ENDERS & CAMBRIDGE Pro Skating Champions (who played hockey)

1920s on

ALBERT PHILLIP ENDERS WAS BORN in 1898 at North Fitzroy in Melbourne's inner city, and his partner Sadie is thought to have been born in Sydney. Melbourne's Academy of Skating produced Enders but Cambridge came through Sydney Glaciarium. She was one of Enders' pupils — the one who became his skating partner, and later his wife. The couple gave skating exhibitions at Melbourne Glaciarium in 1923 with John Goodall, Jack Gordon (Molony's business partner) and Lena Uksila, a professional instructor from New York's Hippodrome. It was the federation year of Australian ice hockey, and these two, then in their early twenties, were about to travel to wherever they thought they could farther their skating skills. Every Australian summer. Until, eventually, they became ex-patriots. They based themselves at both the Melbourne and Sydney rinks for over twelve years until they perfected their pair-skating, making London their base in Europe's winter. Then one year, in the early 1930s, they returned trumphantly home as world professional pair-skating champions. They went on to become world champions many times over, yet they still returned to Australia each season during these years to exhibit and teach. It was on one such occasion in 1933, that Cambridge was interviewed by The Argus newspaper: Miss Sadie Cambridge ... spoke with enthusiasm of the recent development of the ice ballet and ice dancing in Europe. Both Miss Cambridge and Mr Enders are world's champions, and are among the mere handful of people who hold the gold medal for skating. "It takes three to four months to learn to get round," she said, "from four to five years to become a good skater, and then one has the rest of one's active life to develop the art of skating, which is as great an art as drawing or any of the allied arts". "Australia had rinks 25 years ago and England began to follow a few years back," Miss Cambridge continued, "but today there are seven or eight rinks in London alone, although the first English centre was Manchester where Mr Enders and I have done much display work. Among our pupils in London have been Lady Louis Mountbatten, Lord Dunmore, and the Birkenhead family, and they have set a fashion which has grown immensely owing to the really beautiful ice ballets put on in the theatres ... Our last ballet was 'Madame Pompadour' at the Grosvenor, where the Prince of Wales, who is an enthusiastic follower of skating, was present." Miss Cambridge ... considers that ice hockey could be played more than it is here. With Mr Enders she played at the "Palais de Sport," Paris where l5,000 people were interested spectators, and she considers that Australian ice hockey teams, the members of which had learnt to play together, could beat any English team and attend the Canadians.

Between 1932–8, the couple had become NSA Gold Medalists and husband-and-wife World Professional British Pair-Skating Champions no less than seven times. They returned home regularly during the years Brown and Kennedy developed their skills, and helped provide the London base for their international careers. They were trail-blazers, not unlike Bobbie Jackson, Victoria's first State ice hockey captain, who was also a professional instructor and ice dancer on four continents. Enders and Cambridge finally settled in Canada in 1940, working at the Montréal Winter Club at Victoria Skating Rink which had hosted the first recorded organized indoor ice hockey match on March 3, 1875. Also at the Garden City Arena and the Toronto Skating Club from where their Pairs students, Suzanne Morrow and Wallace Diestelmeyer, won Canada's first-ever winter Olympic medal; bronze in 1948 at St Moritz, Switzerland. That continued eight years later in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, where two more of their Toronto Pairs, Frances Dafoe and Norrie Bowden, won the silver medal. Both these couples also produced World Championship titles in pairs skating: Morrow-Diestelmeyer won Silver (1948, Davos) and Dafoe-Bowden won Silver (1953 Davos); Gold (1954, Oslo and 1955, Vienna); and Silver (1956, Garmisch). Both were also inducted in the Skate Canada Hall of Fame. Morrow-Diestelmeyer are credited as being the first pair to perform the death spiral. Morrow also competed as a singles skater in the 1948 and 1952 Winter Olympics and served as a figure skating judge for over fifty years. At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, she took the Judge's Oath, the first woman to do so at the Winter Olympics. Dafoe-Bowden were the first pair skaters to do the twist lift, throw jump, ‘leap of faith’ and overhead lasso. It was because of these two that some of the rules in pairs skating were changed. Bowden has since been inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame (1955), the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame (1958), and the Skate Canada Hall of Fame (1993). Brown and Kennedy were not the only Australian winter athletes breaking British records and flying our flag at olympics and worlds in the early years. Albert and Sadie are nominated to be inducted to the Skate Canada Hall of Fame. Australia may do similarly one day. References: Skating Champions in their Stride: joys and trials of winning a world's title, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 1935 p 21 S