I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, and I’m thinking about my grandmother. Born in 1902 to a homemaker and farm manager, she was a young woman at a time when women’s roles were rapidly changing in post-WWI Britain. She graduated with a PhD in botany from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and took a position at the University of Durham that year.
My grandmother was an academic and she was also a grass hockey player. All of her academic achievements are well-documented, but about her life as an athlete, I know almost nothing. I do know that women in the 1920s were taking the field of sport by storm, and that 28 women from Great Britain participated in the 1924 Olympics in Paris, bringing home 8 medals. Gertrude Erle was the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926, beating the men’s record in the process. Did my grandmother cheer when she read the news?
I know nothing about my grandparents’ courtship, but my grandfather was also an athlete scholar. He graduated with a first-class degree in classics from Cambridge and played rugby for England in the early 1920s, going on to become captain of the Rugby Club. For my grandfather, intellectual and athletic idealism was rooted in his historical moment—the rebirth of the Olympic movement, the celebration of classical traditions of masculinity, and new regimes of health and physical exercise all contributed to his success.
What I want to know is: were my grandparents attracted to each other as athletes or scholars? Of course, this question suggests a false distinction—both of them were a mix of both. But what I mean is: did they talk about sport on their first dates? Or did they talk about the careers they aspired to as scholars? What drew them to each other? I doubt they went for runs together before hitting the books, but I like to think they found some way to speak to each other’s passions, both athletic and intellectual.
All of this is idle dreaming, on my part. My grandfather suffered with mental illness throughout his adult life, perhaps as a result of his time in the trenches in WWI. He never was able to follow in the footsteps of his father, a famous classics scholar, despite his early promise. My grandmother found herself a single mother during WWII, temporarily when my grandfather was posted to Egypt, and then permanently, when he divorced her at the war’s end. She went on to achieve success as an academic, despite the obstacles placed in front of university women. But it must have been hard, for my gran, to be a professor and a single mother of three at a time when divorce was rare and conservative domesticity was on the rise. Did she ever dream of her grass hockey days and the promise of the 1920s, in those challenging years?
Today, I honour my gran and the rugby player she loved when running up and down a field meant so much to both of them, in the days before the world went to hell in a handbasket, again.
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