International Football at the 1948 Olympics

As Euro 2020 finally kicks off, guest blogger Paul Hayes sees parallels between this year’s championship and the first tournament broadcast on British television. BBC Genome helps to tell the story of football at the 1948 Olympic Games.

This summer, the BBC will televise a major international football tournament which is being held across a scattering of disparate venues, culminating in semi-finals and the final at Wembley Stadium. It’s a tournament which has been delayed due to a long-lasting, major international crisis. In these respects, Euro 2020 – as it’s still being called – strikingly parallels the very first international football tournament ever to have been broadcast on British television: the one held as part of the 1948 Olympic Games in London.

Those Olympics were an important landmark in the history of BBC TV. They may not have had the same mass audience or widespread cultural impact as the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II five years later, but for the team at Alexandra Palace the success of the coverage gave them a sense of pride and self-belief, and a real appreciation of what they could achieve. Television’s then-Head of Programmes, Cecil McGivern, wrote to staff at the end of the Games that: "There is no doubt at all that our televising of the XIV Olympiad has been a very great success and has brought considerable credit to British television both in this country and abroad."

Television had begun broadcasting in high-definition – on 405 lines – in 1936, but closed down during World War Two when TV was still in its infancy. TV broadcasts resumed in 1946 and the Olympic Games was an early and ambitious outside broadcast for the developing service.

In 1948 the number of those watching was still relatively small, as the BBC had only one television transmitter – at Alexandra Palace itself, in north London – although the Corporation’s official report on the Games estimated that the average audience for each broadcast was around half a million viewers. Coverage did not officially expand until the opening of the Sutton Coldfield transmitting station, serving the Midlands, in December 1949. In practice, however, the Alexandra Palace broadcasts could, given the right conditions, be received a great deal further away than intended: the official report also states that: "The BBC’s faithful viewer in the Channel Islands (180 miles), where reception is inconsistent, was able to get pictures which were of excellent entertainment value."

So successful was the televising of the Games that the BBC showed more live coverage than they had planned. Radio Times told readers that "Times of Olympic programmes may be varied," and that certainly turned out to be the case for the football; more than double the originally-intended amount of action was shown.

Television’s live coverage of the Olympics was entirely centred around Wembley, showing events at the stadium and the pool there. This meant that the televising of football could only begin towards the end of the tournament, because the two semi-finals and the two medal matches were the only games held there. The Radio Times listings indicate that it had originally been planned to show the second halves only of the first semi-final and the two medal games. But we know from documentation held in the 1948 Olympic files at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, Berkshire, that in fact the entirety of both semi-finals and both medal contests were televised.

This resulted in some notable firsts in the history of live football on British television. The first semi-final, held on the evening of Tuesday, 10 August 1948, was pioneering for two reasons. With Sweden playing Denmark, it was the first time ever that a football match between two non-UK teams was shown by the BBC. And with the game starting at 6.30pm, it was also the very first match with an evening kick-off to be televised.

Light, or the lack of it as winter afternoons wore on, was often the enemy of football broadcasts in those early days – it didn’t stop play, but it could stop the cameras of the time from being able to show an acceptable quality of picture. A Radio Times billing from January 1950 contains the disclaimer that “Light permitting, the whole of the match will be televised,” and we know that on more than one occasion the television service had to either abandon coverage altogether or else lapse into a sound-only commentary.

This being the summer, however, there appear to have been no such issues. The evening after Sweden had beaten Denmark, the second semi-final was also televised live in full, as the Great Britain team – coached by Manchester United manager Matt Busby – lost to Yugoslavia. Two days later, on Friday, 13 August, there was one more footballing first from the Olympic coverage. In the afternoon the bronze medal match between Great Britain and Denmark was broadcast, followed in the evening by the final between Sweden and Yugoslavia, with the Scandinavians winning both encounters. This was a television milestone because it was the very first time that two full football matches had been shown live on the same day – something we’re now well used to, of course, particularly whenever the World Cup or the European Championship rolls around.

At the microphone for all of these games was the man who was then the voice of television football – former referee Jimmy Jewell. Jewell had led a pretty extraordinary life: in World War One he was one of the very early pilots to fly from an aircraft carrier, and after becoming a top-level referee in the 1930s he officiated at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and took the 1938 FA Cup final, the first to be televised, awarding what turned out to be the winning penalty in the dying moments of extra time. In an unusual switch, in January 1939 he then became the manager of Norwich City, and there is some evidence that he may even have managed the England team in one of their wartime internationals.

A few other people were tried before Jewell took up the microphone for BBC Television in 1947, but he went on to be the commentator for five successive FA Cup finals and almost all the other live matches of the period. The BBC experimented with various others alongside Jewell, including former amateur footballer Norman Creek and future ITV commentator Peter Lloyd, but never really found anyone else they liked until they struck upon a certain Kenneth Wolstenholme in 1950.

For the Olympic tournament, Jewell had producer Barrie Edgar joining him on-air, with athletics specialist Pat Landsberg and water polo commentator Harry Getz also being given try-outs alongside Jewell and Edgar on the semi-finals. Jewell, though, remained BBC Television’s main voice of football until his sudden death from a stroke in October 1952, which propelled Wolstenholme into the top job.

Like almost all of his other commentaries, Jewell’s Olympic football broadcasts are lost forever; never recorded and seen only by those viewers who watched them live. In fact, for all the games he worked on, only one tiny fragment of Jewell’s live commentary still exists. His is the voice on the earliest surviving live television football coverage in the BBC archives – a few minutes of an experimental telerecording of England v Italy at White Hart Lane in November 1949.

With the process of preserving television broadcasts having still been in its earliest days, football was far from the only 1948 Olympic sport to be beamed out live and then never seen again. Indeed, the only existing live television coverage of the games at all is a section of the opening ceremony, although there are also many filmed reports from the Television Newsreel programme.

Despite this lack of material in the archives, the coverage of the Games overall has been justly celebrated ever since as an important milestone in the history of British broadcasting. But the fact that this included the televising of an international football tournament – some six years before World Cup matches would first be brought live to British screens – has perhaps not been so well remembered.