WOMEN'S SPORT HISTORY

The Mystery Of Dorothy Prior

by Bruce Kidd
Published in CAAWS Action Bulletin, Winter 1995

Some time ago, an elderly women in a Toronto hospital lingered fondly over the yellowing pages of a scrapbook she kept by her side. It was, she told the nurses, her most treasured possession. When she died, the hospital staff decided to find a home for such a valued record, and last summer the scrapbook was passed along to me.

The trail from the hospital has gone cold, but the scrapbook seems to have belonged to Dorothy Prior, the first Canadian woman to swim at the Olympic Games.

The first pages are devoted to clippings noting the accomplishments of the top Toronto swimmers and divers of the mid-1920s – presumably those who inspired her – such as Flora Martin and George Young, who won the women’s and men’s sections of the 1¾ mile Across the (Toronto) Bay Race in 1926. But a Mrs. K. Prior is listed as one of the contestants. Did Dorothy follow in her mother’s footsteps?

Gradually Dorothy Prior’s name and photo take over. She first appears as one of 13 young women in middies who passed the Royal Life Saving Society exam. On the very next page a headline proclaims, "Dorothy Prior Wins Breast-stroke Race" and someone has underlined the paragraph about her race in ink in the column below. Other articles record her freestyle and diving championships. Most of the remaining pages are devoted to her achievements.

The scrapbook confirms that there was a time when female athletes in amateur sports were regularly covered and featured in the mainstream press, and daily columnists like Alexandrine Gibb kept their readers up to date with women’s sports gossip.

In 1928, Prior’s athletic career began to soar. She lowered her best time in the 220 yard breaststroke by almost 20 seconds, reclaiming the Canadian record from American Agnes Geraghty, a silver medallist at the 1924 Games, and then setting a new American record at the US championships. It was the first time ever that a Canadian had broken an American swim record. The noted New York coach, Louis de Breda Handley, published her photograph in his widely-read Ocean Bulletin of Swimming (sponsored by the Ocean Bathing Suit Company). Later that year, she was the only Canadian female (along with six men) named to the Amsterdam-bound Canadian swim team.

1928 was the first time Canadian women were entered in the (Summer) Olympic Games, and the small contingent of six track and field competitors, manager Alex Gibb, chaperone Marie Parkes, and Prior received a gala send-off from Toronto’s Union Station. Several pages of the scrapbook are devoted to published photos of the fashionably attired young women waving gaily from their platform car to the throng of dignitaries and friends on the tracks below. Prior is hamming it up in giddy excitement, with the biggest smile of all. In a subsequent photo, she poses in her swim suit with the captain of the ship which took them across the Atlantic. It must have been a heady time for the 16-year-old high school commerce graduate.

Despite the high hopes of her supporters, Prior was eliminated in the heats at Amsterdam, along with her major competitors from the United States. Hildegard Schrader of Germany won the 220 yard breaststroke, and Europeans took all of the medals.

In 1929, Prior had another banner year, lowering several of her records and winning the prestigious Gale Trophy, a five-event competition to determine "the all-round swimming and diving champion of Canada".

But then the clippings stop. Was it because her victories were becoming commonplace, or because she went to work as a secretary and didn’t have the time? She seems to have kept on winning because she is referred to as the defending champion when the press reports briefly resume in 1932, and she won a place on the nine-woman Canadian Olympic team in Los Angeles. The remaining pages in the scrapbook are empty.

According to Canadian Olympic Association (COA) archivist Sylvia Doucette, Prior (as Dorothy Schute) was last heard from in Surrey, B.C., but the COA lost touch with her more than a decade ago. I have not been able to trace her in Ontario death records. (If any reader has any suggestions, I would be pleased to hear from her/him c/o CAAWS).

We can only speculate about why the woman in the hospital so prized the memories evoked by race reports and photographs from such a distant time. But sports brought a sense of personal accomplishment, public acclaim, and broadened horizons which few other avenues could provide for women in the 1920s. During her athletic career, Prior (and athletes like her) travelled and competed in Europe and most of the major American cities. She dined with senior public officials and exchanged autographs with movie stars.

If she was like athletes and organizers I’ve interviewed from that period, sports brought lasting friendships with other women, too.

It’s too bad that so much of that rich history has been lost from view, or that the best female athletes today receive so little of the coverage their counterparts enjoyed 70 years ago.

Bruce Kidd’s writing reveals his astonishing range of interests and knowledge of sport. Among his published works are articles dealing with physical activity, athletes' rights, the place of sport in the modern state, physical education for adults, sport and masculinity, and the philosophy of excellence. Almost single-handedly, he has brought attention to illustrious but largely forgotten contributors to Canada's rich sporting history such as the ground-breaking Women's Amateur Athletic Federation. His most recent work, The Struggle for Canadian Sport, won the North American Society for Sport History Book Award in 1997. During the 1960's, Bruce was Canada's best known middle-distance runner, winning the Lou Marsh Trophy for his successes on the track. He was twice chosen Canada's Male Athlete of the Year.