Gold, silver and iron

At some point during 2012 those organising the Olympic Games in London will pay tribute to a couple of names not readily associated with record times, gold medals and the corporate billions of international sport. Much Wenlock and a country doctor, William Penny Brookes, who crusaded to "promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement" of local folk.

In its early stages his vision included quoits, a "half-mile foot race", a wheelbarrow race and old women competing for a pound of tea. Look what they led to. Brookes is credited with being the principal founding father of the modern Olympic movement.

Every so often its hierarchy goes to Shropshire to assure Much Wenlock that its place in sporting history is not forgotten. A recent pilgrimage involved the travel industry looking at ways of promoting the town before and during the London Games. It's not a difficult place to sell. Much of it is half-timbered and so quaint that their bus became stuck at the junction of High Street where it overlooks the 16th century Guildhall.

They remember the incident with amusement at the Raven Hotel, a key venue in Olympic history and on Much Wenlock's Olympian Trail which is, in the metric measure of modern athletics, a walk of 2,100 metres and ends near the graves of Brookes and his family.

He was one of those earnest, far-sighted Victorians – a rural version of Titus Salt – who wanted to improve minds and bodies, "especially of the working classes", too many of whom appeared before his magistrates' bench accused of drunkenness and petty crime.

One of his solutions was to establish an Agricultural Reading Society and then, 160 years ago, Wenlock Olympian Class, which began staging annual Games on Windmill Meadow. He brought the railway to the town and with it came more competitors and spectators. Then he helped establish the National Olympian Association and successfully challenged a rival organisation which wanted to preserve the elitism of British sport. His ethos won.

By the 1880s the doctor was trying to persuade the Greek government to revive the Olympics on an international level. The flame was truly lit when Baron Pierre Coubertin, organiser of the International Congress on Physical Education, attended the Wenlock Olympian Games in 1890, had dinner at the Raven and went home much impressed by Much Wenlock. Within seven years the first modern International Olympic Games was up and running, though their inspiration just failed to make it to the starting line. Brookes died at 86, four months before the revival in Athens. Wenlock still holds its Olympian Games each July (phone Mr MacVicker to enter the triathlon and Ms Smith for badminton), and their founder also campaigned for physical education to be compulsory in schools. The doctor's petition to Parliament was supported by an experiment in which he recorded the chest and arm measurements of two groups of boys. At the end of a year the fittest and strongest were those who had done gymnastic exercises.

For all his far-sightedness Brookes wasn't the area's first great innovator. Less than 10 miles away they were building bridges long before him. Ironbridge Gorge, now a pretty wooded valley beside the River Severn, was once smoky, clanking and dangerous.

Abraham Darby helped to make it that way when he perfected the smelting of iron with coke, a technique which became a building block of the Industrial Revolution and enabled his grandson to build the world's first cast-iron bridge there in 1779. Tourists can walk across for free but it used to be a halfpenny each for a calf, pig, sheep or lamb, and considerably more for a landau, chaise, chair and hearse. Walking up and down its hump can feel like another of those one small step, one giant leap occasions, and yet the structure was criticised. It was over-designed and many of the component parts were poorly cast, claimed Thomas Telford, the shepherd's son who became one of the greatest engineers in history, building 40 bridges in Shropshire alone and so revered in the county they named a town after him.

Ironbridge Gorge, "the birthplace of industry", is now a World Heritage Site. Among its 10 museums is the Blists Hill Victorian Town, a 54-acre site where they've recreated a typical community of the East Shropshire coalfield among the remnants of blast furnaces. Courtesy of a frock-coated cashier you can change your decimal money for replica farthings, halfpennies, pence, threepenny bits and tanners. The exchange rate is adjusted to compare prices then and now at the drapery, the grocer, the New Inn and other period traders: eg fish and chips 1/- (4.80), a pint of Marston's Pedigree 7d. (2.80), and eight guineas for a gentleman's safety bicycle

Nostalgia for the "good old days"? Think again. Today's free bus travel for the over- 60s doesn't apply at Blists Hill. They charge 1d (all classes) for a ride on the horse-drawn omnibus, and you pass plenty of signs of life's miseries during Victorian times. Women were denied the vote, and a mile away at Madeley nine coal miners were killed in 1864 when a chain became unhooked and the pit-cage plunged 700ft. Of those who died, one was 12, another 13, and two were 14. A public notice describing the tragedy offered its own version of health and safety: "Watch therefore, for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come".

Little wonder they were queuing to escape from Ironbridge Gorge in 1872. There were offers of free passage to Australia for single and married labourers and "female domestics", and the chance to buy farms in Queensland at 2 and sixpence per acre, payable over 10 years.

www.ironbridge.org.uk

www.wenlock-olympian-society.org.uk

www.discovershropshire.org.uk

YP MAG 22/5/10