commerce, as well as chairing the Home Office Committee on Police of England, Scotland and Wales.
During the First World War he was very active as the president of the Central Association of Volunteer Training Corps in which at time one or another more than a million men served, most of whom were either too old for military service or in protected occupations. The Corps played an important part in releasing trained troops for active service, as well as helping to bring in the harvest and working in dockyards and munitions factories.
In 1906 Lord Desborough returned from the Athenian Games, in which he had been a member of the British fencing team, with the invitation that Britain should take over the organisation of the 1908 Games. He consulted King Edward VII and the big sporting associations, and on November 19th 1906, a letter was despatched to the International Olympic Committee formally accepting that London should became the host city for the IV Olympiad.
When the members of the newly formed British Olympic Council received the news that Britain was to host the 1908 Games, they were confident that in Desborough they had the man to lead the formidable task ahead. His drive and organisational talents, and of course his sporting achievements, made him the ideal man to prepare the country for the Olympiad. He possessed, said one council member, “the skill of a D’Artagnan, the strength of a Porthos, the heart of an Athos, and the body of an Englishman” (The News).
Just as important too was the fact that Desborough had the personality that the Council recognised would be important to the success of the Games. He was courteous, well-connected and popular. He was unpretentious. As the magazine The Empire said, he was “Utterly devoid of arrogance, or side, which frequently causes Englishmen to be detested by the foreigner”. To navigate around the elaborate social structure of the age, someone was needed who could be trusted to win the support and confidence, not only of the host of visiting royalty and dignitaries, but all classes of people in the country.
A man, as one council member put it, who would guarantee that, “every humble subject of this country who had a shilling left in his pocket on Saturday, or any day of the week, might be able to spend that shilling with the certain knowledge that he would get his money’s worth of true sport” (Official Report). They found such a man in Willy Desborough.
Appointed as the president of the Olympic organising committee, Desborough, now fifty-one, had less than two years to organise the London Games. From the start, he was personally involved in all aspects of the Games. For him, they were in effect “the actualisation of a dream”.
Great Britain was acknowledged to be the cradle of athletic sports, and Desborough believed that it was absolutely essential that the Olympics were carried out in a manner worthy of a great athletic nation. In the work ahead, he was fortunate to have the services alongside him of the indefatigable council secretary, the Rev Courcy Laffan, who shared his energy and enthusiasm for the Olympics.
Desborough was described by Throne magazine in 1908 as “the real hero of the Olympiad”. He lifted the first girder of the new White City stadium into place himself. He made innumerable speeches, hosted banquets and entertained at Taplow Court. He dealt untiringly and with good humour with countless meetings, some of which on occasions, it was said, lasted a week without a break! He was the man who persuaded Lord Northcliffe to launch the public campaign that saved the finances of the Games. His wife, Lady Desborough, acted as hostess at official functions on many occasions, and together with the Queen was one of those who distributed medals at the closing ceremony.
He was also deeply committed to the wider mission of the Olympic movement. In a later review of the Games, he reflected eloquently about the expression of good fellowship between Greek and Greek which had characterised the original Olympic Games, and which enabled the Hellenic race to put aside their internal bickering and conflicts and co-operate peacefully. He believed the same ideals could be applied to the modern world from international athletics.
The two thousand young men and women from various countries who had taken part in the London Games were, he wrote, “inspired by the same ideals of physical excellence and committed with each other in friendly rivalry. These young men are also representatives of the generation into whose hands the destinies of most of the world are passing at the moment, and with them the hopes of international peace (Official Report).
Fine words, but as we have seen the Americans at the time did not, unfortunately, see it quite like that. Privately, Lord Desborough was upset by the controversies that surrounded the Games, but he refused to indulge in public recriminations, and he responded to criticisms carefully and with dignity. He emerged from the Games with his reputation nationally and internationally unharmed, and, with Laffan, is truly one of the two great pillars on which the British Olympic movement has been built.
In 1887, Lord Desborough had married Ethel Anne Fane. Together they made Taplow Court on the banks of the Thames a highly fashionable society venue. Ettie Grenfell was a brilliant hostess and a leading member of the politically minded group of intellectuals known as The Souls. They had five much-loved children, three boys and two girls. The two eldest sons were killed in action in 1915 and the third son died in 1926 as the result of a motor car accident. The death of his sons affected Lord Desborough deeply and he gradually withdrew from public life. But he never lost his interest in sporting matters and loved to talk about them. In the 1930s the writer Lytton Strachey described him as still “a huge rock of an athlete”.
Lord Desborough died in 1945 in his ninetieth year. Early reports of his death had been grossly exaggerated. There are reports he was infuriated one day in 1920 to find his obituary that had been printed in The Times, rather than that of his near namesake Lord Bessborough who had just died. He promptly called the editor. “Look here,” he cried, “You’ve published my obituary this morning!” “I’m sorry,” the editor is alleged to have replied, “but from where are you speaking, my Lord?”