Not just Chariots of Fire: the forgotten heroes of 1924 Paris Olympics

14 July 1924. Paris. Lucy Morton sat up on the pavement with a start. All around her was a cacophony of shouting. In French. The taxi she’d been travelling in seconds earlier was halfway up the kerb and another taxi appeared to be parked in the side of it. As her senses began to return, she reasoned that the impact of the crash must have thrown her clear of the open-air cab and knocked her out on the street. She felt blood trickling down her face and noticed five of her teeth lying beside her.

Her teammates from the British Olympic swimming team were white-faced and sobbing, and with the 200m breaststroke competition starting two days later, she realised her big Olympic adventure had taken a dreadful turn for the worst.

The 26-year-old from Blackpool had left England as a potential medal winner, but certainly not the favourite to win the gold. That was going to be a battle between her compatriot and world-record holder Irene Gilbert, and American favourite Agnes Geraghty.

Morton had broken the 150 yards backstroke world record in 1916 and won titles in arduous open-water swims on the Thames, Mersey and across Morecambe Bay. But with the 1916 Olympics being cancelled and her events not being included at the 1920 Games, it was widely felt she might be past her best.

The year before the Paris Olympics she was working full time in the post office at St Annes and Blackpool council opened the local baths for her so she could train before and after work.

She did well enough to join the 13 female swimmers on the British team and fought her way to the final at the open-air Piscine des Tourelles. On the morning of the final there was more bad news for the team; Gilbert had been taken ill overnight and wasn’t sure she could swim. The previous afternoon a local doctor had, in Lucy’s words, “tidied up her mouth” and given her some painkillers which seemed to be doing the job. Everything had gone wrong, but she felt fine and strangely calm.

Years later, for a school lecture, she was persuaded to tell the tale of the race. “I decided that if I could keep up with Irene I should come second, so off we went,” she said. “On the second turn I lost Irene, but I feel that I have her to thank her for that first length, for she seemed to go like the wind with me doing my best to keep up with her. I finally finished and looked round to ask who won. All around me the poolside seemed to be teeming with British swimmers trying to pull me out of the water.”

Morton had won by the narrowest of margins as Sheffield’s Gilbert faded, with Geraghty second and Leicester-born Gladys Carson third. The Americans – including Johnny Weissmuller, who won three golds – had so dominated the swimming events at the Games the French officials couldn’t find a big British flag to hoist for the medal ceremony.

Quiet and unassuming, Morton returned from Paris to a hero’s welcome, but claimed she would have gladly walked home from the station to avoid the fuss that would be made. More than 10,000 people lined the streets and a civic reception was held at Blackpool town hall in her honour, where she was presented with … a piano.

Retiring after the Games, Morton spent a lifetime coaching and teaching swimming – she even spent a few seasons performing in a water show at Blackpool Tower Circus. Eight years after her death, in 1980, she was inducted into the International Hall of Fame as a Pioneer Swimmer, and a blue plaque sits on the wall of Blackpool town hall as a permanent reminder of her heroics a century ago.

Those 1924 Games are best known for the Chariots of Fire exploits of sprinters Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, as well as lauded middle-distance runner Douglas Lowe and multi-gold medal-winning rower Jack Beresford. Despite becoming Britain’s first female Olympic swimming champion, Morton’s exploits have faded into history, a fate that has also befallen one of her Olympic teammates, boxer Harry Mallin.

There’s another odd dental connection to his Olympic story. Mallin, then 32, was an unbeaten amateur middleweight from London’s East End, a five-time ABA champion, and had already won gold in the previous Olympics in Antwerp.

Despite murmurs suggesting his best days were behind him, he cruised through to the quarter-finals with relative ease, where he met the French boxer, local hero and pre-Games favourite Roger Brousse. Here’s where the story takes a rather bizarre turn.

After three rounds of elegant boxing, Mallin, his cornermen and the assembled press thought he’d won easily. At the final bell the British boxer beckoned to the Belgian referee and lifted his vest to show him a livid bite mark on his chest. The referee waved it off and, inexplicably, lifted the arm of the French boxer in victory. The partisan crowd went wild, while Mallin and his team trudged back to the dressing room in astonishment. In those days it wasn’t the “done thing” for the British to protest, no matter what the provocation, but a watching Swedish official was so aghast at the decision he did the job for them.

That evening both boxers were hauled before the judging committee and Mallin explained what had happened, removing his shirt to show off the vivid purple bite mark. Brousse countered with his own unique explanation – that every time he threw a punch his jaw would snap shut. Mallin, he said, was simply unlucky that it snapped shut on the middle of his chest. It turned out, however, that Brousse had previous in the biting stakes. The Argentinian boxer Manolo Gallardo, who he’d beaten in the previous round, had also complained about being bitten. Faced with this damning evidence the judges immediately disqualified Brousse and awarded the fight to Mallin.

Pandemonium broke out when the decision was announced at the Vélodrome d’Hiver and while Mallin eased through the semi-final, the local fans staged a near riot and paraded the sobbing Brousse shoulder-high around the ring. The next night Mallin beat fellow Brit Jack Elliott on points in the final and when he returned from Paris, he was tracked down by a reporter from the People to tell his exclusive story.

“For the final 200 gendarmes had been drafted in, but still the row continued,” he said. “The crowd hooted and booed and there was fighting in the seats, and this continued all the time until I won the fight and left the ring. The journey from the ring to the dressing rooms was still a tempestuous ordeal; French and Italians lined the passages and hooted for all they were worth. I hardly seemed to enjoy the record that I had created of winning the middleweight title at two Olympiads.”

The Daily Telegraph headline was a masterpiece of understatement. “Olympic Boxing – Extraordinary Incidents” – but their sports editor, Ben Bennison, was incandescent. “I feared the worst,” he said. “If the building had been wrecked I should not have been in the least surprised.”

The quiet, self-effacing Mallin was often described as a boxing professor and after the Paris Games and more than 300 bouts he retired undefeated from the ring. He was the only British boxer to retain an Olympic gold until Nicola Adams did it 92 years later. A London policeman by trade, he trained young recruits in the Met, and also at Eton Manor Boys’ Club, in the art of self-defence and physical fitness, and went on to to manage British Olympic boxing teams at countless Games, retiring as one of amateur boxing’s greats. In 1937 he claimed another piece of boxing history, providing the first ever live TV commentary for the BBC at Alexandra Palace. But history hasn’t been kind. Like Morton, Mallin’s heroics have disappeared from view, though there are exciting plans in the works to make a film about him.

When he died in 1969, after a long spell of ill health, and even the amputation of his left leg, Daily Mirror sportswriter Peter Wilson described him as “a great stylist; a great gentleman; a great Englishman.”

The 1924 Paris Olympics may have its enduring heroes like Abrahams and Liddell, but 100 years later the exceptional sporting deeds of Morton and Mallin ought to be remembered in just the same breath.

Harry Edward’s lost memoir When I Passed the Statue of Liberty I Became Black, edited by Neil Duncanson, is the story of Britain’s first black Olympic medallist and is published by Yale University Press.