This is the untold story of Britain's most improbable gold medal triumph at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Germany and an early defeat by Britain of Adolf Hitler in an arena intended to showcase Nazi superiority.
An inspiring story of an underdog British ice hockey team cobbled together at the last minute who managed to steal victory from the favourites of Canada and Germany.
Today these men and the historic popularity of ice hockey in Britain has been largely forgotten and this history documentary will uncover the fascinating history of when Britain dominated international ice hockey in a novel and interesting way.
More than 75 years have passed but there is still no British sporting triumph to match it. Set against the backdrop of the rising Nazi movement in 1930s Germany, a makeshift British ice hockey team overcame political squabbling, personal vendettas and zero funding to win gold for the first and only time in the sport's history.
Assembled at the last moment by an enterprising Irishman, a remarkable group of individuals aged from 17 to 39 years old made their own way to the Olympic games carrying their own equipment and bags of determination.
They faced a range of established international teams including the Canadian national team who had never lost at the Olympics and expected to go home with the gold. Their strongest rivals was a team of German professionals, backed by the Nazi party who had offered the country's best player Rudi Ball, previously barred from the sport because he was Jewish, a free passage out of Germany if he won. The British were rank outsiders but their competitive playing captured the hearts of the Bavarian home crowd as they arrived in the twin villages of Garmisch-Partenkirchen for the games.
As Hitler and top Nazis presided over the games, this debonair and eclectic bunch of men showed true Olympic spirit as they faced off against all the odds. When the first puck hit the ice under the shadow of the Zugspitze Mountain, they came out fighting. They did not know that back home the BBC were broadcasting the games live and a wave of unexpected national pride was building. Their ultimate victory rocked the Olympic community and caused controversy that reverberated as far away as the Canadian parliament.
They returned home to find that they had sparked a national obsession with this unlikely British sport and for a brief period ice hockey players would earn more than the top footballers. Ice hockey games were televised before football matches were. Even the Queen took up playing ice hockey on a frozen pond at Buckingham Palace. But soon after this peak, the Second World War broke out and the obsession was short lived. The memory of the British team's amazing achievement was lost.
Now through a stylish and compelling film we present the story of how these extraordinary man came to gather from all corners of the globe to form the most unlikely team of sporting heroes and how they ended up giving Hitler a taste of British determination before World War II even started. Reliving this incredible moment will be in inspiring Olympic story. It will also challenge common beliefs that Nazism was unacceptable to Britain's interests at time, for this was the era when finding a common ground for peace with Germany was Britain's key foreign policy. Several of the players had German family and ultimately had to take sides in the conflict.
The stadium and the buildings where this took place still stand. There are many photographs and artefacts connected to the principals but most eye-witnesses are now dead. With the assistance of AI for in-betweening, this documentary can utilise hand-drawn animation in the style of the the classic 'Eagle' comics to recreate the games and dramatic events surrounding the story. Animation can also be rapidly created from rotoscoping live action and motion capture of ice hockey players and 3D scanning of the actual locations.
The film would include a combination of:
- Archive footage and sound recordings of the games sourced from agencies around the world including the BBC, ABC, as well as Canadian and Japanese news sources,
- Never seen before personal stills and film archives belonging to the families of the British team.
- Personal artefacts of the team members including Olympic medals, sporting equipment, news cuttings and other museum-grade objects.
- 'Eagle' style animation of games and events that elaborate on the personal journeys of these amazing men. Many of the actual Olympic facilities remain extant for reference and scanning.
- Footage from Leni Riefenstahl's iconic documentary about Hitler's 1936 Olympic Games.
- Interviews with the teams surviving family members.
- Archive news interviews with team members such as Archie Stinchcombe and team captain Carl Erhardt.
Britain's Forgotten Nazi Gold.
Remember that Jamaican bobsleigh team in the 1988 Winter Olympics? Well, what about the British ice hockey team in 1936? Not only did a motley scratch team win the gold medal but they took the European championship and the World championship from under the noses of the eight times in a row World champions. It's an upset the losers Canada are still smarting from. Along the way they also tweaked the noses of the Nazis and set off a boom in ice hockey in Britain which for a while, for professionals, was bigger than football. Case in point: ice hockey matches were televised by the BBC long before football ever was. So what happened?
When the 1936 Olympics were awarded to Germany in 1931, Adolf Hitler had not yet been elected and there had only been two winter games. The world was in an economic depression and some of Britain's best hockey players were working in Canada drilling oil and punching cattle in the summer and playing hockey in the winter. Hitler originally did not want a bankrupt Germany to host a rinky-dink athletics meeting but once in power he quickly grasped the opportunity to demonstrate Nazi supremacy. The winter games became a dress rehearsal for a bigger show in Berlin in the Summer. However Britain didn't get around to picking an ice hockey team until the last minute. With little time for training and hardly any money for equipment and travel and no hope of a medal, the British team set off for Bavaria intent on enjoying themselves and trying their best.
Each member of the team has the kind of biography that shows their toughness and resolve that won them gold on February 11th 1936. Winger Archie Stinchcombe was a typically gritty Yorkshireman who was blind in one eye and would readily scrap with opponents even though players didn't wear helmets then. Ironically the British team captain Carl Erhardt was born to German parents who had moved to England before the First World War but when having German heritage got to be uncool at school, he went to America and Switzerland where he learned to play ice hockey. Carl was the kind of guy Ian Fleming looked up to. He was smart, handsome and had a taste for the good life, he excelled at tennis and water skiing too. To get to the games he drove his open topped Lagonda M45 tourer (still owned by his son) from Kent with his hockey equipment, skis and his dinner jacket on the back-seat to Bavaria at high speed along the twisting Alpenstrasse, one of Hitler's new showcase projects, an undertaking even 'Top Gear' would find challenging in winter snow. In Germany he could not have failed to notice the village signs that said "Jews not welcome here" though these were hastily removed from around the Olympic village after protests.
In the newly built stadium (still standing) at the foot of the magnificent Zugspitze, the Nazi flags fluttered alongside the Olympic rings everywhere and Adolf Hitler and other Nazi top brass attended the games. For the opening parade the teams were told to lower their flags in front of the viewing stand and give the Nazi salute but this didn't go down well, so when the British hockey team walked in, they saluted the crowd, walked past Hitler looking the other way, then saluted the crowd again. The Nazi controlled media splashed the 'arms-up' photos everywhere, causing concern in English newspapers.
There was some inter-British Empire politics in play too. Before the matches got underway, Canada objected that two players, though British born, had played in Canadian teams and sought to have them banned. This did not win friends with the authorities and the charming German-speaking captain and his team; full of Olympic spirit, captured the public's affection as the underdogs. The Canadian figure skaters photographed queueing for Hitler's autograph didn't win it back.
The matches were played outdoors sometimes in snowstorms but Britain beat Sweden 1-0 and then Japan 3-0 and so unexpectedly faced the undefeated World and Olympic champions in the semi-final. The match played under stars and a few dim floodlights had that behind-the-sofa kind of anxiety; the first British goal was scored by Gerry Davey (still Britain's highest goal scorer) who had signed himself out of a sick-bed with a fever, then Canada hammered Britain back for most of the game but goalkeeper Jimmy Foster (rated one of the world's best) kept them to one goal before Edgar Brenchley smashed another home in the dying seconds. The German crowd went absolutely wild; they knew they had witnessed history. Because of the scoring system, Canada now had to win their second semi final by five goals but Britain only had to draw otherwise Britain had the gold. Britain's hopes soared like a ski jumper's bobble hat. The Canadians then objected to the scoring system but the officials (perhaps because Germany was still in the running) said the rules had been properly agreed before the games. Canada's plan crashed like a four-man bobsleigh. The radio commentary of the second semi-final with Britain against Czechoslovakia reports Czech hopes for bronze were dashed by a 5-0 thrashing; the 'colour' commentary came from Canadian player Bob Bowman. The churlish Canadians then also beat Czechoslovakia but it was only enough for a silver medal but would Britain be able to deliver a coup-de-grace and push them down to third if they beat the USA? Hampered by some premature celebration hangovers no doubt encouraged by camaraderie in the bars of the Olympic village, Britain's final match finished nil-nil in normal time and the two teams remained deadlocked for one over-time period after another until both teams could barely skate and called it a draw. The players collapsed on the ice like a scene to come from Stalingrad; utterly spent, their heavy woollen jerseys steaming, Jimmy Foster's forehead bleeding with cuts from heroic goalkeeping. Britain, the crowd's favourite, by its tally of points, had now secured the Gold and the European and the World Championships.
In the subsequent Second World War many of the team are known to have served with distinction. Gordon Daley would encounter Hitler again in extraordinary circumstances; being one of the first allies at Hitler’s bunker in 1945, he grabbed hold of the petrol cans that had been used to burn the Furher’'s body and they are now in a Canadian museum. Britain did well in following championships but after a period of growth; by the 1960's the lack of investment in home-grown talent stalled ice hockey in Britain. Though Archie Stinchcombe and others went on to coach teams in Britain, Europe and Canada until very recently, they weren't feted like our '66 World Cup heroes and made their living running sports shops and dry cleaners. In 1983 the Times Newspapers got in touch with the team but it turned out they only wanted to look at their Olympic passes signed by Adolf Hitler to try and authenticate the bogus diaries they'd purchased.
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