A golfer and editor is honoured as a Manawatu legend
In those days, newspapers had few women in authority.
Aileen Clare Nash was welcomed in to the Manawatu world on April 23, 1923.
At the age of 94, she is still breathing that same air.
A daughter of one of Palmerston North’s gentrified families, she went on to play golf for New Zealand and in February was anointed a Manawatu legend of sport.
I recently visited her in a city rest home to fill in a few gaps in her life story.
Back in her day, playing golf was almost breaking the mould for women because men very much ruled. She did go on to be a Manawatu Golf Club life member, but that was bestowed by the women.
The men ruled in journalism too and specifically the Nash men as the owners of the Manawatu Evening Standard. and she ended up marrying James. They produced Aileen who, despite a suitor or two, never married.
‘‘The ones that asked me I didn’t like,’’ she said, laughing.
She didn’t excel at Terrace End Primary School and Palmerston North Girls’ High School. That didn’t faze her, because sport was her thing.
She went on to play for Manawatu in tennis, basketball, badminton and squash.
In 1941, all of the young men had gone to war and players were in short supply at Hokowhitu. So families such as the Nashes turned to their daughters.
While she hated giving up all the games she played, she grew to quickly embrace golf.
She remembers James as a good father, although a tough businessman as the Standard‘s managing director, editor and chairman of directors.
In the middle of her golfing career, someone at Hokowhitu told her father that Aileen should be writing about sports, not playing.
So her father brought her into the paper as sports editor. You did as your father told you.
‘‘It was a title my father gave me and he said ’hang on to it’.’’
She covered many sports and tried covering rugby, but only once.
‘‘I never liked rugby. I thought it was brutal.’’
Sports editor from the late 1950s to 1968, she gave up only when her mother died.
In those days, newspapers had few women in authority. Lorraine Vincent became the newspaper’s only other woman in the role.
To quote one of her colleagues, Aileen was good-looking, independent and sparky, a foretaste of career women of 25 years later.
She could be outspoken and it got her in hot water with the Nash men. It was difficult having to answer to her father over the dinner table, in their big house overlooking Hokowhitu Park, and at the Standard.
Her uncle Gerald was the chief sub-editor and he didn’t like Aileen being at the newspaper. They never agreed, whether on the home front or at work.
She recalls hiding in the woodshed, especially when her uncle Norman Nash, who was also the editor and later the owner, was around.
‘‘He couldn’t be bothered with the women, although he liked to put his arm around them.’’
Her grandfather, also named James Henry, rode around town in his Rolls Royce and the family owned the Standard until 1981.
Aileen was set on her golfing career aged 18. By 1950, mentored by great amateur Bessie Fullertonsmith and coached by club professionals, she won her first tournament, the Manawatu Open. Only three years later she was wearing the silver fern.
She was angry when left out of the 1953 New Zealand team to England in favour of what she saw as a lesser player.
‘‘I had to play her at the Open at Whanganui the next year and I thrashed her.’’
Aileen won the New Zealand Ladies Championship in 1954 in wind and rain at Miramar and yet by 1960 she had retired from international golf.
She had played the first British Commonwealth tournament at St Andrew’s in Scotland in 1959 where she won two singles out of three.
‘‘It was just another course where the weather was terrible,’’ she recalled.
She played Russell Grace golf until 1965, a span of 15 seasons, and silver pennants for her club until 1992.
New Zealand players abounded at Manawatu then. There were Jean Horwell, Cath Collier (killed in a plane crash with her son), Jean Whitehead (who died in January aged 92) and Miss Nash, who has out-lived them all.