The Shape of Glory: The Stolen, Melted, and Bizarre History of Trophies - Episode 13

Aleksandra: I wonder why do we give people objects when they win things? Seriously, think about it for a second. Someone runs faster than everyone else or scores more goals or lifts more weight or hits a ball more accurately, and our response as a species is to hand them a cup or a plate or a small statuette, or in one memorable case, a wheel of cheese. We could just say, well done you want. We could give them money, which is practical and frankly useful. We could give them nothing, just the knowledge that they were the best, but No, we make an object. We make it shiny, we engrave their name on it, we photograph them holding it above their heads, and then we put it in a glass case or on a shelf and look at it for years. What is that about? Today we're going to find out. We're going to go all the way back to the actual origin of the word trophy, which is darker than you might think. We're going to visit the tiny, slightly disappointing urn that is the most famous object in cricket. We're going to meet the dog who saved the 1966 World Cup. Cup, and we're going to understand why humans, despite having access to money, despite having the capacity to simply congratulate each other, keep insisting on making elaborate objects to mark the moments that matter. I'm Alexandra, welcome to the Hidden Life of Things, everyday history for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wanted. How did this actually get here? Let me tell you where the word trophy actually comes from, because it's not where you'd expect. The English word trophy comes from the French trophée, which comes from the Latin tropheum, which comes from the ancient Greek tropeion, and a tropeion was a very specific thing, not a cup, not a medal, not a podium. It was a structure built on a battlefield at the spot where the enemy had turned and run. Greek and Roman armies, after winning a battle, would collect their armor and weapons. Of the defeated, the helmets, the shields, the breastplates stripped from bodies or abandoned in the battle, and hang them on a wooden frame or a tree. Sometimes they'd add a captured enemy standard. The whole thing was left standing on the battlefield as a permanent marker. The message was not subtle. This is where we beat you, this is where you broke, this is the proof. The tropion was not designed to last, it was deliberately left to decay. the wood would rot, the metal would corrode, the whole structure would gradually fall apart and be absorbed back into the landscape. Because the victory was the thing, not the monument. philosophy held that building permanent victory monuments was boastful in a way that invited divine punishment, hubris essentially expressed in stone. So the original trophy was the stuff we took from the people we defeated, hung up to rot where we defeated them. The word has come a long way since then. For most of human history prizes for athletic or competitive excellence were not permanent objects. The ancient Olympic Games gave victors a wreath of olive branches cut from a sacred tree at Olympia, not silver, not gold, leaves, which would wither within days. The honour was in the winning, not in the object. Roman gladiatorial victors might receive money or a rudus, a wooden sword, which symbolized freedom if they were enslaved. Medieval jousting tournaments awarded horses, weapons, embroidered banners, sometimes livestock. The actual physical price was often functional, something useful rather than purely symbolic. The idea that every major competition required a permanent, ornate, highly decorated object, a trophy in the modern sense, in Emerged gradually and reached its fullest expression in the Victorian era. The 19th century, with its combination of industrial wealth, imperial self-confidence, and an absolute passion for organizing competitions and institutions, produced most of the iconic trophies we still know today. The FA Cup, the Ashes, the America's Cup, the most recognisable prizes in sport, were almost all created within a few decades of each other by the same culture, reflecting the same set of values. The Victorians believed. That excellence deserved permanence, that the record of achievement should outlast the achiever, that an engraved silver cup was the appropriate physical embodiment of that belief. And so, more or less by accident, the world ended up with the trophy. Let me tell you about the FA Cup because I think most people know the broad outline and very few people know the details and the details are extraordinary. The Football Association Challenge Cup was first competed for in 1872, making it one of the oldest national football competitions in the world. The original trophy was a modest silver cup made by a Birmingham firm called Martin Hall Company at a cost of £20. It was known affectionately as the Little Tin Idol. It was small, it was not particularly glamorous. In 1895, Aston Villa won the cup, beating West Bromwich Albion in the final. The trophy was brought back to Birmingham and put on display in the window of a sports shop on Newton Row in Aston, owned by a man called William Shilcock. Fans could come and see it, admire it, stand outside the glass and look at the thing their team had won. On the 9th of September 11, 1895, someone broke through the roof of the shop, they took some cash from the till and they took the cup. Police were notified, a £10 reward was offered for information, the trail went completely cold. Aston Villa were fined £25 by the Football Association, more than the trophy's original cost because it had been lost while in their care. A replacement had to be commissioned. The original FA Cup was gone for 63 years. Nobody knew what had happened to it. And then in 1958, an 83-year-old career criminal named Henry James Burge gave an interview to the Sunday. Pictorial newspaper. He said he was a thief. He described breaking in through the roof with two accomplices. They'd also helped themselves to several pairs of football boots, which I find oddly humanizing, and taking the cup. And then that same night he said they broke it up and melted it down in an iron pot. They had molds for making counterfeit half-crown coins. They used the silver from the FA Cup to cast fake money. And then, and this is the detail that I think is most perfectly absurd, they spend those counterfeits. Coins in a pub called the Salutation in Birmingham, a pub that was owned by a former Aston Villa player and regularly frequented by the Villa Squad. Some of the Villa players who had won that FA Cup may have handled coins made from their own trophy in a pub without ever knowing it. The confession was unverifiable. Burge was elderly, the police records from eighteen ninety five were fragmentary, no charges were ever bought. So we can't say with certainty that his account is completely accurate, but it's the only account we have, and it has everything. The theft, the audacity, the counterfeit scheme, the beautiful irony of the final destination of the silver. The original FA Cup is probably still circulating somewhere in Birmingham as coins in someone's change jar, in a drawer somewhere. Nobody Will ever know. In 1882, Australia played England at cricket at the Oval in London. Australia won by seven runs. It was the first time Australia had beaten England on English soil, and the English press treated it with approximately the level of composure you might expect. A satirical obituary appeared in a sporting newspaper called The Sporting Times. It announced the death of English cricket. The body, it said, would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The joke was at England's expense, a gentle national humiliation dressed up as a funeral notice. A few months later, when England's team toured Australia that winter, a group of Melbourne socialists decided to lean into the joke. They presented England captain Ivor Bly with a small terracotta urn containing what was said to be the ashes of a burned cricket bale, the small piece of wood that sits on top of the stumps. Some accounts say that it was something else. The exact contents have never been officially confirmed, partly because the urn has never been formally open for analysis. The urn is roughly the size of a coffee mug. It is 12 Centimetres tall. It lives permanently in the museum at Lord's Cricket Ground in London. It has never actually been awarded to the winning team in the Ashes series. The trophy that gets ceremonially handed over is a crystal replica. The original stays at Lord's. It is probably the most famous sporting trophy in the world that the winners never actually receive. Fans travel across the world to stand in front of it. They're cue to see it, they photograph it, and many of them, when they finally get close enough, are visibly taken aback by how small it is. There is something completely wonderful about this. The most contested prize in cricket, the thing that series after series of international sport is played to determine, is a small clay pot that may contain some ash, which sits in the museum and can't be touched. England and Australia play five test series covering weeks of cricket for something that neither side Gets to take home. meaning of the object is entirely disconnected from its physical reality. A 12-centimeter terracotta urn created as a joke in someone's Melbourne living room has accumulated more symbolic weight per centimetre than almost any other object in sport. Now for the story I have been looking forward to telling since I started planning this episode. The Jules Rimmet Trophy was the FIFA World Cup trophy from 1930 to 1970. It was named after Jules Rimmet, the French football administrator who had helped establish the tournament. The trophy itself was designed by a French sculptor named Abel Lefleur, a figure of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, holding a cup above her head. It was made from gold-plated silver and stood about 35 centimeters tall. It weighed Under 4 kilograms. In March 1966, four months before the World Cup was due to begin in England, the first time England had hosted the tournament, the trophy was put on public display at a stamp exhibition at Central Hall in Westminster, London. There were security guards, there were precautions, and then on Sunday, the 20th of March, someone walked in, somehow bypassed the security, removed a padlock and took the trophy. England woke up the next morning to find it had lost the World Cup before the tournament. tournament had even started. The police investigation was, to put it gently, not a triumph. Scotland Yard chased leads a ransom note arrived demanding £15,000, a sting operation was set up in Battersea Park, a small-time criminal named Edward Betchley was arrested. He claimed to be only a middleman working for someone who called himself the Pole. The Pole was never identified, the trophy was still missing. The FA quietly had a replica made in case the original was never recovered. And then on March 27th, a man named David Corbett took his black and white collie dog for an evening walk near their home in south east London. The dog's name was Pickles, and Pickles stopped at the hedge and started sniffing at a package wrapped in newspaper. Corbett investigated, unwrapped it, and found, staring back at him, the Jules Rimmer trophy. Corbett took it to the local police station where an officer reportedly looked at it and said, Doesn't look very world cuppy to me. it was confirmed genuine shortly afterwards. Pickles became immediately and completely famous. He appeared on television, he received the silver medal of the National Canine Defense League. He attended the World Cup victory party after England beat West Germany in the final that summer. He starred in a feature film. He ate considerably better than many humans for the rest of his life. The trophy England lifted that summer was actually the replica. The real one had been swapped for safekeeping immediately after the final, and the copy used for the public celebrations. In 1970, Brazil won the World Cup for the third time, and under the rules of the tournament at the time, they got to keep the Jules Rimmer trophy permanently. In 1983, thieves broke into the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation in Rio de Janeiro and stole it. Suspects were eventually arrested, but the trophy was not recovered. Investigators believe it was melted down for gold. The most famous object in football was stolen twice, recovered by a dog the first time, turned into something unrecognizable the second time. Nobody has ever been convicted of the second theft, nobody knows exactly what happened to it. Somewhere in the world, possibly, there is gold that used to be the World Cup. Most trophies, once awarded, go into a glass case. They are handled carefully, displayed behind barriers, insured for enormous sums touched by almost no one. The Stanley Cup, awarded annually to the champions of the NHL, the National Hockey League, has had a completely different experience of existence. The Stanley Cup was donated in 1892 by Frederick Arthur Stanley, the Governor General of Canada, as a challenge trophy for the best ice hockey team in Canada. It has since become one of the most travelled, most democratically handled, most chaotically celebrated objects in professional sport because of a long-standing tradition. Each player on the winning team gets to spend a day alone with the Stanley Cup. Their own personal day with the trophy. They can take it wherever they want. and what they do with it is magnificent. Players have taken it home to their hometowns in Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, across the United States. It has attended weddings, birthday parties, baptisms. The cup has reportedly been used as a baptismal font with at least one child baptized in it. Players have eaten cereal from it, families have fed their dogs from it, it has been taken to bars, to beaches, to farms. It has also had a fairly eventful physical existence. Cup has been dented during celebrations, left beside a road after a car ran out of petrol, dropped into a swimming pool, kicked down stairs. It has been left on a doorstep overnight and been picked up by a neighbor who didn't realise what it was. One player reportedly used it as a flower pot. The NHL employs a specific person, a keeper of the cup, who accompanies the trophy on all its travels. The keeper's job is to ensure the Stanley Cup doesn't get lost, destroyed, or used in ways that will be difficult to explain. think about that job quite a is something I love about this tradition. The Stanley Cup is not kept in a vault. It is not a sacred object behind a rope. It lives. It has a life. Every dent and scratch on it is documented. The cup is periodically refurbished, but some marks remain. And each one is part of the story. The cup has been to hundreds of cities, thousands of homes, been held by probably tens of thousands of people. It is a trophy that exists in the world rather than behind glass, and because of that it carries a history that a pristine, untouched award simply cannot have. Let me take a moment to celebrate some of these stranger prizes in the history of competition because I think they reveal something important about what trophies are actually for. In 1882, members of the Calcutta Football Club in India, facing the dissolution of their club due to a lack of opposition to play against, decided to melt down their club's silver rupees and use the metal to create a trophy. The result was the Calcutta Cup, now awarded to the winner of the rugby match between England and Scotland. The handles are formed as co. An elephant stands on the lid. It is one of the most beautiful and distinctive trophies in sport. It was made from dissolved currency by a sports club that was shutting down because it had run out of opponents. In Gloucestershire in England, every year competitors throw themselves down a very steep hill called Cooper's Hill chasing a wheel of cheese. The event has been running for centuries. It causes injuries annually. The winners receive cheese. That is it. That is the price. You fling yourself down a dangerous slope, and if you're fastest, you get the cheese you were chasing. In Finland, the Wife Carrying World Championships award the winner their partner's weight in beer. The sport is exactly what it sounds like. It originated from a historical and not particularly honourable practice, but has been transformed into a gleefully absurd annual competition. The trophy is beer. In Derbyshire, toe wrestling is a competitive sport. It is exactly like arm wrestling, except conducted with feet. There are championships, there are trophies. The point of all of these, and I do think there is a point, is that the specific form of the price matters much less than the fact of the prize The function of a trophy is not to be impressive. The function is to mark the moment, to make a specific achievement tangible, to give the winner something to hold, to look at, to point to and say, I did that on that day and here is proof. A wheel of cheese does that just as effectively as a gold cup. If anything, it does it better, because every time someone tells the story of the Cooper's Hill cheese rolling, the absurdity of the prize becomes part of the myth. Nobody forgets the cheese. Let me get to what I think is the real reason for all of this. A trophy is not really about winning. It is about memory. It's about the problem of time. A moment of victory, of being the best, of achieving something is fleeting. It happens and then it is over. And the next season begins and the record is broken and the years pass. The human mind is not reliable storage for glory. We forget, we misremember. A physical object is more durable than a human. An engraved silver cup can outlast the person whose name is on it by centuries. It continues to testify to a moment that everyone who witnessed it. directly has long since forgotten. It is a way of making the temporary permanent. And that is why the scars matter, why the dents in the Stanley Cup are not failures but features, why we respond more emotionally to an old battered trophy than to a shiny new one. An unmarked object has no history. A dented, scratched, occasionally dropped and retrieved cup is an object that has lived in the world, has been held by people who felt things strongly, has been dropped in moments of celebration, it has survived. FA Cup original melted into counterfeit coins in a Birmingham Back Street in 1895. Is gone, the Jules Rimmet remade trophy is gone, the specific physical objects that witnessed those moments of victory no longer exist, and we feel their absence was a genuine loss, even though they were made of metal and had no feelings and no consciousness. We feel the loss because the object was the container of the story, and when the object is gone, something of the story goes with it. The most famous trophies in the world are not the most beautiful ones. They're the ones with the most complicated histories. The Ashes Urn that was a joke. The FA Cup melted into coins, the World Cup found by a dog, the Stanley Cup that has been a baptismal font and a flower pot and the resident of a the Calcutta Cup made from dissolved money by a club that was closing down. The prize is never really the object. The prize is the story the object carries. That is why humans keep making them, keep engraving names on them, keep listening. lifting them above their heads in photographs that will outlast everyone in the frame. We're trying to make the moment last longer than the moment. And sometimes if we're lucky, it works. So the next time you see someone lift a trophy on television, in a photograph, in real life, take a second to think about what's actually happening. They're holding a container for a story that hasn't finished yet. Every person who holds it after them will add something. Every scratch and dent and dropped moment will become part of what it means. The object will outlast everyone in the room, it will end up in a museum or a glass case, or if it's unlucky, in a canal. And somewhere probably there are coins in circulation made from the silver of the first FA Cup, passed from hand to hand for 130 years by people who had absolutely no idea what they were holding. is not a bad definition of history, actually. History isn't only in museums. Sometimes it's in your pocket and it used to be a trophy. The Hidden Life of Things is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen, a follow or a comment genuinely helps. And if you know someone who takes sport or trophies very seriously, send this to them. They might not look at their cabinet the same way again. And here's your clue for next time. Humans have been making this for at least 10,000 years, possibly longer. It almost certainly happened by accident the first time, and people liked it so much they figured out how to do it on purpose. It has been used as currency, it has been buried in tombs as an offering. There are hundreds of varieties of it, and they're all technically the same process, going slightly differently. Some of them are kept in caves, some of them are eaten within days of being made, some of them take years. To be ready and people guard them like treasure. It is alive, literally. living organisms in it doing the thing that makes it what it is. And the more time passes, the more complex it becomes. And yet, most people eat it without thinking twice. What is it? Stay curious, I'm Aleksandra and I'll talk to you next week.