The Headmaster Who Lit the Olympic Flame

​Picture a small, moustachioed Frenchman sitting alone for a whole night in a solitary vigil in the darkened chapel of Rugby School in England. Baron Pierre de Coubertin had made a pilgrimage across the Channel just to sit before the tomb of Rugby School’s visionary Headmaster and it had a powerful effect. He wrote, “My eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed. I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire."
 
That night of reflection lit the flame for the modern Olympics.
 
Twelve-year-old Pierre had discovered the charismatic headmaster through reading a French translation of Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the 1870’s. Hughes himself was an enthusiastic product of Rugby and his best seller spread the gospel of Thomas Arnold’s brave educational experiment far and wide. 

​Bullying, bastardising, drunkenness and gambling was rampant at Rugby when Arnold arrived to take over in 1828. By prioritising the spiritual growth of the boys through pastoral care, he proved that kindness helped promote moral strength and found, as he expected, intellectual development tended to follow.
 
The energetic Christian Principal loved outdoor physical activity and set about bringing organisation to football, athletics and cricket as a way of developing character in his students. This ignited a sporting flame that spread internationally which became known as ‘Muscular Christianity’.
 
Its impact was felt half a world away in Melbourne when Thomas Wills, another Rugby graduate, returned home from England in 1856.  A brilliant all-rounder, Wills not only became the star of inter-colonial cricket and coach of the Aboriginal team that toured England in 1868, but one of the main instigators of Australian Rules Football. His statue stands outside Melbourne Cricket Ground.
 
Like Arnold, Baron de Coubertin was passionate about schooling and wrote admiringly, “This great man…can be considered the founder of modern English education. He had just 14 years to transform Rugby, through the contagion of his example, he changed other schools. 
… Arnold gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education. The cause was quickly won. Playing fields sprang up all over England.” He described Rugby School as “that mecca of Sports education.”
 
 During that night of quiet reflection in the chapel, the Catholic French aristocrat caught the vision of organised sport lifting the aspirations and behaviour of young people in his home country. But it did more. It fuelled his vision for universal amateur athletics which culminated, in 1896, in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens.
 
A world expert on Olympic history zeroed in on this critical link. ‘Thomas Arnold was the single most important influence on the life and thought of Pierre de Coubertin.” The visionary of the modern Olympics openly acknowledged this himself in his 1932 memoir. “It was to Arnold we turned more or less consciously, for inspiration.”
 
Sadly, by the end of the 19th century, much of Arnold’s dream was being channelled by schools at home more into making gentlemen who ‘played the game’ and who built the Empire. In David Putnam’s award-winning film Chariots of Fire, there is a telling scene where enormous pressure is being placed by men of that calibre on champion Scots sprinter Eric Liddell to compromise his personal values as a Christian. Patriotism is elevated above faith and, as much as Eric wants to represent his country at the 1924 Paris Olympics, he refuses to bend.
 
Eric always made it clear that he was running a long-distance race for a prize higher than an Olympic medal or the adulation of his countrymen. I for one, believe that the Rugby Headmaster would have stood shoulder to shoulder with this muscular Christian as a man who lived the Olympic ideal. He would have endorsed David Putnam when he said that for him, the brave Scot was the epitome of all that is noble in the human spirit – courage, faith, self-sacrifice and above all, humility. Eric Liddell carried these qualities with him to China and finally into the POW camp where he died.
 
Last year, I made my own pilgrimage to reflect in a quiet graveyard on the Murray River near a bush schoolhouse at Cummeragunja. I had been inspired by the story of Yorta Yorta civil rights campaigner, Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls - champion sprinter, boxer and VFL footballer. I knew that the Christian Principal of this humble school too, had produced a truly muscular Christian hero – a man of unbending faith like Eric Liddell.
 
The inscription on the grave told me he and his wife Gladys had run the same race as game-changers Thomas Arnold and Eric Liddell.  I was inspired by their choice of the life-goal of pioneer missionary Paul, ‘We strove towards the mark of our high calling in Christ Jesus.’
 See also, An AFL Champion,
​ https://www.theoutbackhistorian.com.au/stories/an-afl-champion