In 1850, the picturesque town of Much Wenlock in the West Midlands played host to the first ever Wenlock Olympian Games.
The brainchild of local visionary, Dr William Penny Brookes, the annual Games were a mixture of sporting and cultural activities designed ‘to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the Town and neighbourhood of Wenlock’. As well as his own Olympian Games, Brookes was a source of direct inspiration for Baron Pierre de Coubertin – the Frenchman who in 1896 founded the Modern Olympic Movement. In October 1890, Coubertin travelled to Much Wenlock and see first-hand the success of Brookes’ annual games.
The Games incorporated a strong cultural programme alongside the main sporting competition - a vision that would later inspire Coubertin to make this ‘wedding of sport and art’ one of the founding principles of the International Olympic Committee. So impressed was Coubertin by what he saw in Much Wenlock that on his return to France he wrote in La Revue Athletique in 1890:
"Much Wenlock is a small town in Shropshire...and if the Olympic Games ... still survive today, it is due ... to Dr W. P. Brookes. It is he who inaugurated them 40 years ago, and it is still he, now 82 years old but still alert and vigorous, who continues to organise and inspire them"