There was bicycle polo and tug-of-war, banquets attended by lords and ladies of the realm, a controversial marathon and ice skating in Knightsbridge in the middle of October.

It may all sound a little surreal but this was the scene of the 1908 Olympics in London — a sporting spectacle a world away from the modern-day Games that will descend on the city in 2012, minus the Edwardian eccentricities and the shoestring budget.

Leading figures from the Olympic movement joined Gordon Brown last night at a gala dinner hosted by the Queen at Windsor Castle to mark the anniversary of an event thrown together in under two years when Rome withdrew as host city after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1906.

At the time, members of the fledgeling British Olympic Association — led by the dashing chairman William Grenfell (Lord Desborough), a sportsman and politician — were jolly good sports about the whole thing, by all historical accounts.

Stepping into the breach at the pleading of the International Olympic Committee, Lord Desborough and his colleagues ensured that the show would go on. The Olympic concept was still in its infancy and may have withered if Britain had said no.

“It might not be going too far to say these were the Games that saved the Olympic movement,” said Philip Barker, an Olympic historian. “They could have said it just wasn’t going to work after Rome pulled out.” The Games were a remarkable feat of improvisation. They were staged over six months between April and October, which makes them the longest in Olympic history, for the princely sum of about £250,000.

The cost to the British taxpayer was negligible because donors, from the Prince of Wales to Cornelius Vanderbilt, stepped forward during a fundraising appeal. The single biggest donation was £1,500 from Eugen Sandow, a strongman considered the father of modern bodybuilding.

Even arch-foe France, in the new spirit of co-operation under the second Entente Cordiale, chipped in £680.

Eventually they managed a small profit even after the £5,300 spent on entertainment and hospitality, which was the biggest single expense under the £35,000 operating budget.

The amounts involved were chicken feed — even adjusting for inflation — compared with the upcoming London Olympics, which will cost £2 billion to run over 16 days and at least £9.3 billion of public money for the stadiums and amenities.

A direct comparison between 1908 and 2012 will have thrifty Mr Brown, who as Chancellor at the time of the bid was against hosting the Games, hankering for Herbert Asquith’s era.

While present-day ministers take the flak for escalating costs, their peers 100 years ago happily announced that the organisers of the Franco-Britannic exhibition would foot the bill for the 93,000-capacity centrepiece in White City in return for three quarters of the gate receipts.

Considered an engineering marvel at the time, containing not only athletics and cycling tracks but also an infield 100m swimming pool (which caused some problems when the rugby players kicked into touch), the stadium was completed in ten months.

“The 1908 Games were like a garden fête in comparison to the modern Games,” Mr Barker said. “It totally blows your mind when you look at the names involved — I mean Arthur Conan-Doyle was reporting it for the Daily Mail. These were Games run by the Establishment of the old Empire.”

David Miller, in his official history of the Olympics, notes that there were 700 athletes in the largest ever British team and they swept the board in boxing, rowing, sailing and tennis.

Many events, such as rackets, involved only British competitors. Evan Baillie Noel, a former sports editor of The Times, won the gold medal in the men’s singles event. It was the first gold of the 1908 Games.

The Games were not short of controversy, however. Spats with the Americans dominated the newspapers. There was the judging of the 400m race, which was won by Wyndham Halswelle after three Americans pulled out in protest, and cries of foul play in the tug-of-war when the British team, all policemen, wore boots.

By far the biggest storm occurred at the end of the marathon when officials helped the winner Dorando Pietri, an Italian chef, over the line, causing him to be disqualified.

Then and now

1908
Nations 22
Athletes 2,008
Sports 23

2012
Nations 201
Athletes 10,500
Sports 26

From the Times Archive

— The Question of Attendance: "To expect that every seat will be taken each day for a fortnight is absurd. Nowhere in the world could an athletic performance of any kind achieve such a feat as that."

The Times July 18, 1908

— The Marathon Race: "To-day the great event of the Olympic Games will be decided. The notion of a race from Marathon to Athens is thought by some to be based on the story that the famous runner Pheidippides conveyed the news of the battle of Marathon to Athens and fell dead in the Agora with the last triumphant cry of 'All hail, we conquer'. We may or may not believe the tale, but the idea was a brilliant one."

The Times July 24, 1908

— Olympic Athletes on Shipboard: "In the 90 passages I have made of the Atlantic it has never been my good fortune to meet such a continuously interesting company of fellow passengers. To adopt an expressive Americanism, there was truly 'something doing from start to finish' — sprinting, running, jumping, wrestling, ball-throwing rope climbing, and every variety of athletic exercise possible on board a ship."

The Times July 6, 1908