Category: Books and articles

Mrs. Syers in the Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung

Bev
Header to the first issue available in ANNO (July 1, 1880).

I recently discovered the Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung archive in ANNO: Historische österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften at the Austrian National Library. Spanning 1880–1927 with a few gaps, it is a fantastic resource for skating history! (Provided you read German.)

This newspaper was published in Vienna, home of the famous Vienna Skating Club of Spuren auf dem Eise. It includes notes from that club. Coverage of each half-year’s skating events can be found using the index to each volume.

Here, for example, is the coverage of the 1902 World Championship, which Mrs. Syers audaciously entered. She placed second following Ulrich Salchow. The Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung reports (my translation):

A lady took second place. “Mrs. Syers” would surely win first or second prize in a World Championship for Ladies, but not in one for Ladies and Gentlemen. The difference between her and Salchow was no less than 118 points. In all the previous World Championships, this difference was never more than 20 points. … How inferior the Berlin skater Gordon (3rd place) and Mr. Torrome (4th) were can also be seen from the huge difference in points.

“Die Weltmeisterschaft 1902,” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, February 23, 1902, 183.

This is very different from the positive view of Mrs. Syers in English-language media! However, it does go on to say something nice:

Mrs. Syers was the only competitor who didn’t leave any of the loops in the dreaded backwards paragraph out. … Mrs. Syers made all the figures small and without power, but correct and on axis.

“Die Weltmeisterschaft 1902,” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, February 23, 1902, 183.

But of course, a Viennese paper thought Viennese skaters could do better:

Mr. and Mrs. Syers won the pair skating; they presented their graceful and decent figures slowly and uncertainly to the 10,000 spectators. In comparison with our excellent Viennese pairs there is only one adjective: “Anemic.”

“Die Weltmeisterschaft 1902,” Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung, February 23, 1902, 183.

Why didn’t these “excellent Viennese pairs” participate in the competition?

The Field

Bev1 Comment

When you read old skating books (or this blog), the Field comes up a lot. This post explains what it is and why it’s important for skating history.

The Field’s logo. Image © The British Library Board. Courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.

The Field began in 1853 as a weekly magazine in 1853 aimed at rich men with estates in the country. They apparently needed advice on a variety of sporting matters—hunting, fishing, yachting, shooting—as well as agriculture and investments. Winter issues included regular columns on skating.

These columns are fascinating for anyone with a geeky interest in skating around the turn of the previous century. They include reports on competitions, tests passed, and meetings of the National Skating Association. The big names in the development of figure skating reported their new discoveries, like counters and rockers. Debates raged over what to call turns, how figures should be skated, and, later on, whether the English style or the International style was superior. Skaters who had traveled abroad to train related the details of their experiences. Sometimes, they included photographs or (more often) diagrams. Historic books about skating occasionally refer to articles published in the Field, making it an important part of skating history.

Its short and vague title makes the Field difficult to find in library catalogs. The best source for it I’ve found is the British Newspaper Archive, which has all issues from 1853 to 1911 (except 1857 and 1864) in a searchable format. The search function isn’t perfect, but it is much better than paging through heavy volumes of crumbling newsprint by hand. The main drawback is that the site requires a subscription fee.

Although the Field is still published today, you won’t find anything about skating in it!

Spuren auf dem Eise

Bev2 Comments

This is one of the great books of figure skating. The full title is Spuren auf dem Eise: Die Entwicklung des Eislaufes auf der Bahn des Wiener Eislauf-Vereins [Tracings on the Ice: The Development of Ice Skating on the Rink of the Vienna Skating Club], and the authors are Demeter Diamantidi, Carl von Korper, and Max Wirth. It’s in German and, as far as I know, has not been translated into English.

Spuren went through two editions in the nineteenth century: a first edition published in 1881 and a second edition published in 1892. Both cover roughly the same topics in the same number of pages (about 350), but the second edition has more material, and a larger format to accommodate it.

This book, especially the second edition, is great for people studying special figures. About two-thirds of it consists of a catalog of figures, including some that would now be called freestyle, like one-foot spins on all four edges (p. 295–297 in the second edition).

The second edition originally included a booklet of figure diagrams that’s now very hard to find. Most copies have lost their booklets over the years, and a copy with both parts demands a much higher price on the used market than a copy that’s missing the booklet. Without the booklet, the book is much less useful, as the vast majority of figure diagrams—essential for anyone trying to skate the figures—are in the booklet.

Fortunately the University of Connecticut has been kind enough to scan its copy, including the booklet, and put it online. You can find it here.

Skates Made of Bone

Bev

My book on bone skates is available for pre-order! You can get it directly from the publisher, McFarland, from Amazon, or from whatever bookstore you like best.

The cover. Sourced from McFarland.

This book is the result of nearly 20 years of research, though there were many distractions during that time, some of them quite substantial—like a PhD in an unrelated field. The first book-length study of bone skates, it brings together literary and archaeological evidence to provide a comprehensive description of how bone skates were made and used and fits them into the larger context of European history.

Skaters History on Ice and Roller Skating

Bev2 Comments
The cover of Skaters History. From my collection.

I first met this book at the 2018 World Figure Championship when Eddie Shipstad, Jr., showed me a copy he found among his uncle Roy’s things. It’s a little book published by the author, Julian T. Fitzgerald, in 1916.

After the competition, I came home and looked for a copy of my own. It turns out it’s pretty rare: OCLC Worldcat only lists two libraries that have copies. I also didn’t find a scan or used copy in the usual online places. But, I did discover that the National Museum of Roller Skating reprinted it in 2011! It’s $15 in the online gift shop. This edition is enlarged by 25% for readability and includes a new forward by George Pickard.

The book starts with administrative documents from various skating governing bodies, but mainly consists of short biographies of roller and ice skaters and rink managers, with pictures of many. The order appears random and is not explained. Some of the interesting skaters profiled are Edward C. Hill, inventor of the ball of twine (53), John F. Davidson, “The World’s Greatest Stilt, Acrobatic and Trick Skater” (62), Harry G. Schroeder, pictured on his motorcycle-based ice-clearing machine (88), Fred J. Robson, “Former Canadian Champion,” who is pictured wearing so many medals he ran out of space on his shirt and had to hang them from his pants (117).

The pictures of ice skaters show some of the women and men wearing white boots. This is interesting because Sonja Henie is often credited with popularizing (and something with innovating) white boots among female skaters. When the book was published, she was only four years old. These pictures show that she wasn’t really responsible for this fashion trend.

In the middle of the book (pages 96-108), there’s a section called “Figure Skating Program for Ice and Rollers and How to Learn It” by Allen I. Blanchard. It covers the usual basic figures and turns, plus moves that are less common today, like grapevines and crosscuts. It ends with a list of “Hints to Skaters,” starting with the advice to

Never look down at your skates as it gives you an ungainly appearance; look about thirty feet ahead

Skaters History on Ice and Roller Skating, 108

This is still good advice today—as long as you’re not trying to trace a figure.

The book ends with a list of records in speed skating and events that are no longer held: hurdle jumping, barrel jumping, high and long jumps, and backward and one-foot skating. The barrel jumping record was set by Edmund Lamy, who jumped 12 barrels in a row in 1913. He also set the record for the longest jump on skates, 25 ft 7 in, on the same day.

Overall, it’s a nice book that people interested in skaters from the turn of the last century will enjoy. Its strengths are in the wide variety of people included—rink managers as well as skaters, and show skaters and innovators as well as competitors—and the pictures and lists of records.

Bibliography

Julian T. Fitzgerald, 1916. Skaters History on Ice and Roller Skating. Chicago: Julian T. Fitzgerald. Reprinted in 2011 by the National Museum of Roller Skating, Lincoln, NE.

Writing projects

Bev
The final manuscript atop the archive notes and drafts.

The final manuscript of my book on bone skates is now on its way to McFarland, who will publish it. Watch for it in bookstores later this year.

Now I’m ready to get going on my next big writing project, a history of figures. As part of it, I’ve started a page of resources for people interested in skating them now. Along the way, I plan to produce a few more Skating History Press editions. Next in line is Lowther’s set of three little books: Edges & Striking, Principle of Skating Turns, and Combined Figure-Skating. Only an handful of copies survive in libraries around the world.

You’ll probably see more about figures than bone skates in future blog posts. But I’m sure I’ll find more to say about bone skates—they’ve been on my mind for nearly 20 years.

On the Outside Edge

Bev

cover-revised-smallMy edition of On the Outside Edge: Being Diversions in the History of Skating is now available on Amazon at such a low price ($8.31) that Amazon will lose money on each copy sold.

The author, George Herbert Fowler, is quite an interesting person. He worked as a scientist at first, but later switched to archive management and made great contributions to both fields. He was also an avid adult skater who contributed to skating by writing a great book on its history. On the Outside Edge chronicles the history of skating until 1897. For years, it had only been available in a handful of rare books rooms in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Fowler describes his own experiments with bone skates (he didn’t know about pushing with a pole, so he tried to push with his feet, with some success) and mistakes in translations of Old Norse literature that led people to believe characters were skating when they weren’t (sometimes they were skiing). The latter part of the book describes the development of skating (primarily figure skating) in various countries. At the end, there is a table of skating moves, dates, and references to where they were first published. All this is done in a quirky style that is a joy to read. I think it’s been under-appreciated for at least a century.

In this edition, I’ve added a lot of commentary to bring Fowler’s work up to date. I also found many of the pictures he mentions and reproduced them in this book. This is the first new edition of the book since 1897.

The other Jones

Bev

Readers of this blog and everybody else who’s interested in skating history already know about Robert Jones’s Treatise on Skating. But there’s another book, a much more recent one, by a Jones. Ernest Jones is well-known in psychoanalytic circles as a disciple of Freud, and his background on psychology provides the foundation for his book, or rather books, because The Elements of Figure Skating went through two very different editions.

The first edition, published in 1931, comes in at only 135 pages. It begins with the claim that it “is addressed by a beginner to beginners, and the distinctive feature of it is its psychological mode of approach to their problems in studying Figure Skating.” It’s meant to cover the first year of skating, for someone who “has an average degree of suppleness and confidence” and skates about an hour a day (5). In concrete terms, this includes the forward eights, the forward outside three turn, the forward serpentines, and the back outside eight—basically first test. Some attention is also given to ice dancing.

The second edition, published in 1950, is, at 310 pages, a significant expansion of the first. By this point, Jones had had nearly 20 more years to refine his skating skills, and the book makes it clear that he has made good use of them. It includes all kinds of exercises for figures and combinations of them, which makes it a must for anyone doing figures today. What it lacks is details of brackets, rockers, and counters; Jones notes this in his preface and refers to the reader to T. D. Richardson’s Modern Figure Skating.

In the second edition, Jones includes descriptions of various grapevines, which have mostly been forgotten today. These long, intricate two-footed figures are fun to play with but hard to learn from books. Jones notes that “To describe them in detail has been held to be impossible, a challenge which I found hard to resist” (8). People stopped doing them because they were focused on winning competitions, which meant avoiding two-footed skating as much as possible. Jones calls this “a pity” because skating on two feet can look good and helps develop smooth turns and flexibility (218). He also adds a chapter on teaching skating and another on the history of skating. The former shows how his background in psychology informs his coaching, and the latter is interesting if not entirely accurate.

The writing style is clear and entertaining, as demonstrated by the description of the Demon Eight, reproduced here:

I will finish this section by mentioning a particularly ferocious figure known as the Demon Eight. It is so called because of its having been invented by the Devil, a fact which will be obvious to you as soon as you try it. There is only one gentleman—let me call him Mr. A. B., not Mr. B. A.—who can skate it with easy proficiency, so it is not surprising that he has been suspected of complicity in sorcery, if not of something worse. Carry out a full circle on an ordinary No. 1–No. 2 Backward Outside, but before finishing the circle draw the free foot again forward, slip it across the skating foot and in front of it, i.e. inside the circle, and on reaching your centre strike off on a Backward Outside edge on this second foot. What had been the skating leg remains somehow attached to your person, and gradually finds its way to the front. The shoulders have to be strongly reversed in preparation for the change. With luck—and skill—you are now again in a No. 1 Position and you have to hold it until you change to a No. 2 and complete the circle. The change was an inter-circular one, for there are two circles: so it cannot be a Mohawk. But both circles are skated on the same edge; so it cannot be a Choctaw. In fact it is pure wickedness, not to say devilry. (216–217)

Go try it.

References

Ernest Jones. 1931. The Elements of Figure Skating. London: Methuen.

Ernest Jones. 1950. The Elements of Figure Skating. London: Allen & Unwin.

T. D. Richardson. 1930. Modern Figure Skating. London: Methuen.

Further reading

Todd Dufresne and Gary Genosko. 1995. “Jones on Ice: Psychoanalysis and Figure Skating.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 76.1:123–133.

The first book on skating

Bev7 Comments

Cover image

Robert Jones’s A Treatise on Skating, first published in 1772, is generally considered the first book on skating. It went through several editions between 1772 and 1855, with numerous additions and changes over time.

Aimed at beginners, it has two parts: a section on basic skills, including choosing and putting on skates, stroking and edges, and a section on more advanced maneuvers, such as the spiral line and the flying Mercury (shown in the cover image). It provides a nice overview of what skating was like back in the day. People didn’t do fancy jumps or spins, or even figures. The advanced skaters seemed most interested in dramatic body positions as they glided across the ice.

In 1855, W. E. Cormack updated Jones’s Treatise in response to an unspecified event that occurred three years earlier. I think this may have been the publication of Cyclos’s book, which was the first attempt at systematizing skating. Later, Henry Vandervell and T. Maxwell Witham took this further with A System of Figure Skating in England while Demeter Diamantidi, Max Wirth, and Karl von Korper did the same in Austria with Spuren auf dem Eise. These books laid the foundation for the schedule of compulsory figures, which was the foundation of figure skating for nearly a century.

Based on Cormack’s comments, I think there may have been some resistance to systematizing what had previously been an abstract art, just as there has been resistance to creating a code of points for scoring skating in the ISU judging system.

The link above is to my edition of Jones’s book, which includes both the full text of the original an Cormack’s updates.

References

Robert Jones. 1772. A Treatise on Skating. London: J. Ridley.

John Cyclos [George Anderson]. 1852. The Art of Skating with Plain Directions for the Acquirement of the Most Difficult and Elegant Maneuvers. Glasgow: Thomas Murray and Son.

Henry Eugene Vandervell & T. Maxwell Witham. 1869. A System of Figure Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. London: Horace Cox.

Demeter Diamantidi, Karl von Korper, and Max Wirth. 1881. Spuren auf dem Eise: die Entwicklung des Eislaufes auf der Bahn des Wiener Eislauf-Vereines. Vienna: Alfred Holder.