1948 and all that: On the cheap THE Olympic will wobbled shortly before the games. Was hosting them really a good idea, "at a time," a minister asked, "when we should not have recovered from our economic difficulties"? The Evening Standard denounced "grandiose and luxurious schemes for an international weightlifting and basketball jamboree" as "an unheard-of absurdity" in an era of cuts. That was in 1947, a year before London last held the Olympics. By a quirk of fate, the city has staged the games twice at times of austerity (as well as in 1908). In 1948, however, austerity was rather more austere: there was a fuel shortage, strikes, mass homelessness and even meaner rationing than there had been during the second world war. Britain's finances were dire enough for officials to warn that, should the games be transferred to America, the country might struggle to muster the dollars to send a team. Carping about costs is one of the challenges shared by London's Olympic committees then and now. The boosts to tourism (the post-war government craved exports even more than the current one) and to what today is called branding are the main advantages cited by both. Those benefits are usefully hard to disprove, though in 1948 the economic case was helped by the games" shoestring budget. Materials were scrounged from abroad. Javelins were thrown in a dark stadium, pursued by torch-wielding judges. Afterwards, everything that could be was sold off. The encouraging result was a modest profit and a net gain to the taxman. Rather as today's organisers are fending off references to the splendour of Beijing, their predecessors faced comparisons with the ugly ostentation of Berlin in 1936 and the glamour of Los Angeles in 1932. Their biggest worry in the bombed-out city was finding respectable accommodation for the athletes; a bespoke village was out of the question. The war both caused and remedied the problem: competitors were housed in a pair of spruced-up RAF camps and an army convalescent home. Visiting teams brought their own food (and the French their own wine), donating some to the hungry Brits. The flashy Americans flew in fruit daily from California. Following a typically British pattern, attitudes to the 1948 games lurched from self-deprecation to pride - another heartening precedent for the 2012 organisers. Janie Hampton, author of "The Austerity Olympics," argues that although the games had no physical legacy, besides the road built by German POWs from Wembley station to its converted greyhound-racing stadium, there was a valuable "emotional legacy." The decidedly low-rent opening ceremony, which featured pigeons, was an affirmation of peaceful internationalism; Britons were proud of the pluck shown by staging the games at all. In some ways, of course, the contexts are incomparably different. In 1948 there were no rows about rockets placed on suburban roofs to guard against terrorism. But there was some tricky diplomacy over Japan, which wanted to come but was refused, and the Soviet Union, which didn't turn up - unsurprisingly, perhaps, since the games coincided with the Anglo-American airlift to Soviet-blockaded Berlin. At home, as David Kynaston, a historian, puts it, the event was not "a big deal." Few owned televisions and radio coverage was limited. In what was an overwhelmingly working-class country, football and cricket were much more compelling. Still, the Olympic archives suggest that some things are eternal. The organisers worried about getting enough booze to the press centre. Tickets were cheaper and easier to obtain, but lots of bigwigs still tried hard to blag them. And the weather - a bizarre heatwave followed by torrential rain - was awful.