In 1850 William Penny Brookes, physician, surgeon, apothecary, botanist, magistrate, entrepreneur, and free-thinking philanthropist, set up the ‘Olympian Class’, later retitled ‘Wenlock Olympian Society’, to organise an annual Games in Much Wenlock Shropshire England, with the aim of encouraging moral, physical and intellectual improvements by the award of prizes for competitions.

Many ‘gentlemen’ athletes were prejudiced against working class men participating in amateur sports competitions. They contended that ‘amateur athletes’ did not work for a living. Dr Brookes vehemently disagreed.

Dr Brookes instigated the setting up of the National Olympian Association. Their first Games, held at London’s Crystal Palace in 1866, attracted an astonishing 10,000 people.

On several occasions he unsuccessfully petitioned Greece to stage an international Olympic Games.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin visited Dr Brookes in 1890, saw the Wenlock Olympian Games and learned of Dr Brookes’s aspirations for an open Olympics. Coubertin was so inspired that he went on to stage the world’s first international Olympic Games in Athens in April, 1896.

Dr Brookes died, just 17 weeks before, in December 1895, so never saw the realisation of his
life-long dream.

“If the Olympic Games that modern Greece has not been able to resuscitate survive there today, it is due not to a Greek, but to Dr W.P. Brookes. It is he who inaugurated them 40 years ago, and it is he, now 82 years old but still alert and vigorous, who continues to organise and inspire them.”

Baron Piere de Coubertin, 1890.