Archived Special Collections - archives and rare books: Unboxing The Boxer

Ski Sundae: Cafes and Cocktails in the Ski Club of Great Britain Collection

Like all the best start-ups, it began in a café with a small group of people, a shared interest and a new idea. The Ski Club of Great Britain was born at the Café Royal, London on 6th May 1903. One hundred and sixteen years later, the tradition of celebrating important moments and sporting activities over a good meal is still going strong as the Ski Club hosts this year’s End of Season Party on 18th May.

That first meeting was a genteel and informal affair as fourteen well-heeled gentlemen enjoyed the fine food, fine wine and fine surroundings of one of the most fashionable establishments of the day. Over dinner,

“it was agreed to found a ski club…[as] It was pointed out by those who spoke, that the sport had now gained considerable ground in this country, and that an institution was needed which could assist its members in such matters as where to go, what sort of ski to purchase, from whom initial instruction could be had, and what the general condition of the snow was in such and such a place at such and such a time of year, &c.”

(From a letter to the press entitled ‘Ski Club of Great Britain’, signed by E. Syers, E.H. Wroughton and E.C. Richardson).

The original menu for this dinner, signed by the founding members, is a prized piece of the Ski Club archive.

S/006/A/01/01/001 Committee and Annual General Meeting Minutes 1903 – 1909

The following year, another dinner was held at the Café Royal, this time following the Annual General Meeting, a tradition which was to be upheld for decades to come and which brought members of the Committee together with ordinary members, often with a noted guest speaker. As the detectives amongst you may have spotted in my last blog post, in 1912 it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The cuisine on offer in 1904 included ‘Bombe Nesselrode’, the most popular ice pudding of the nineteenth century according to historicfood.com and a clear inheritance from the bygone Victorian era.

Underlining the importance of dinners to the Ski Club and assuring its place in history, the dinner menu was once again used as an attendance record and firmly stuck into the minute book for safe keeping.

S/006/A/01/01/001 Committee and Annual General Meeting Minutes 1903 – 1909

In 1924 the Club held a dinner to celebrate an important milestone in its history: its twenty-first birthday. The location this time was the Hotel Cecil, another renowned venue for dining and dancing, once the largest hotel in Europe. The cover of the menu has been specially designed to incorporate the trefoil logo of the Ski Club of Great Britain in its border and it features an image of a skier. Inside, we learn that toasts were raised to the King, to the Club’s founder members, some of whom were still involved in the running of the Club, and to the Club itself. Perhaps the Coupe Glacée on offer for dessert was the first ever ski sundae?

S/006/A/01/02/001 Circulars to Members 1910 – 1924

S/006/A/01/02/001 Circulars to Members 1910 – 1924

The Club logo has been incorporated into menu design many times since, as in this example (undated).

By the 1930s there was an Entertainments Committee to organise formal dinners and much more besides. In this report from 1934 the music suggested for the Spring Dinner seems to range from a dance band (Ted Sommerfield’s No. 1 Band of seven musicians – does anyone know anything more about them?) to Swiss waltzes and an accordion, an interesting mix of traditional and more current musical styles of the time. The Report also mentions an Exhibition of Skiing Films and a lectures by two great figures in skiing history, Gerald Seligman and Arnold Lunn.

S/006/A/04/06/002 ‘Committee Minutes II’ 1929 – 1952

An orchestra, a steel band and a discotheque provided the entertainment at the 1971 Ski Club Ball, continuing the Club’s penchant for mixing musical styles, but this time there was an opportunity to rest weary dancing legs and regain some energy before the journey home: hot soup was served to all attendees from 2 to 2.30am!

Auprès-ski rather than après-ski, the Ski Club dinner has a long and joyful history of bringing members together to celebrate their Club and their sport. If photographs could talk perhaps the attendees at this Ski Club Dinner eighty years ago would raise this toast to all those current members who will be at the End of Season Party on 18th May: cheers!

Ski Club of Great Britain Dinner, London, 4th May 1939

Louise

NB-this was originally posted at https://dmuheritage.our.dmu.ac.uk/ski-sundae-cafes-and-cocktails-in-the-ski-club-of-great-britain-archive/ on 17 May 2019.

Reel Cool: Films In The Ski Club of Great Britain Collection

As I’ve mentioned before, the Ski Club of Great Britain collection is very varied, comprising not only the administrative record of the organisation but also photographs, skiing equipment, competition awards, a library and a film collection dating from the 1930s to the 1970s.

There are about 90 film reels in the collection. When the Ski Club collection came to DMU Special Collections a list was made, but there is significant information missing from it. Not having the equipment to show the films ourselves, we had to rely on what was physically written on the film reel or tin for a clue as to its contents. We found that some films had no title at all, some films had titles which had been crossed out and replaced with a new title, several films had the same title and very few had dates. Without watching the films it is impossible to tell if the films with the same titles are duplicates, what the contents of the untitled films might be, and what their age is.

We realised we needed specialist help.

The Media Archive of Central England (MACE) is the specialist public film archive for the East and West Midlands, an independent company and registered charity based at the University of Lincoln. MACE has the equipment and, most importantly, the expertise to carry out an assessment of the Ski Club films and provide us with the vital information that we are missing. Not only that, casting an expert eye over the films will enable MACE to report on their condition, give us guidance regarding their future storage, and identify film gauges and formats.

So last month Katharine and I took a trip to Lincoln to deliver the films to MACE.

We were lucky enough to be given a tour around the facility and were very impressed! We saw our films safely into the very cold specialist storage room with its banks of roller racking…

…and then gazed in wonder at the collection of historic film recording and playing equipment on display in the reading room.

We met the members of the MACE team who will be working on the Ski Club films and listened with increasing perplexity and admiration as they explained the work they proposed to do on the collection with equipment like this:

Understanding all of the individual words but little of the overall meaning of the explanation, Katharine and I were impressed with the specialist technical knowledge of the staff, which only confirmed our belief that this was definitely not something we could have attempted ourselves.

One thing we did understand was a comment that white is a tricky colour to work with, meaning that a collection of skiing films presents a real (reel) challenge of technical skill!

We look forward to seeing the results.

Louise

NB- this was originally posted at https://dmuheritage.our.dmu.ac.uk/reel-cool-expert-assessment-for-ski-club-of-great-britain-films/ on 19 June 2019

To shee and not to ski? Problems of pronunciation in the Ski Club of Great Britain collection 

To shee and not to ski? That was the question puzzling winter sports enthusiasts in 1928. Ski Club of Great Britain (SCGB) member Mr. G. D. Greenland was so concerned that he raised the matter in a meeting.

S/006/A/04/05/001 Affiliated Clubs Sub-Committee Minutes, 21 November 1928

The meeting minutes, which are preserved in the SCGB archive held by De Montfort University Special Collections, record that he “asked for an official ruling on the pronunciation of the word “ski”. The Meeting were of the opinion that either of the usual forms might be used.”

Ski history buffs will note that this answer was endorsed by the famous Arnold Lunn, an important figure in the development of the sport, as Chair of the Committee.

While Mr. Greenland may have been reassured to know that he could use “either of the usual forms” of pronunciation of the word ski, today the answer leaves us a little confused. Surely the word is pronounced ‘sKi’ with a hard ‘k’ sound in the middle? Given the spelling, how could there ever have been any doubt?

Go back twenty years to 1908 and the cause for uncertainty begins to emerge. Skiing was a new sport in the midst of development from a Nordic way of life to a codified competitive pastime enjoyed initially by a wealthy elite of mainly British pioneers. The Ski Club of Great Britain itself had been in existence only five years. British skiers looked to Norway’s long history of skiing for inspiration.

 W. R. Rickmers, ‘On the Pronunciation of the Word “Ski”‘, Alpine Ski Club Annual 1908, pp56-58

In the Alpine Ski Club Annual of 1908 W. R. Rickmers, another pioneer of skiing, wrote an article ‘On the Pronunciation of the Word “Ski”.’

Here he explained that ‘ski’ is a loanword from Norwegian. Britain not having historically been a nation of skiers, there was no existing word in English.

The debate over pronunciation was a debate about whether to use the original Norwegian pronunciation, which approximates to “shee” in English, or to read the word as the spelling would suggest it to sound in English: “skee”.

In spite of the fact that twenty years later Mr. Greenland remained unsure, in 1908 a consensus seemed to have been reached and Rickmers was not happy about it:

“There is no scientific excuse for the adoption of the Norwegian pronunciation of the word “ski”… The same root word is found in the English “skid,” and ski pronounced s-k-ee would have been easy and natural…”

Rickmers sees the preference for Norwegian pronunciation as a “laudable wish” but ultimately “mistaken pedantry” and even “snobbishness” which makes little sense and is inconsistent with historical precedent since “[f]or centuries the Englishman has loftily ignored the sound of the foreign tongue”.

Rickmers himself had been using his preferred pronunciation of ski (as we say it today) for years, and had even formulated his own spelling. On 5th May 1903, the day before the Ski Club of Great Britain was founded, Rickmers delivered a speech to The Alpine Club entitled “The Alpine Skee and Mountaineering.”

The “shee” pronunciation still found favour, however. Key figures in the history of the sport took the opposite view to Rickmers. The very first sentence of ‘The Ski-Runner’ by E. C. Richardson (1909), a classic text written by a founding father of skiing, reads:

“Let us begin with a brief description of the ski themselves, premising that the way to pronounce ski is “she”, as in “he, she or it.”

The matter settled, Richardson moves on to other concerns. Given so definite a verdict by so notable and influential a figure, in a book so widely read, it becomes easier to understand how the “shee” pronunciation took hold in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

But it was not to last. Skiing grew in popularity and by the late 1920s when Mr. Greenland asked his question, the Ski Club of Great Britain had grown from a founding committee of 6 men to a membership of nearly 3,000. Members learned about the latest skiing techniques, equipment, resorts, tours, competitions and social events through Club publications such as Ski Notes and Queries and the British Ski Yearbook. In an era without television and in the very early days of radio, the chances are that many skiers seldom heard anyone talking about skiing before they read someone write about it. It can be difficult to pinpoint when and why language change occurs, but perhaps Rickmers was right when he observed that it is

“…the common sense habit of all peoples…to follow the line of least resistance, and to knock the foreign importation into shape, as it were, for immediate use at home.”

It appears that not even the authoritative instructions of well-respected pioneers were enough to counteract the phonetic temptation to say it like you see it. Language evolves through use and the ‘shee-ers’ of the early twentieth century evidently found sentences such as “she shees down the shee slope” too much of a tongue-twister to cope with.

Louise

NB-this was originally posted at https://dmuheritage.our.dmu.ac.uk/to-shee-and-not-to-ski-that-was-the-question/ on 6 August 2019

Half-time: Unboxing the Boxer Project Update, April 2020

I'm reaching for an orange segment and preparing to swap ends as I get to the mid-way point in the project. Hard to say what the final score will be...but I think I'm winning!

I'm pleased to say that cataloguing is now complete on one of the four sports archive collections which make up the project. The Papers of Sir Norman Chester Relating to Football are now catalogued, re-packaged, labeled and boxed, amounting to some 328 files in total. The catalogue is available online to search and browse here: https://specialcollections.catalogue.dmu.ac.uk/records/S/005.

Look out for my next blog post all about the Norman Chester papers!

In the new year I started work on the large England Boxing (formerly Amateur Boxing Association) collection. Comprising trophies, medals, kit and programmes, in addition to the paper administrative records, the archive spans over 120 years of amateur boxing history since the creation of the Amateur Boxing Association in 1880. Notable discoveries so far include the papers of Harry W. Fowler, Association Secretary in the 1930s, and a scrapbook dating from 1885 – 1904 into which are stuck a fantastic selection of advertisements, press cuttings, tickets and circulars, giving an important insight into the earliest days of the organisation.

Meanwhile, progress continues on the Ski Club of Great Britain collection. The Media Archive of Central England (MACE) has now completed its assessment of the Ski Club film reels (see previous blog post 'Reel Cool'). Detail of the content and condition of the films has revealed some real gems! I am excited to learn that there are home movies from the 1930s and 1950s! With this information I can prioritise films for digitisation and we hope that by the end of the project a selection of these old films will be viewable, probably for the first time in over fifty years!

Louise

Pitch Perfect: cataloguing the football papers of Sir Norman Chester

In the absence of any live sport at the moment due to COVID-19, some of us have turned to fiction.

‘The English Game’ (available on Netflix) dramatises the origins of football in the late nineteenth century in a whirl of period costume and class tension which explores themes including amateurism vs professionalism, the codification of rules, the development of administration and the emergence of fandom.

Many sports have their roots in such debates, and more often than not we can find echoes of these concerns trickling down through the histories of their development over the course of the twentieth century. The Papers of Sir Norman Chester Relating to Football are one such example. While cataloguing the collection, I found that I recognised some of the same issues running through his work in football administration almost one hundred years later, in the 1960s to 1980s.

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An academic and specialist in public administration by profession, Chester was a lifelong football supporter. He led two inquiries into the organisation, finance and management of association football in 1966 - 1968 and 1982 - 1983, the former only a few years after the end of the retain and transfer system and maximum wage rule which determined players’ ability to transfer between clubs, and the latter only ten years before the creation of the Premier League. The Chester Papers collection includes files of correspondence and notes Chester compiled as he worked on these inquiries, along with copies of the final reports (see series S/005/01 and S/005/02).

Chester was working during a difficult time for football in which declining attendance figures, crowd behavior, financial struggles and stadium safety were key concerns. The bulk of the collection we hold consists of files relating to Chester’s work for two Trusts which sought to improve facilities at football grounds across Britain.

Appointed for his unique combination of public administration expertise and personal passion for the game, Chester served as Chairman of The Football Grounds Improvement Trust from 1975 - 1979 and as Deputy Chairman of The Football Trust from 1979 - 1986. Following the Ibrox Stadium Disaster in 1971, a report into safety at sports grounds found that existing standards were inadequate. The Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975 required sports stadia with capacities of over 10,000 to carry out improvements to meet new safety criteria. Many Football League club grounds were large enough to fall under the legislation, but found it difficult to finance the necessary alterations.

The Football Grounds Improvement Trust (FGIT) was set up to give grants to football clubs to carry out safety improvement works. Funded by money from the football pools, FGIT considered applications from clubs on an individual basis, using a firm of surveyors to examine the technical details of proposed structural work. As Chairman, Chester reviewed all of these applications and kept copies, along with correspondence, in a series of alphabetised files. These are now catalogued as the series S/005/03/04. Many of the applications include plans and provide a snapshot each club’s facilities and future plans at that moment in time. Sadly, in spite of the grants allocated and the improvements made, disasters such as the Bradford City stadium fire in 1985 showed that many football grounds still required significant redevelopment.

Grant applications can also be found in Chester’s files relating to his work as Deputy Chairman of The Football Trust. As a sister organisation to FGIT, the Football Trust had a wider remit, extending grants to non-League football clubs and supporting research into football’s place in society. The grant files series (S/005/04/05) is a great place to search for local clubs as well as local-authority run grass-roots football grounds.

Chester’s files show that work to improve the safety of football stadia was linked to a desire to improve the environment for spectators and to contribute to a reduction in hooliganism. The ‘Anti-Hooliganism Measures’ series (S/005/04/05/009) documents efforts to understand and tackle problematic crowd behaviour. This work was ongoing at the time of Chester’s death in 1986.

Cataloguing personal papers as opposed to those of an organisation can be challenging. Whereas the documents of an organisation often retain the traces of the creating administration, divided into departments and divisions with defined responsibilities, personal papers can be more amorphous. The challenge presented by the Chester files was that they all consisted of papers relating to football improvement works and the content of each file appeared at first glance to be very similar. With over 300 files to sort through, I needed a way to uncover each file’s history and make sure that I retained its association to other files documenting the same piece of work.

I discovered that the best way to distinguish between files was to establish what Chester’s role was in that particular file – was he Chairman, Deputy Chairman, advisor, individual football fan? The way he signed off his letters was a clue, as was the headed paper. Unlike many collections of personal papers, the Chester collection is entirely concerned with Chester’s work on football administration and I therefore decided that the best way to structure the catalogue was by Chester’s role. There are different series for his work on each football enquiry and each organisation. The only additional material is Chester’s copies of football publications and newspaper cuttings, which he likely compiled for research purposes.

The most personal items are his collection of Oxford United football programmes. Many are annotated with the final score, showing that Chester attended almost all of his local team’s home games over a twenty-year period until the month before he died, remaining a football fan first and a football administrator second.

The catalogue for the Sir Norman Chester Papers Relating to Football can be found here: https://specialcollections.catalogue.dmu.ac.uk/records/S/005.

The rest of Chester’s papers – from which the football collection was separated in times past – are held by Nuffield College, Oxford, where Chester worked for most of his life: https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/the-college/library/special-collection-and-archives/archive/#C.

Louise