One of these individuals was Philip Noel-Baker, a former minister in the Attlee Government who was deeply committed to the cause of disarmament and had achieved international prominence through his writings on the subject during the 1920s and 1930s. Noel-Baker was a Quaker with a distinguished record of ambulance service during the First World War, a former Olympic athlete (Captain of the British track team at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris which was the subject of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire) and a former holder of the Sir Ernest Cassell Chair in International Law at the University of London. He was committed to an ambitious task in the 1950s: the production of a book on the arms race and how it might be checked. He also had plans for a further book on the major disarmament conferences sponsored by the League of Nations in the inter-war years. Noel-Baker recognised that he needed assistance with a project of this magnitude and looked around for a young scholar whom he could respect and whose wits matched his own. He was guided to a newly appointed Assistant Lecturer in International Relations at the London School of Economics, the recent Oxford graduate Hedley Bull, and a working partnership was formed in 1956, the year in which the Olympic Games were held in Australia.