The adventurer and politician who went missing from British history
It seldom bodes well when a book’s foreword questions the enduring relevance of its topic, and so it is hard not to shudder when Dame Katherine Grainger writes here “Why should someone like Lord Desborough matter?” Certainly, Desborough is not a figure that most readers are familiar with. Rower, politician, Olympics impresario and President of the Thames Conservancy Board, he seems an unlikely subject for co-author Sandy Nairne, former director of the National Portrait Gallery. Yet this well-researched and comprehensive, if at times stagnated, book, makes a fair case for his continued relevance.
Born William Grenfell in 1855, Desborough rose to prominence firstly in 1878, when he led Oxford to victory in the Boat Race, and then in 1908, when he became instrumental in ensuring that London held the Olympic Games for the first time since their inception in 1896. Before then, we get well-drawn cameos of his early life amidst the Victorian aristocracy and his education at Harrow and Balliol, where he clashed with the famous classicist and master of college Benjamin Jowett, whom he called “an ass-pig”.
He was also a contemporary of Magdalen’s Oscar Wilde, whom he shunned after his disgrace and imprisonment, and, more happily, President of the Boat Club, when his team’s victory established a record that lasted until 1981. It was at Oxford that he developed a lifelong love of the Thames, which lasted until his death in 1945.
Nairne and Williams are acute on the way that the then-popular “muscular Christianity” movement pioneered by Tom Brown’s Schooldays author Thomas Hughes, which prized athleticism as a means of moral and physical achievement – quite literally, “mens sana in corpore sano”, or “a clean mind in a healthy body” – stayed with Desborough his entire life. It also influenced his son, the poet Julian Glenfell, who was killed in WWI, but not before pronouncing the whole affair “like a big picnic but without the objectlessness of a picnic. I have never been more well or more happy”; he blithely stated, “I adore war.”
His father may not have gone as far as Julian, but nonetheless he came to see sport and life as intertwined, declaring at a dinner in 1879 that “A man must not only pull well himself, but he must consider others, and maintain good temper and good fellowship.” He sometimes fell foul of his own edict – denigrating his more intellectual contemporaries at Balliol as “little men with big heads who think themselves clever and don’t wash” – but he at least practiced what his mentors had preached. When he wasn’t swimming the Niagara Falls or hunting bears in the Canadian Rockies, he served as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in the Sudan, having failed to be accepted as a mounted infantryman, and, typically, saw “a degree of active service” despite being nominally a non-combatant.
Structurally, the book leaps about, divided into such sections as “Sport and Adventure”, “Family and Society” and “Public Gain, Private Loss”. This can be confusing. There is a vast amount on Desborough’s physical and sporting activities, but his contemporaries’ whisperings of academic limitation seem to be justified by the man who emerges from these pages as hearty, active and fundamentally basic. His political service was lengthy but undistinguished, save for his switch from Liberal to Conservative allegiance.
His wife Ettie, who had greater intellectual and artistic interests, was the more interesting of the two, complete with what may or may not have been love affairs with Julian’s friends. And some of the details are, frankly, boring: the (ironically named?) chapter “Passionate Campaigner”, detailing his interests in bimetallism and a fixed date for Easter, could easily have been omitted.
Far better are the sections on the Olympics, exploring the tensions between early 20th century ideas of amateurism and professionalism, to say nothing of the difficulties of obtaining any public funding for the Games, and the Thames: one newspaper wrote “Nobody had a closer connection with the Thames than Lord Desborough” and he was nicknamed “Father Thames” for his tireless work as both aficionado and administrator of the river. And the descriptions of the deaths of his sons, whether in war or in automobile accidents, are deeply moving.
This may not be an essential book, but Nairne and Williams have done an honourable job of reviving Desborough from obscurity. Dame Katherine calls him “a magnificent figure who has, for whatever reason, gone missing from British history”. Now he has been restored to his rightful – even dutiful – place.
Titan of the Thames is published by Unbound at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
