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WOMEN'S SPORT HISTORY

Velma Springstead

by Bruce Kidd
Published in CAAWS Action Bulletin, Summer 1995

In 1932, Alexandrine Gibb and the Women's Amateur Athletic Federation (WAAF) created an award to honour the best Canadian female athlete each year. They named it after Velma Springstead, linking her with the highest levels of athletic achievement ever since. The 1995 winner of the trophy, presented at the Canadian Sport Council's Canadian Sports Award gala, was double Olympic champion Myriam Bédard.

At the time, Gibb said that Springstead symbolized the early ambitions of Canadian sportswomen in international competition. Yet more than 60 years later, she seems a curious choice.

She was not the first to compete outside North America at a major international championship. That was Cecil Eustace Smith who, at the age of 15, placed sixth in the singles figure skating competition at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France.

Nor was Springstead the most distinguished of the athletes who electrified Canadian with their performances in the first flush of international competition for women in the 1920s. Others like multi-sport star Bobbie Rosenfeld or Olympic high jump champion Ethel Catherwood were more successful and more famous.

So why did Gibb and her sisters believe she was so exemplary?

Born and raised in Hamilton, Ont., Velma Springstead was one of the many young women who took readily to sports in the heady post-suffragette years of the early 1920s. In the summer of 1925, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) of Canada was invited to send a women's team to London, England, to compete against the national teams of Great Britain and Czechoslovakia. In the hastily organized selection trials at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, Springstead won a place on the team by out-performing the then Canadian record holder, Innes Bramley, in the high jump. Wearing a billowing tunic, she cleared 4' 7" with the scissors kick.

It was this trip that opened the door for Canadian women's participation in international competition. Not wanting to organize it themselves, but unwilling to risk public criticism by turning down the invitation, the AAU turned over the responsibility for selecting and managing the team to Alex Gibb (Action, Spring, 1995.) At the time, Gibb worked as a secretary in a Toronto brokerage firm, and was one of the leading organizers of women's sports in her spare time. In less than a week, she brought together a group of Ontario sportswomen to conduct the trials and make travel arrangements.

The trip gave the participants a full taste of the athletic stimulus, broadened horizons, and adventure that often come with international competition. For most of the athletes, it was the first time away from home. Most had hitherto languished in athletic obscurity, but now that they were representing Canada, they were elevated to celebrity status. During their long journey — by train to Quebec then by ship to Liverpool — and throughout their stay in England, they were besieged by reporters and photographers, and feted by the British organizers and their sponsors, the Canadian government, and the CPR.

Since the team did not take a coach with them, Gibb arranged for Sam Mussabini, the British sprint coach immortalized by the film, Chariots of Fire, to assist the runners during the week they had in London before the meet, and F.W. Webster, a noted authority on the field events, to help with the jumpers and throwers. Alfie Schrubb, the Oxford men's coach who had lived in Canada for a number of years, also showed up to give a hand.

The actual competition was held at Stamford Bridge on August 1, 1925, after an elaborate formal marchpast and ceremony. Although the British women ran away with the championship, winning seven of the nine events, the Canadian women "were by no means disgraced". Despite the last-minute preparations, a spate of injuries from the soggy British cinders, and the fact that some of the best athletes in Canada had not been able to get the time off from work — on the very day of the meet Rose Grosse set a new world record in 220 yards in Toronto — they almost took second place, losing to Czechoslovakia by a mere three points. The London Sketch reported that "with a little further training and experience they will hold their own in the best company."

Velma Springstead finished third in the high jump and fourth in the hurdles, but her main contribution seems to have been the spirit and determination she infused into the team. In practice and competition, she was a continual presence around the track, encouraging her sisters with appeals to their Canadian pride and winning over sponsors and spectators with her confident exuberance. Lord Decies, one of the British aristocrats who fastened on the Canadians, was so taken with her leadership and example that he presented her with a special trophy.

Despite the promise of Stamford Bridge, it was not evident that the AAU would have initiated any further international events for Canadian sportswomen. Some of its leading officials, like national secretary A.S. Lamb, were opposed to their involvement in vigorous competition. But Gibb was so impressed with the advantages of international travel and competition that she become determined that sportswomen control the access to international opportunities as much as possible. Shortly after her return from London, she started the process that created the WAAF, and won Canadian sportswomen the chance to compete in both Pierre de Coubertin's Olympics and the Women's World Games of the Fédération sportive féminine internationale.

But Springstead never lived to compete in these events. On March 27, 1926, she died of pneumonia, five months short of her 20th birthday.

I suspect Springstead's tragic death as much as her leadership persuaded Gibb to commemorate her name in an athletic trophy. During the interwar period, sportswomen were painfully aware of the health issue because the myth of female frailty was always being thrown in their face. Without Medicare and much of what we take for granted today from modern medicine, sustained good health was much more tentative for many people. To assure athletes, their families, the public, and no doubt themselves, WAAF insisted that all registered participants pass a medical examination every season, and in a society without Medicare, tried to get doctors to donate their services for athletes too poor to pay fees.

Springstead thus epitomized not only the ambitions of Canadian sportswomen in the early days of international competition for women, but the uncertainties and complexities of their quest.

She remains an appropriate symbol of that first generation.

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.