On this day (04/08/2024) 90 years ago, the British Empire Games opened in London. The week-long event was the second iteration of what is now called the Commonwealth Games, following its inauguration in Canada in 1930. The 1934 Games hosted 500 athletes from 16 nations, all of which were British colonies or Dominions. Events included athletics, swimming, cycling, and boxing, as well as the less familiar (to contemporary international multi-sport events, at least) lawn bowls competition.[1] Come the end of the games, England topped the medals table with 29 gold medals, 20 silver, and 24 bronze; India brought up the rear with one bronze medal, just behind Southern Rhodesia on two.
The British Empire Games were part of a tapestry of public events that encouraged British people to invest in, and engage with, the empire, with sports events in particular being able to “sports wash the British Empire’s reputation”.[2] In fact, the forerunner of the British Empire Games, the Inter-Empire Championships, was a key component of the programme of the 1911 Festival of Empire. This meant that the events of boxing, swimming, and wrestling were part of a platter of entertainment that included tours of replica Jamaican sugar plantations, Māori villages, and Malay houses on stilts, as well as miniatures of iconic colonial buildings and an Indian pavilion. As Jeffrey Auerbach has put it, these exhibits “bolstered Britain’s sense of superiority . . . [and] encapsulate British efforts to control and contain the Empire”.[3]
Early iterations of the Empire Games, then, were fully integrated as part of leisure activities that espoused the supposed glories of empire, and which made it a vital thread in the fabric of British social life. Indeed, the boxing, wrestling, swimming, and diving events at the 1934 Games all took place at the Empire Pool and Arena, Wembley. This was built especially for the occasion, but was part of the Wembley Stadium complex constructed a decade earlier for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925, another celebration of the cultural and social benefits that the empire was deemed to confer on British people. Audiences therefore experienced the games as one part of a mesh of pro-empire events and exhibitions.
The 1934 Empire Games are likewise noteworthy for their introduction of women’s athletics. Whereas previous Games had only featured women’s swimming and diving, in 1934 women could compete in short running sprints and a relay race. These races were deemed acceptable for female competitors because they were not “too exhaustive”, with the relay race shortened to 220-yard legs, as opposed to the 440-yard legs in the men’s programme.[4]
If you would like to see images and read reports from the 1934 British Empire Games, you can do so by browsing collections hosted by British Online Archives, namely The Sphere, 1900–1964 and The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1874–1970.
[1] “1934 British Empire Games,” Commonwealth Sport, accessible at https://www.commonwealthsport.com/commonwealth-games/london-1934#.
[2] “The History of the Commonwealth Games,” Routledge blog, 9 August 2022, accessible at https://www.routledge.com/blog/article/the-history-of-the-commonwealth-games.
[3] Jeffrey Auerbach, “Empire under glass: The British Empire and the Crystal Palace, 1851–1911,” in Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 2015), ed. John McAleer and John Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 136.
[4] “1934 British Empire Games,” Commonwealth Sport.