Isabella Grenander. Image copyright the British Library Board. courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive.
Henning Grenander is one of the big names in the early days of figure skating. He was born in 1974 in Sweden and won worlds in 1898, when it was held in London. In the same year, according to Hines, he relocated to England, where he served as a judge in the 1908 Olympics (2011, 103). He died in 1958.
On November 30, 1901, he married Isabella Wilson, age 27, who was born in Edinburgh. The ceremony took place at All Saints’ Church and was followed by a reception at Isabella’s parents’ house. They received “numerous and costly” presents. Afterward, they left for St. Moritz, one of the Swiss resorts that was popular among skaters (“Weddings,” 836–837).
The 1911 census records them living at 13 Upper Wimpole Street in Marylebone, London, with their eight-year-old daughter Jean, a nurse, a cook, three housemaids, a kitchenmaid, a butler, and a footman. This, along with Grenander’s work on the medical field, points to them being quite well-off.
Did Isabella skate? Of course she did. If the St. Moritz honeymoon wasn’t enough of a clue, in 1905, The Bystander called her and her sister “perhaps the most skilful and the most accomplished skaters in London,” and yet she doesn’t seem to have competed. Their daughter Jean, however, seems to have avoided making her own place in the annals of skating history.
References
1911 England Census, digital image s.v. “Isabella Grenander.” Ancestry.com.
The Bystander. 1905. “Skilful Habituées of Prince’s Skat…” The Bystander. November 8, 1905.
Gentlewoman. 1901. “Weddings of the Week.” December 14, 1901.
James R. Hines. 2011. Historical Dictionary of Figure Skating. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press.
London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754–1932, digital image s.v. “Henning Grennan Esaias Grenander.” Ancestry.com.
Since my last post on them, I’ve been tracking Mr. W. A. V. Waldron and Miss B. Waldron through Ancestry.com. Here’s some of what I’ve been able to piece together.
William Arthur Vaughan Waldron was born in 1876 in Kent and died in 1933 in Penzance. Tracking this name through the census records revealed the most likely candidate as the William Waldron who, in 1891, was living in Hampstead, London with his dad Herbert, who was a retired army captain, and two sisters, Lilian and Kathleen.
Going back to the 1871 census, a few years before William was born, yields more information about this family. At that time, Herbert and Margaret Waldron were living in Sussex. They had four-year-old twin daughters, Beatrice M. and Lilian C., who were born in Southsea, and a ten-year-old son.
The 1901 census records 24-year-old Vaughan Waldron, born in Kent and working as a secretary, living with his 34-year-old sister M. Beatrice, born in Southsea. The names are slightly different, but the ages and birthplaces match my earlier finds. Beatrice apparently had not married, leaving her “Miss B. Waldron.” They lived, with a cook from Barbados, at 154 Sauderdale Mansions in London.
Were these the W. A. V. and B. Waldron of skating fame? It seems possible, but there is much more work to be done.
References
1871 England Census, Colgate, Sussex, digital image s.v. “Lilian C Waldron,” Ancestry.com.
1891 England Census, Hampstead, London, digital image s.v. “William Waldron,” Ancestry.com.
1901 England Census, Paddington, London, digital image s.v. “M Beatrice Waldron,” Ancestry.com.
“Cornwall, England, Parish Registers, 1538-2010,” digital image s.v. “William Arthur Vaughan Waldron,” Ancestry.com.
“England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837-1915,” digital image s.v. “William Arthur V Waldron,” Ancestry.com.
Johan Ekeblad (1629–1697) was a prolific Swedish letter-writer who spent a lot of time on the Continent. According to the Swedish Academy, publisher of a great dictionary that’s rather like the Swedish version of the OED, he was the first to use the word skridsko in Swedish. This word is for metal-bladed skates, not bone skates, which have their own word, islägg.
Ekeblad wrote many letters to his brother, Claes, while he was abroad. The Swedish Academy says he first used skridsko in 1650, and it appears several times in his numerous letters. Here’s an interesting bit about his own skating experience, from a letter dated December 15, 1652, in Stockholm:
Jag tror visst om I visste att jag igår var ute och försökte till att löpa på skridsko, så skulle I mena att jag nu vore helt bättre i mitt lår. Men jag skall försäkra. Er på jag lopp inte mycket, utan av ett fall jag strax i begynnelsen gjorde har jag nu så ont igen så I skola inte tro det. Dock haver jag nu hittat på en slags olja som mig mycket lisar och blir fulle bättre hoppas jag.
I think certainly if you knew that I was out yesterday and tried to skate [literally: run on metal-bladed skates], you would think that my leg would now be completely better. But I will reassure you. I haven’t skated much, [and] aside from [because of?] a fall I took right at the beginning it is now so bad again that you wouldn’t believe it. However, I have now found a type of oil that makes me very happy and I hope to become completely better.
Ekeblad 2004, 67-68. Translation my own.
I don’t know what was wrong with his leg, but he complained about it frequently in his letters.
His letters put Ekeblad’s skating in Stockholm a decade ahead of English diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, who famously observed skating in London in December, 1662.
Henry Eugene Vandervell (1824-1908) is well-known in skating circles as the “father of English style skating.” He’s remembered for inventing the counter, writing (with T. Maxwell Witham) A System of Figure Skating, and chairing the Ice Figure Committee of the National Skating Association (Hines, 233). But the skating books say little about his personal life. I spent some time going through the records on familysearch.org to see what I could piece together.
Henry was born in 1824 to Francis Vandervell. In 1854, he married Rebecca Batt, who was the same age as him. They don’t seem to have had any children, and she died in 1867.
Henry then became an attractive prospect. A wealthy widower who worked as a stockbroker and lived in a fancy townhouse, he simply had to get married, as Jane Austen noted (Austen 2008). His townhouse, 28 Aldridge Road Villas, is currently worth about 4.5 million pounds, according to zoopla.co.uk.
Just two years after Rebecca’s death, Vandervell married Fanny Thornton, who was 26 years younger than him. In the next decade, they had at least five children: Henry Eugene (aka Harry), Charles Anthony, Percy, Ethel, and Maud. Charles Anthony went on to do important work on the electrical systems in cars, and Ethel worked for the Red Cross during World War I.
Henry died in 1908, and Fanny lived until 1925. The burning question that remains is, did Fanny skate? Given Henry’s involvement in the sport, I’d be surprised if she didn’t. And his (and T. Maxwell Witham’s) remarks on ladies skating in the first edition of A System of Figure Skating—published the year he married her—suggest that if she didn’t already skate, he would have encouraged her:
We can scarcely imagine a more delightful, exhilarating, and health-giving exercise for ladies in winter-time than skating… We rejoice to think that within the last few years the girls of England have been taking to skating in considerable numbers.
When I put together a new edition of an old skating book, I like to include some biographical information about the author in the introduction. Henry C. Lowther, the author of the three little books I’m working on now (Edges and Striking, Principle of Skating Turns, and Combined Figure-Skating) is turning out to be a rather slippery subject.
There were two Henry C. Lowthers alive at the right time to have written the books: Henry Crofton Lowther (1858-1939) and Henry Cecil Lowther (1869-1940). In addition to similar names, they had similar lives. Both were knighted, and both married women named Dorothy. In this article, I’ll call them by their middle names to make it easy to keep track of who is who.
I haven’t been able to find a relationship between the two Lowthers. Cecil was the nephew of the Earl of Lonsdale, and Crofton was the son of Reverend Brabazon Lowther (who was not rich) and Ellen Jane Legh, the only surviving child of Ellen Turner of Shrigley Abduction fame (Ashby and Jones, 189-190).
The big question is, which one wrote the skating books?
In the bibliography to The English Style, James Hines lists the books under the name “Henry Cecil Lowther,” which means he thought Cecil wrote them. Hines doesn’t discuss Lowther in this book or any of his other books, so I can’t say why he picked the Henry he did. I suspect he simply looked the books up in a library catalog, like OCLC WorldCat. WorldCat Identities has the books listed on Cecil’s page. Crofton does not appear in WorldCat.
Elaine Hooper, historian of the National Ice Skating Association—the body that governs figure skating in the UK—thinks the skating Lowther is Crofton because his knighthoods match the knighthoods listed in his membership records exactly (Cecil received different knighthoods) and because two addresses in the NISA’s records match addresses associated with Crofton.
Frances Glover, secretary of the Royal Skating Club, confirmed the identification through membership records. The skating books note that Lowther was a member of the Skating Club, which merged with another club to become the Royal Skating Club in about 1930. The old membership lists include “Sir Henry Crofton Lowther,” who is definitely not Cecil!
So, Crofton wrote the books, but it seems like he has been lost to time. His books have been attributed to Cecil, another man who lived a similar life. It’s time to separate the two men and bring Crofton into the light. Here’s a picture of Sir Henry Crofton Lowther, diplomat, expert skater, and author of three books on skating.
Sir Henry Crofton Lowther, by Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea. Platinum print, 1890s. NPG Ax15684. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
The confusion in WorldCat makes me wonder whether Crofton is actually responsible for any of the other books attributed to Cecil. From Pillar to Post and The Scots Guards in the Great War 1914-1918 were definitely by Cecil, and Old English Silver is about Cecil’s collection. Among the Liars is a short article listed under H. C. Lowther in WorldCat; the index reveals that Cecil wrote it. But some of the others invite questions.
There’s a Report on the Railway Systems of Brasil published in 1904 by H. C. Lowther. Crofton was part of the diplomatic service in Brazil at that time; he could have written it.
The Handbook of the Danish Army(1904) is harder to attribute: Cecil, a military man, and Crofton, the British Minister to Denmark, both seem like possible authors. But Crofton was busy in Brazil at that time; he didn’t take up his post in Denmark until 1913. Cecil was part of the War Office, to which the publication is attributed, which makes him the more likely candidate.
Separating Crofton from Cecil is a good start, but there’s more to the problem. The plot thickens with Geology of the Alexo Mine area, Clergue-Dundonald Twps., District of Cochrane, Ontario, published in 1950—after both Cecil and Crofton had died—by what seems to be yet another H. C. Lowther. Perhaps this is the Colonel Lowther mentioned by Irving Brokaw in connection with Canada and the Connaught Cup (192). How does he fit into the story?
Bibliography
A. Ashby and A. Jones, 2003. The Shrigley Abduction: A Tale of Anguish, Deceit, and Violation of the Domestic Hearth. Stroud: Sutton Publishing.
I. Brokaw, 1925. The Art of Skating. New York: American Sports Publishing.
Christie, Manson, and Woods, 1930. Old English Silver. London: Christie, Manson, and Woods.
J. R. Hines. 2008. The English Style: Figure Skating’s Oldest Tradition. Westwood, MA: Neponset River Press.
H. C. Lowther. 1900. Principle of Skating Turns.London: Horace Cox.
H. C. Lowther. 1902. Edges and Striking. London: Horace Cox.
H. C. Lowther. 1902. Combined Figure-Skating. London: Horace Cox.
H. C. Lowther, 1904. Handbook of the Danish Army. London: H. M. S. O.
H. C. Lowther, 1904. Report on the Railway Systems of Brasil. London: H. M. S. O.
H. C. Lowther, 1911. From Pillar to Post. London: Edward Arnold.
H. C. Lowther, 1925. The Scots Guard in the Great War 1914-1918. London: J. Murray.
H. C. Lowther, 1950. Geology of the Alexo Mine area, Clergue-Dundonald Twps., District of Cochrane, Ontario.London, Ontario: Department of Geology, University of Western Ontario.
