Today marks the 250th anniversary of Robert Jones’s conviction.
On this blog, Jones is best known for his Treatise on Skating—the oldest known book about ice skating—and his skates, which I tried to reproduce. Jones is also known for child molestation. Today day in 1772, he was convicted of molesting Francis Henry Hay, a 12.5-year-old boy.
Jones’s book on skating was published in the same year as his trial, possibly during the trial. The popularity and visibility of the trial helped advertise his book. It’s possible that this popularity is why the book has survived so long.
Today’s book report is on Schaatsen en schaatsenmakers in de 19e en 20e eeuw [Skates and skatemakers in the 19th and 20th centuries] by A. C. Broere. I have the 1988 edition (dark blue cover); there’s also a version with a white cover. I don’t know what the difference is.
It’s only 80 pages long but full of information, in Dutch but with the figure captions in both Dutch and English and an English summary at the end. Most of the figures are pictures of skates in Broere’s collection.
Like virtually all skating books, it starts out with a little on bone skates. It moves pretty quickly through those and early metal-bladed skates, including the picture of St. Lydwina’s accident and the one from Bodleian MS Douce 5.
By page 12, it’s into the 19th century. That section focuses on three types of skate: Dutch curl skates, Frisian skates, and Dutch track skates. It also looks at figure versus speed skates and skates from England and Germany. At the end, there’s a fascinating montage showing different ways of fastening skates to boots with straps in 1928.
Ways to fasten skates. From the Catalogue of the firm of G. A. A. van de Wall of Arnhem, 1928; reprinted in Broere 1988, p. 29.
My favorite chapter was the one on skate-making because it shows pictures of a skate being sharpened on a giant grinding wheel, a blade being forged, and other parts of the skate-making process.
Sharpening and forging skates in about 1930. Broere 1988, 32.
The next chapter covers well-known skate-makers and skate-sellers. Broere argues that the between the latter part of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, skate-makers and -sellers went from being individual craftspeople (e.g., blacksmiths) to corporate factories and sport shops. The text concludes with some examples of new skate technology, like klapskates (new, that is, to the 1980s). It is followed by two appendices—catalogs of skate labels and makers’ marks.
Overall, it’s a great little book. You can buy a copy from bol.com as long as you have a shipping address in the Netherlands or Belgium.
Reference
A. C. Broere. Schaatsen en schaatsenmakers in de 19e en 20e eeuw. Franeker: Van Wijnen. 1988.
This post continues the backlog of skating books books I have to write about. This one is in Dutch, and the title means “roaming on skates through Holland.” It’s a small book—only 96 pages and about 5″x7″—published by Van Gorgum in 1942.
The book includes short chapters on the organization of skating in the Netherlands, winter in Holland, a failed electoral meeting that led to ice roads, birds in winter, winter in history, medals and prizes for tour skates, a wedding on the ice, training and technique, and what tour skaters need to know. The bulk of the book describes skating routes through Holland
The chapter on historical winters references Samuel Jackson Pratt’s description of his winter visit to Rotterdam in 1774. This has not made it into the English-language literature on skating! Apparently, he remarked that “the most dead season in other lands is the most living in Holland” (28). I dug up the original:
It has been justly remarked, that the deadest season in other countries is the most lively in Holland. While this little watry world is frost-locked, which it is sometimes for three months together, it is a kind of universal fair or jubilee. Booths are erected upon the ice, with good fires in them. Horses, rough-shod to the element, run races. Coaches glide over the smooth expanse, like pleasure barges. Men, women, and children, are equally expert. The peasant scates to town with his panniers, the country girl with her milk pails, and many merchants take their longest journies during the season of the ice. You may some|times see a string of twenty or thirty young people, of both sexes, holding each other by the handkerchief, and shoot away almost with the rapidity of lightning.
Pratt 1795, 253–254
The most useful part of the book is the skating routes. The book includes written descriptions of all of them, plus there’s a map at the end that summarizes them all. Someone has colored them in with blue pencil and pen in my copy of the book.
The map from pages 88–89, with coloring.
You can read Zwerven op de schaats door Holland online at the University of Connecticut. It’s one of a series of similar books. There’s also Zwerven op de schaats door Friesland and several books that are simply Zwerven without “op de schaats”—presumably not necessarily about skating.
References
Samuel Jackson Pratt. Gleanings through Wales, Holland and Westphalia. Volume 2. London: Longman and Seeley, 1795.
This book was published in 1966 by the US Figure Skating Association, but exists outside of the Rulebook and test structure. It, according to the foreward [sic], exists
to help further interest, proficiency and enjoyment to the skaters who like this phase of our sport.
Ice Dances, p. 3
The book can be divided into three major sections: Skating fitness, dance figures, and dances.
The section on skating fitness is a fairly short description of exercises for improving posture and flexibility. Most are for off-ice use, but a few are on-ice stroking exercises.
The syncopated roll, p. 19A twizzle exercise, p. 24.
The dance figures are dance steps on a figure eight. The one that survives today is the waltz eight, which is now on the pre-preliminary moves in the field test. Some are quite complex, and I’d have trouble fitting them onto a standard figures circle.
The dance section begins with a glossary of dance terms before presenting a catalog of dances you’ve probably never heard of. Many of the patterns can be found on Skate Dance Diagrams and Tools
The amount of context provided varies. Some include lengthy descriptions, others are just diagrams. The dances are at different levels, from easy to quite difficult. They’re a reminder of age of social dance and should be fun to try on the ice.
Traité du patinage(Treatise on Skating) by Georges Deney, was published twice: in 1891 or 1892 and again in 1914. WorldCat gives the date of the first edition as 1891, but Fowler includes it in his list of books published in 1892. Everyone has the year in square brackets, which means nobody’s really sure. Fowler’s description is minimal:
Just the title, publisher, size (octavo) and number of pages: 4+4+166. Plus it cost 2 francs. Source: Fowler 1898, 96.
There’s not a lot about this book online, other than a few copies in libraries and bookstores, often with a note saying that it’s rare. I can’t find a difference between the 1891 (or 1892) and 1914 editions. Catalog entries give the same number of pages and size for both. I suspect the latter was simply a reprint, especially since the author died in 1898.
Georges Deney was a pen name for Julian-Félix Delauney (1848–1898). He also wrote Traité du canne, boxe et baton(Treatise on boxing, cane, and stick) under his real name for the same publisher in about the same years as the skating book. I think the 1914 editions of both may be parts of a grand reprint scheme by the publisher.
Deney advises starting by sliding in shoes before progressing to skates. He calls skating “le cousin germain de la danse” (the first cousin of dance) (p. 45). While diagrams of some figures—including threes to a center, the Maltese cross, and a heart—are included, the emphasis is clearly on free skating. Deney’s skating is meant to appeal to an audience.
The book concludes with a few brief chapters on different attempts to produce ice by feats of engineering and the rules of the “cercle des patineurs” (circle of skaters).
Courtney Jones is being the third Jones discussed on this blog, after Robert Jones and Ernest Jones. I have no idea whether they are related.
This Jones’s achievement is the publication of a memoir, Around the Ice in Eighty Years: An Irreverent Memoir by an Accidental Champion, currently for sale only in the UK. It covers much of what he is known for in both skating and fashion design, including his own competitive experience, his involvement with the ISU and, perhaps most famously, the costumes he designed for Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.
The book begins with an introduction, “Life’s Rich Tapestry,” that introduces all the characters. This is important because the book is not entirely in chronological order; people come and go throughout it, and it’s nice to have them all lined up in one place.
The bulk of the book is a roughly chronological summary of Jones’s life on the ice, with some excursions into his professional education and life as a fashion designer. It includes descriptions of his five World and six European Championship medals with two different partners along with the difficulty of balancing skating with working to support himself.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter is 6, “You Have To Go Down To Go Up,” which covers several transitions in his life: trying to get a job in fashion design, moving in with his partner Bobby Thompson, and joining the ISU Dance Committee. There’s quite a lot in this chapter, but one important thing is missing: photographs of Jones and Thompson’s two cats, Charlie and Fred. Jones does include an interesting prediction for the future of figure skating:
“[i]t’s obvious that sooner or later the ISU will have to capitulate and allow same sex couples to compete in the Pairs Skating and Ice Dance events; so many sports now have to reassess their basic rules and regulations and I doubt whether, as the years progress, ours will have any alternative but to follow suit.”
Jones 2021, 103
We’ll see what happens.
The last three chapters stand alone: “Creating a Winning Performance” (advice to skaters), “Golden Boys: Curry and Cousins,” and “Our Last Golden Couple: Torvill and Dean.” The latter includes a photograph of the spoon used to stir the dye used on their famous Bolero costumes (p. 188).
The writing is lively and conversational throughout. The casual layout—including the eccentric but consistent capitalization and punctuation—adds to the homey feel and “irreverent” conversational tone. Overall, it’s a broad overview of many years in skating with some very interesting insights. You can get it from YPD Books and Amazon UK.
Reference
Courtney Jones. 2021. Around the Ice in Eighty Years: An Irreverent Memoir by an Accidental Champion. York: Herstory Writing & Interpretation / York Publishing Services.
I haven’t been writing much here lately, but some new things are up on Schaatshistorie.nl:
Two videos from my new Evolution of Skating series: Bone skates and Archetype skates. Those links are to the English versions, they are also in Dutch here and there.
“Whither bone skates research?”, a short article summarizing the state of research on bone skates and suggesting directions for future research. This is a revised version of a presentation I gave at the 13th meeting of the Worked Bone Research Group in Montréal in 2019. In English with Dutch to come.
And my article on the figures events at ISI Worlds last summer, “Figuring it out at 2020ne Worlds,” just appeared in Recreational Ice Skating. They haven’t posted the Fall 2021 issue yet, but maybe they will have by the time you read this. It’s on pages 23–24.
I just read David Block’s Baseball before We Knew It. As might be inferred from its title, this book is not about skating. It’s still great. I found a lot of parallels to my work on skating history in it. It covers some of the same ground that histories of skating cover, namely, various nineteenth-century and earlier works on sports and games.
Among these is Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, first published in 1801. Block accuses Strutt of “taking some serious liberties with his scholarship”—specifically, fabricating evidence for club-ball, an early ball-and-stick game, by changing a jug to a ball in his copy of a picture from a medieval manuscript (Block 2005, 104–107). This is cause to look on the rest of his work (including his short passage on skating!) with more than usual suspicion.
Block also talks about the excitement of finding rules for a game called “das englische Base-ball” (English baseball) in a German book from 1796. That book was Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths’ Spiele zur Übung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes: für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde unschuldiger Jugendfreuden (Games for the Exercise and Recreation of Body and Spirit: For Young People, Their Teachers, and All Friends of the Innocent Joys of Youth). Gutsmuths is also an early but often-neglected source of information on skating. This particular book includes a few pages (starting with 217, or 239 of the linked pdf) on different games played on ice. Maybe I’ll write about them another time.
References
David Block. 2005. Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Joseph Strutt. 1801. Glig-gamena angel-deod, or, the Sports and Pastimes of the People of England: Including the Rural and Domestic Recreations, May-Games, Mummeries, Pageants, Processions, and Pompous Spectacles, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London: T. Bensley. The second (1810) edition is available in HathiTrust.
Figure skating’s origin story relates the sport to Norse mythology, but this claim does not stand up to a careful analysis. Its roots can be traced to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquaries interested in the old north. The popularity of skating and early scholars’ imperfect understanding of Old Norse led to skating appearing in translations and adaptations of medieval Scandinavian literature despite being absent from the original. The origin story’s development can be traced through manuals and popular histories of figure skating from the eighteenth century to the present. This paper exposes figure skating’s origin story as the invention of a privileged class to elevate a popular leisure activity and explains its enduring function in supporting the upper-class image of figure skating.
