19 March 2024

By Chris Dodd

Chris Dodd on the several lives of Lord Desborough. 

The more I learn about William Henry Grenfell, Lord Desborough, the more I wonder why it has taken so many decades for someone to write his biography. When I was part of the curatorial team building collections and exhibits in the 1990s at the new River & Rowing Museum, the name Desborough surfaced often in several contexts pivotal to the museum’s interests, two of them being rowing and the River Thames. 

Sandy Nairne and Peter Williams’s book Titan of the Thames, which was published last month, follows the Harrow schoolboy born to an aristocratic family with its seat at Taplow Court, atop the wooded slopes overlooking the Thames towards Maidenhead. This neighbourhood of Boulter’s Lock and Brunel’s graceful railway bridge spanning the river nearby enjoyed a reputation for seediness sustained by hotels that welcomed officers from the Windsor garrison who had assignations.

Nairne and Williams have at last fulfilled what was perhaps Desborough’s only failure, putting his own life on paper. In fairness, he wrote copious how-to-row, how-to-punt and how-to-fence articles in magazines and books by other authors, while the range of subjects dear to his heart are gleaned from the bibliography and list of Parliamentary speeches and reports. Samples are: 

• Lost in the Rockies.
• Mr Gladstone and the Currency.
• The House of Lords and Socialism. 
• Address on Bimetallism.
• The Mediterranean Tunny. 
• The Real Yellow Peril. 
• Lord Kitchener As I Knew Him. 
• Ethics of Egg Collecting.
• Silver Money, The Case For Its Restoration.
• The Date Of Easter And Other Christian Festivals.
• Tideless Thames in Future London.

But Grenfell/Desborough’s parallel lives of family, sporting and business left no time for indulgences, although he was captain of Maidenhead Rowing Club from its foundation in 1879 until 1945! He was married to Ethel ‘Ettie’ Priscilla Fane with whom he had three sons, Julian, Billy and Ivo, and two daughters, Monica and Imogen.

He compensated for his modest academic achievements – an Oxford pass degree – by all-round sporting excellence. He won the Boat Race, fenced for Britain, was amateur punting champion and a fixer whose activities included bringing the 1908 Olympics to London and for many years occupied the chair of the Thames Conservancy, the body that regulated the river. 

Grenfell was a sportsman par excellence, indulging in fencing, cricket, tarpon fishing, game shooting, swimming, running, rowing, punt racing, boxing, tennis, drag hounds, harriers, wrestling, croquet, stické, cricket, athletics, mountaineering, bartitsu, four-in-hand carriage driving, fishing… and the greatest of these were pulling an oar, punting by pole or pointing an épée.

The chapter headings of Titan of the Thames are in keeping with publishing in Desborough’s era by listing topics by chapter on the contents page, enabling readers to find their interests. Desborough’s ideas on the ideals of sport dovetailed with those of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics in 1896. Coubertin, himself a rower at the Société d’Encouragement du Sport Nautique on the River Marne, admired the ancient Greek ideals of peace and international cooperation when the games were taking place and the attraction of English team sports compared with military disciplines such as fencing and equestrian competitions that the French favoured. As the authors point out, colonial rivalries overflowed into serious international conflicts towards the end of the nineteenth century, and Desborough’s final report on the 1908 Games confirmed that maintaining Coubertin’s ideals was the purpose of the meeting.

The modern games began in Athens in 1896 and were followed by Paris in 1900 and St Louis in 1904. They were scheduled for Rome in 1908, but a huge eruption of Vesuvius in 1906 made the Italian government pull out in order to deal with the volcanic disaster. When this happened, Desborough, who had been appointed as first chairman of the British Olympic Association in the previous year, happened to be en route to the Intercalated Games in Greece with a British fencing team led by the Oxford rowing Blue Theodore Cook. 

Hearing the news, the fencing team mooted the idea of staging the Games in London, and after seeking support from his pal King Edward VII, Desborough found himself with the task of setting up and organising a multi-sport meeting within a timeframe of two years. 

He set about the mammoth challenge with relish. The British Olympic Council was set up to find money and venues, codify 20 sets of rules for 20 competitions, set numbers of competitors and how their competitions would progress. Once international agreement was negotiated for all these items, they had to be translated into French and German. 

The definition of the ‘amateur’ was just one knotty area for dispute, defining ‘country’ being another. When the Games opened 800 officials had been employed to make them work and 10,000 letters issued. Three thousand athletes were entered, including 736 men and 39 women representing Britain, the largest team. 

The council was fortunate that its Games coincided with the Entente Cordiale that was signed in 1904. Among other things, this treaty of Anglo-French friendship agreed that Britain would have ‘freedom of action’ in Egypt and France likewise in Morocco. There was also to be a Franco-British exhibition at Shepherd’s Bush. The specification for ‘White City’ included construction of a stadium, running and cycling tracks, lawn tennis courts, a swimming pool, dressing rooms and spectator stands. Metric measurements were adopted except for the marathon and the rowing regatta at Henley. The whole exhibition shebang involved twenty palaces, seven huge pavilions landscaped with courts, vistas and a lake illuminated by 150,000 electric globes and arc lamps and 7,000 gas lamps. 

The 1908 Games also benefited from a highly competitive news industry. Picture postcards were all the rage. Newspapers engaged in circulation wars, photographic and film coverage became significant, and Pathé News set up shop for the duration.  

Given the history of boycotts and disputes impinging upon the Games since the Second World War, it comes as no surprise that politics, both national and Olympian, arose in 1908. The Irish had no wish to compete under the British flag, nor Finns under Russia’s, nor New Zealand as part of an Australian hybrid. Austria objected to being lumbered with Bohemia, and the Danes tried to block Greenland. 

At the opening ceremony the Swedish and US flags were missing among the flags which flew around the Stadium, and the shot-putter who led the US contingent failed to dip his flag to King Edward while passing the Royal Box which was inscribed ‘Rex et Imperator’. Asked to explain the absence of dip, the team captain said, ‘This flag dips to no earthly king’. Opening day was a damp one in more ways than one.

Bouts of partisanship broke out. The marathon ended in a mess after Italian runner Dorando Pietri was first into the stadium but lost his way to the finish line. He tumbled, fell, was picked up by officials and helped on his way. He was declared the winner, but the umpires later disqualified the Italian because he was assisted, and the American Johnny Hayes was confirmed as winner. It was Pietri, however, who became an overnight sensation. He was presented with a silver gilt trophy by Queen Alexandra at the prize-giving. Arthur Conan Doyle, the medical officer and Daily Mail correspondent, pronounced that, ‘the Italian’s great performance can never be effaced from our records of sport, be the decision of the judges what they may’.

There was also a major dispute in the 400 metres between three Americans and a British sprinter when officials were accused of blatant partisanship. Incidents like these, particularly involving Americans whose delegate James E. Sullivan was a belligerent spokesman who tested the resolve of the organisers and set questions for Coubertin’s Olympic movement. 

Arguments over unfair judging and professional-versus-amateur status were rife and showed grubby insights into the world of sport. Theodore Cook, rowing Blue and journalist, observed that ‘England no longer stands alone, as she once did, as the apostle of “hard exercise”…’ We have had to see our best pupils beat us’. The Brits were experiencing what the journalist George Orwell would encapsulate some years later: ‘Sport is war minus the shooting’. Desborough’s conclusion was that, ‘we must be willing to give as well as to take’. 

A sermon by Ethelbert Talbot, Episcopalian Bishop of Pennsylvania, delivered at St Paul’s on the first Sunday after the Games opened, asserted that the lesson of the real Olympia was that, ‘the Games themselves are better than the race and the prize’. Coubertin seized the sentiment when he later declared that, ‘the importance of these Olympiads is not so much to win as to take part’. Few Olympic athletes would agree, then or now.

It is evident that Desborough’s talents for organisation and multi-tasking, not to mention his insights and brilliance at diplomacy, were godsent for the future of Coubertin’s Games. One commentator described him as possessing ‘the skill of a D’Artagnan, the strength of a Porthos, the heart of an Athos, and the body of an Englishman’. Another said how ‘with his rowing and swimming and fencing and tennis, his Lordship was, as Gilbert and Sullivan might have had it, the very model of a modern English gentleman.’

Shaping the modern Olympics was by no means Desborough’s only activity. ‘Nobody has a closer connection with the Thames,’ said the Daily Telegraph. ‘He had swum in it, rowed on it, represented it in Parliament, lived by the side of it, spent hours fishing in it, administered it and measured it.’ 

He was in the Oxford crew who controversially dead-heated with Cambridge in the 1877 Boat Race. He commanded an Oxford eight who crossed the Channel, a crew composed of oarsmen who rowed at Oxford, not exclusively Blues. 

Desborough was involved in proposals for House of Lords reform, construction of a Thames barrier and campaigned for – or against – many causes. He was president or captain or chairman or representative of dozens of institutions, clubs and interest groups, while maintaining his busy family life at Taplow Court. 

But of course, nobody can expect such a charmed life devoid of tragedy. The tragedy that befell William Henry Grenfell, the Lord Desborough, was the death of his sons Julian and Billy in the Great War and Ivo in a fatal car accident. 

The good Lord’s story has been a long time coming, but Nairne and Williams have cleverly knitted together quotes, chapter notes, footnotes, appendices, chronology and narrative into a detailed but highly readable volume. 

Titan of the Thames, the Life of Lord Desborough by Sandy Nairne and Peter Williams, Unbound 2024. ISBN 978-1-80018-279-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-80018-280-6 (ebook). Available to order here.

The authors: Sandy Nairne and Peter Williams compete in racing punting on the Thames, a sport in which Lord Desborough was amateur champion. Nairne is a writer and curator whose recent books include Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners. He is a former director of the National Portrait Gallery and a former director of programs at Tate and chairs the fabric advisory committee at St Paul’s Cathedral. Williams is a Fellow of the Land Economy Department at Cambridge University and a writer specialising in housing and mortgage markets. He is the author of a history of racing punting at Dittons Skiff and Punting Club.

Sandy and Peter have written five previous HTBS posts on Grenfell/Desborough: Rowing at Oxford; The 1908 Olympic Games in three parts; Rowing career.