Aug 30, 1930 Ethel Scott becomes British sprint pioneer
TIn 1930, her golden year, she set an unofficial time of 11.1sec for the 100 metres
he first black woman to run for Great Britain at an international athletics meeting has no memorial. Lamentably, until the conscientious work of her nephew, David, and his family to recount and publicise Ethel Scott’s story over the past few years, one could almost say she left no trace.
Such unfair obscurity cannot solely be attributed to her race and sex. In the interwar decades, such was the subordinate status of sports journalism that all but a handful of prominent sportspeople amassed no more than a mention in a short report or, if they were good enough to warrant it, a line in the smallprint results. Piecing together the mosaic of the achievements of a quiet, modest woman of that era who neither married nor had children is impossible from the fragments in the archives of the national and local press. Save for her nephew, Black History Month would be lacking a significant sporting pioneer.
Scott was born in 1907, the second of four children of David Scott, originally of Westmoreland, Jamaica, and Jane Pilgrim. Her churchgoing parents are likely to have met in the congregation at Chatham while David was serving in the Royal Navy and Jane was working as an assistant in the local hospital. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Scott’s father, despite being 49, enlisted with the RNVR and was killed only 20 days after Britain declared war on Germany in an accident in Scapa Flow. His death left Jane as the sole provider for four mixed-race children in the East End, ranging in ages from eight to a babe in arms. She was belatedly awarded the war widow’s pension, which had initially been denied her.
It was paramount the children started work as soon as it was legal, and Scott joined the Ministry of Labour at 14. It was there, in the Civil Service Athletics Club, that she began to show her prowess as a sprinter. From her home in Upton Park and later Leigh-on-sea, she also became a member of Middlesex Ladies’ Athletics Club, competing in championships at Stamford
Bridge, at the News of the World Sports Club in Mitcham, White City and Battersea Park. In 1929, she was photographed in her MLAC kit with the silver spoils garnered in the first years of her athletics career, a haul from her life’s work obliterated when her family home was destroyed by a Luftwaffe air raid in 1940. In 1930, her golden year, she set an unofficial time of 11.1sec for the 100 metres and racked up a number of victories in the 60m, including a fastest time of 7.45sec, which earned her a call-up for the third Women’s World Games – created in response to the Olympics severely restricting the number of women’s track and field events. Hoping to raise £400 to send a full team, the WAAA managed only half that figure and could afford to send merely 16 women. Scott travelled to Prague by boat-train and there she won her 60m heat, but did not make the final. She did, though, win silver in the 4x100m relay alongside Daisy Ridgley, Eileen Hiscock and Ivy Walker.
The team won only one gold in 1930, compared with five in 1922 and four in 1926, which partially accounts for the paucity of the coverage. Mary Weston, one of Scott’s team-mates, explained why Britain had fallen so far behind their continental rivals. “The German girls will continue to enjoy their ascendancy while their government provides so many facilities for training and sport that we in this country lack,” she said.
Scott’s silver medal cut little mustard with her family. Because of their race, David says, “they were a defensive laager and to be respected they had to be twice as respectable as everyone else. In the black side of my family, any sign you were getting above yourself was met from the others with a put-down. Modesty was all. Ethel never spoke to me about her athletic career, but her younger sister referred to it and said she was ‘an international athlete, but she didn’t get anywhere’. Coming second was regarded as ‘not getting anywhere’.”
Hers is not a happy story, but not untypical of first and second generation black and mixed-race families who withstood unconscionable prejudice and abuse. Mercifully, some happiness entered the severely asthmatic and frail Scott’s life in the years before her death at the age of 76 in 1984 when she was befriended by the Clarks, a well-known Jamaican family, who took her off to her father’s home island for the worst of the winter months.
Back home in Barking, no one beyond her siblings would ever know the frail, old lady had once been a champion athlete. Not even at her church did anyone know the story of the devout and humble woman in the back pew. It is to her nephew’s great credit that, at last, it can be told.
‘Any sign you were getting above yourself was met with a put-down. Modesty was all’