Browsing by Author "Williams, Jean"
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Item Metadata only An Age of Speed(Routledge, 2014-07-01) Williams, JeanThis chapter looks at the rise of motor sport in Britain, particularly the advent of the Brooklands racing 'set' before World War One and revival during peacetime. Early feamel racing motorists such as Dorothy Levitt, of Jewish descent, who in 1906 became known as 'The Fastest Girl on Earth' with a women's land speed record of 91 mph.Item Open Access Amateur and Professional Debates in European women's Football 1950-1980(2015-02-06) Williams, JeanThis conference presentation gave an overview of the development of female football player migration and labour issues from the 1950s to the 1980s. It explored different kinds of movement and migration as well as characterising phases of migration as micro,mess and macro.Item Metadata only An Ambivalent Spectacle: Watching Women's World Cup 2015(2015-06-04) Williams, JeanI have been writing about women’s soccer since 1998 and have attended the two Women’s World Cups held in the United States. In 2011, I was frequently asked if I was going to Women’s World Cup in Germany, and I have had the same questions about Canada in 2015. Neither tournament appealed to me enough to make the trip. Like many fans of football, I find a World Cup spectacle as something that I am ambivalent about. It is great to see the best female players in the world, on a global stage, and the Women’s World Cup is becoming an important mega-event for women’s sport more generally. But I also do not want to financially contribute to the already swollen finances of FIFA.Item Metadata only Annie Coupe Speirs (1889–1926), swimmer, and Olympic title holder(Oxford University Press, 2014-10-01) Williams, Jean; Curthoys, MarkAnnie Coupe Speirs (1889–1926), swimmer, was borb at 120 Leta Street, Walton, Liverpool, on 14 July 1889, the fourth daughter in the family of at least five sons and four daughters of James Speirs, coppersmith, and his wife, Eliza, née Spencer. Annie came in fifth in the individual freestyle swimming competition at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games. On 15 July 1912 Speirs was a member of the Great Britain gold-medal winning team in the ladies 4 × 100 metres freestyle relay, whose other members were Isabella [Bella, Belle] Moore, Jennie Fletcher and Irene Steer. She worked as an upholsterer from before the First World War until her marriage, at Breeze Hill Presbyterian Church, Walton, on 3 June 1922, to Charles Hillman Coombe, ship's cooper, son of Thomas Coombe, watchmaker and jeweller. She died at 107 Rice Lane, Walton, on 26 October 1926 of infective endocarditis.Item Metadata only Aquadynamics and the Athletocracy: Jennie Fletcher and the British Women's 4 x 100 metre Freestyle Relay Team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games(Maney Publishing, 2012-06) Williams, JeanThis article considers the part played by aquadynamics, or a concern for the technical properties of swimming costumes, in the career of Jennie Fletcher (1890–1968) who won Britain’s first individual Olympic female swimming medal (bronze) at the Stockholm Olympic Games in 1912 and contributed to the first women’s team gold in the 4 × 100 metre Freestyle Relay. Her light silk one-piece racing swimsuit represented a new kind of modernity: the revealed sporting body enabled competitive principles, rather than modesty, to define the appearance of the female swimmer. The article also examines the place of the working-class competitor in our understanding of the early Games, an ‘athletocracy’ where performance, not background, enabled individuals to compete. The work therefore also explores the relevance of Fletcher’s birthplace, Leicester, in the development of amateur and professional swimming and in the production of swmming costumes for both sport and leisure.Item Metadata only A beautiful game: international perspectives on women's football(Berg, 2007) Williams, JeanItem Metadata only A Contemporary History of Women's Sport, Part One: Sporting Women, 1850-1960(Routledge, 2014) Williams, JeanItem Metadata only 'The Curious Mystery of the ‘Olimpick Games’: did Shakespeare know Dover…and does it matter?’(Taylor and Francs, 2009-06) Williams, JeanThe First half of the article looks ar the period 1612 to 1642 when Robert Dover reinvented the existing Cotswold Games as annual 'Olimpick' celebrations of sport and, to an extent, popular culture. The second section reviews subsequent published editions of the Annalia Dubrensia, a collection of poems written in celebration of the Games abd first published by Dover in 1636. Examining the changing meaning of the Annalia as a text is intended to critique simplistic notions that place oursporting and literary heritage as part of the 'Merrie England' industry, particularly in the context of the so-called Cultural Olympiad in the approach to 2012.Item Metadata only Danica Patrick(ABC Clio, 2012-04-01) Williams, JeanThe article is a biographical summary of the career of Danica Patrick, the motor racing driver.Item Metadata only Edith Marie Thompson (1877–1961), sports and empire settlement administrator(Oxford University Press, 2012-05-30) Williams, JeanThompson, Edith Marie (1877–1961), sports and empire settlement administrator, was born at 44 Russell Road, Kensington, London, on 19 May 1877, the only daughter of William Frederic Thompson (1847/8–1921), barrister and mineral and chemical merchant, and his wife, Marie Charlotte, née Warde (1849/50–1900). She was educated at Norland Place School and was a boarder at Cheltenham Ladies' College in 1892–3, at a period when there was still very little sport played at the school. In January 1895, after returning to London she enrolled in the ladies' department of King's College, London, and continued to attend classes there, in English, history, Italian literature, political economy, and Old English, until 1900. The vice-principal of the ladies' department, Lilian Faithfull, was first president of the All England Women's Hockey Association (AEWHA), founded in November 1895. The women's association had sought affiliation to the men's hockey association and on being rebuffed created a separate governing body for the women's sport, with a rule that no man should hold executive office. In 1901 Thompson founded a weekly journal, the Hockey Field, as the organ of the AEWHA, and she edited it until 1920. Her book, Hockey as a Game for Women (1904), urged that team games should be part of the curriculum of girls' schools, and that hockey was the best winter game to inculcate the qualities of self-control, self-reliance, unselfishness, and good fellowship. Sceptics were reassured that women players ‘dressed neatly and becomingly’, their skirts were ‘not indecently short’, and they did not ‘shout or knock each other down’ (p. iii). She attributed the success of the sport for women to the wise rule of the AEWHA, whose organizational genesis she described.Item Metadata only Elsie Mary Wisdom [née Gleed], [nickname Bill] (1904–1972), racing driver,(Oxford University Press, 2013-05-30) Williams, JeanElsie Mary Wisdom [née Gleed], better known as Bill (1904–1972), racing driver, was born at 23 The Parade, Upper Tooting Road, Tooting Graveney, London, on 2 March 1904, the third of seven children and the only daughter of Benjamin John Gleed (1869–1950), master watchmaker and shopkeeper, and his wife, Emma Amelia, née Avenell (1872–1937). Nicknamed Bill, as a child she rode as ‘ballast’ on the back of her brothers' motor cycles, and terrified her family by moving from the pillion seat to drive the machines for herself. It was though that four wheels would be safer and she met the amateur racing driver and journalist Thomas Henry (Tommy) Wisdom [see below], whom she married on 14 March 1930. They had a daughter, Anne born in 1934. Anne 'Wiz' Wisdom went on to become famous for her victory with Pat Moss in the 1960 Paris Liege rally.Item Metadata only Item Metadata only The FA Super League: women’s football goes professional(2012-01) Williams, JeanThe article gives an overview of the eight-team Super League launched in 2011/12 season and argues the case of a US-based franchise model but centrally funded by the Football Association (FA).Item Metadata only The fastest growing sport? Women's football in England.(Frank Cass, 2004) Williams, JeanItem Metadata only Football and Feminism(Cambridge University Press, 2013-01-01) Williams, JeanThe chapter looks at the development of what is conventionally called 'women's football' from an historical point of view in assessing how gender has been an aspect of the performance and commercial profile of the game.Item Metadata only Football Interconnections and Olympic Parallels(Routledge, 2014-07-01) Williams, JeanThis chapter explores the connections between the expansion of women's football during the period between 1917 and 1923 and calls for a separatist Women's Olympic Games, led by Alice Milliat. The Women's Olympic Games held between 1921 and 1934 were a key tool in the campaign to expand the IOC schedule for female competitors into more sports and disciplines.Item Open Access For me, the most important photograph of Women's Olympic Participation: the 1912 British 4 x100 freestyle relay team.(2011-09-09) Williams, JeanThe presentation explores a well-known but often taken for granted photograph showing swimmers of 1912 wearing revealing swimsuits. It argues that competitive principles rather than modesty defined the appearance and technical preparation of female athletes.Item Metadata only “For the Most Part, The Team Was Given Hospitality of The Most Lavish Sort”: Women’s Hockey, Brooklands and Aspects of Empire(Routledge, 2014-07-01) Williams, JeanThis chapter looks at how different aspects of imperial identity were explored and developed through women's hockey and female racing motorists at Brooklands. Crucial to the imperial project was a degree of lavish hospitality, travel and movement. The chapter explores the lives of key women through their sporting interests and the remainder of their lives.Item Metadata only Frisky and Bitchy: Unlikely British Olympic Heroes?(Taylor and Francis, 2010-06) Williams, JeanThis article begins with a brief biographical overview of the career of bridge player and writer Rixi Markus (1910–1992). To a lesser extent, it gives an account of her sometime partner Fritzi Gordon (1916–1992). Questions of Britishness are specifically informed by Markus’s 1988 memoir, A Vulnerable Game. In her twelfth and final book, Rixi details her experiences as a Jewish emigrant who escaped to London after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938. Assimilation, acculturation and a measure of anglophilia as a British-Jew did little to affect Rixi’s increasingly Zionist sympathies, however. Following the naturalisation of both women in 1950, and together known as Frisky and Bitchy, they were to become widely acknowledged as the strongest women’s partnership in world-bridge in the years between 1951-1976. Their upper middle class backgrounds and the internationalism of the bridge circuit enabled both to mitigate a degree of discrimination due to their ethnicity and gender in post-war Britain. There are consequently four thematic research questions. Firstly, an effect of Eastern European Jewish diaspora was arguably to Austrianise a card game, until then played in Britain mostly by elderly enthusiasts behind closed doors and certainly not in front of the servants. So how ‘British’ was post-war British bridge? Secondly, there were so-called bridge Olympiads from 1960 onwards, so in what ways is it meaningful to consider Frisky and Bitchy as part of British Olympic tradition? Third, by the end of the 1970s international bridge, with Rixi Markus as its most famous female ‘face’, was both fashionable and part of the Establishment’s pastimes. Have we so far underestimated female competitors as entrepreneurs in forming their own eponymous brands and in popularising their sport? Finally, in what ways does contextualising mature or ‘late’ work as part of a career contribute to our understanding of the subgenre of the sports autobiography?Item Metadata only From Sportswear to Leisurewear: The Evolution of English Football League Shirt Design in the Replica Kit Era(Taylor and Francis, 2015-03-01) Stride, Christopher; Williams, Jean; Moor, David; Catley, NickThe football shirt is of iconic significance, defining a club's visual identity through its role as sporting uniform and fan identifier, providing a canvas for commercial interactions and increasingly acting as the focus of nostalgia and collector culture. In this article we focus on the football shirt's extension from sportswear to a replica product worn as cross-generational leisurewear. We first consider how a replica's authenticity, its principal attribute, exists in objective, constructive and existential contexts. We then demonstrate how the subsequent focus of kit manufacturers and clubs on satisfying these differing interpretations of authenticity has influenced football shirt design. For two decades, replica kits were marketed as sportswear to children, with attempts to enhance the football shirt's authenticity through distinctiveness and exclusivity leading to copyrighted designs, manufacturer's logos and increased patterning. However, as the replica football shirt became adult leisurewear, the changing customer base led to retrospective and recycled shirt designs proclaiming a club's distinct identity through its heritage, fulfilling fans' nostalgic interpretations of a club's authentic kit, and reflecting fans' use of replica shirts to display their authenticity as a genuine fan. These ideals have also inspired a parallel retro-replica industry and, we argue, caused stagnation in the development of the aesthetic elements of contemporary kit design, which had previously demonstrated innovation interspersed with periods of consolidation, but had taken few retrospective turns. Genuine innovation in football shirt design has increasingly become restricted to technological advances and marketing strategies.