An intrepid quartet of Scottish curlers wrote their names into British Olympic history in late January 1924, although they had no idea at the time.
In fact, it would take 82 years and some equally intrepid reporting from the Glasgow Herald for their place in the nation’s sporting folklore to be truly understood.
Willie Jackson and son Laurence, Robin Welsh and Tom Murray, all from the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, pitched up to Chamonix to what was then known as the International Winter Sports Week.
There they cruised to victory in a curling competition featuring just three team. First, they beat Sweden 38-7, before an even more emphatic 46-4 victory over hosts France to confirm their title.
There was never any doubt over who the best curling rink were in Chamonix. It was the Scots who strolled around the opening ceremony with their brooms over their shoulders like rifles, chanting ‘Balais, Balais’ (broom, broom).
However, even after the Chamonix games were retroactively designated the first Winter Olympics in 1925, it was commonly accepted that curling had been just a demonstration event.
The Jackson clan, Welsh and Murray were curling champions but it was not until 2006 and the eve of the Turin Olympics that they were officially recognised as Olympic champions.
That was thanks to the work of Herald reporter Doug Gillon. And who better to recount the story than the man himself.
Gillon recalls: “It started out as just a feature on the 1924 Olympics. When I started digging around it, I realised that the records were sketchy and a bit ambivalent. I’d always known that 1924 was the first time that curling had appeared at the Olympics and I’d always understood it to be a demonstration sport.
“I’d always understood subsequently that Canada had won the first official curling gold medal (in 1998). But then as I dug around, I realised that maybe this accepted evaluation was inaccurate. I dug around a fair bit and it was clear that I was on the right tracks. I just kept digging.”
That digging came despite the fact that Olympic historians were all agreed that curling was simply a demonstration event, and even the International Olympic Committee had stated that curling was making its debut at the Games in 1998.
But the more Gillon investigated, the clearer it was that there were no contemporary reports that designated curling as a demonstration event. Shown the evidence, the IOC agreed with him and so in 2006, 82 years after that Scottish quartet swept all before them, the RCCC contingent were officially recognised.
Of course they were not alive to find that out, and in a cruel twist of fate the news broke just too late for one of the families.
Gillon explains: “It was quite emotional in one respect because the guy who was the best-known curling historian, Robin Welsh, his father (Robin Welsh senior), had actually played in the 1924 rink. I knew him, he was very elderly, but what I wasn’t aware of was that he was terminally ill.
“I managed to get hold of his son, Peter, and told him. He told me he was seeing his father that weekend and would tell him. His father died while he was en-route to his home in Edinburgh, so literally hours before he would have told him that his own father was an Olympic gold medallist and not a demonstration event winner.
“It caused a lot of angst in Canada. They kind of felt we had stolen their thunder a bit retrospectively. Eventually on the eve of the Turin Olympics, the IOC admitted that we had got it right and this was in fact the case.
“The families that were involved were obviously delighted and ecstatic that this part of their family history had been rewritten.”
The curiosity of the curling event did not finish there. There had been a rumour that DG Astley, one of the British reserves had appeared for Sweden in their match against France, and could conceivably have left Chamonix with both a gold and silver medal from the same event. That would make him unique in Olympic history, but Gillon has since been convinced that this was no more than an urban myth.
That curling success was the only British gold in Chamonix and therefore the first Winter Olympic gold medal won by Team GB. However, it was far from the only British success at those inaugural games.
The men’s four-man bobsleigh won a silver medal with a team that featured Alexander Richardson, a Major who served in World War I and later came out of retirement to serve as a Commanding Officer and later a Chief of Staff in World War II. His son Guy would follow in his sporting footsteps, matching his father’s Olympic silver medal, although he did so as part of the men’s eight in the rowing in London in 1948.
Ethel Muckelt, who won ladies figure skating bronze, is in a very select group of people to have represented Team GB at both Summer and Winter Olympics. She was the first to achieve this feat, although unlike the other six Brits to have achieved it, she is the only one to do so in the same sport, with figure skating having previously been part of the summer programme when she took part in 1920.
The last British medal came in the men’s ice hockey, another bronze. This was a team comprised mainly of Canadian-born hockey players who had spent time serving in the forces in the UK. Among them was Blaine Sexton, originally from Falmouth, Nova Scotia, who served in World War I. He eventually settled in the UK and would go on to be known as ‘Mister Hockey’.
Sexton’s influence went far beyond that bronze medal. He was instrumental in ice hockey’s development both in the UK and across Europe.
There was one more Brit who was officially recognised at those inaugural Winter Games, mountaineer Charles Granville Bruce.
He received a special prize from none other than Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the Modern Olympic Games, for mountaineering. That came two years after he had led the first expedition to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Bruce, whose father Henry Bruce served as home secretary under William Gladstone, received the special prize at the closing of the Winter Olympics in early February. By the end of the month he was back in the Himalayas leading the second attempt at reaching the summit of Everest.
The reason he was awarded a special prize for mountaineering was that the sport did not lend itself to being part of the Olympic programme. It is an indication of how times change that the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will see climbing included in the programme for the first time, albeit in a very different form to Bruce’s Himalayan expeditions.
Unlike the Caledonian curlers, however, there will not be another twist in the tale over the exact value of Bruce’s prize.
Sportsbeat 2024