In October 1943, in an address to the International Sports Fellowship, Philip Noel-Baker anticipated that ‘we shall need more games, more sport, more physical training and recreation in this country when the war is over than ever we had before’. Although, in the same address, he claimed that games had been ‘the great leveller of men’, he was later to express the wish that participation in sporting competition should not be ‘reserved for those who are rich enough to afford the necessary time’. Noel-Baker hoped, not only for a post-war growth in sporting and recreational activity, but also that the socially-progressive role he believed sport to have played in the past would be continued in the future, so that the ways in which the divisions of social class determined who could or could not play a sport at any given level would diminish. He looked not only to an upsurge in sporting activity but also to its uplifting influence within a more egalitarian society. How far was this dual hope fulfilled?

The character of English sport was to be significantly influenced by an ongoing struggle between several different concepts as to the true purpose of sport, and how, and by whom, sports programmes should be administered. This struggle neither began nor ended with the Second World War. The distinctions within this conflict of ideas were by no means clear cut and Noel-Baker himself represented some of the ambiguities and confusions that were involved. An athlete as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Noel-Baker later won the silver medal in the 1,500 metres at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. In the 1920s he was closely involved with the Achilles Athletic Club, made up of former Oxford and Cambridge athletes. He believed that it was this club ‘on which the real prosperity of British track athletics rests’. From this background Noel-Baker developed a powerful empathy for what might be termed the ‘Corinthian’ ideal, the code of true amateurism under which sport was pursued for sports’ sake without ulterior political, social or economic motive. On the other hand, as a Labour politician, holding office in the wartime coalition and then in the post-war government, he did not support the exclusiveness of the gentlemen amateurs.