Gordon, John

BORN NOVEMBER 11TH 1894 at Carlton in Melbourne's inner city, the son of John Grant Gordon and Jemima Porter, Jack was a businessman, skater and professional instructor at Melbourne's Academy of Skating, but his partnership with Ted Molony produced his greatest contribution to Australian ice sports. They owned, leased and operated many rink enterprises in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart over three or four decades.

The Gordons were skaters at Melbourne Glaciarium in the start-up years of the early 1900s. Jack learned to skate from Professor Claude Langley who, with James Brewer from London, trained the first skaters in both Melbourne and Adelaide. In 1912, he joined the Navel Cadets and became a yeoman of signals in 1915.

He passed his 3rd Class skating test in Melbourne in 1916, then enlisted in the Australian Flying Corps at the end of May 1917. He served in Palestine, and passed his 2nd Class skating test after the war in 1922. He won the Victorian Men's figure skating championship in 1923. Four years later, in 1927, he received his Gold Medal for skating, one of the first in Australia.

Gordon won the last of the "Independent" Australian Men's Figure Skating Championships in 1930, and the first three official men's titles that were judged by the new Council of the NISAA between 1931 and 1933. Australian champion for many consecutive years until defeated by Frank Mercovich in 1934, Gordon finished runner-up, followed by Sidney Croll and John Brown, brother of Jimmy Brown.

In 1938, the year Ted Molony won the National Dance title, Gordon won the national pairs title with Betty Cornwell, Australia's first triple Ladies Champion from 1936 to '38. Betty, who won titles between the ages of 14 and 16, was typical of the trend set by Sonja Henie, Megan Taylor and Celia Colledge who became champions in their early teens. Gordon and Cornwell usually competed against Victorians, Ron Chambers and Edith Adams, the 1937 pairs champions of Australia.

Turning professional in 1940, Gordon taught the long line of Australian and New Zealand skaters who were drawn to the Academy of Skating at Melbourne Glaciarium. In 1944, at the age of 50, he married Irene Annie Cave in Melbourne. A celebrated skating instructor who trained the Spencer Trio, Gordon also employed many world-class teachers, including Olympian Felix Kaspar; Dawn Hunter; Daphne Walker; 3-time world's professional champion Joyce Macbeth; English champion Hope Braine; American skater Nate Walley; world champion and Olympian Megan Taylor; and Canadian Olympians, John and Betty McKilligan. In 1952, Gordon and Molony took over the lease of Harry Kleiner's St Moritz Ice Skating Palais, and continued the traditions of the old Glaciarium skating school and ice shows.

Gordon helped to create Melbourne's reputation as the centre for excellence in ice skating in the southern hemisphere, until the eventual demise of their Academy sometime before the closure of St Moritz in 1981. He was the top skating instructor there and coach of Australian International, Nita Solomon, but he had also trained and tested a long line of Australian and New Zealand figure skating champions over several decades. Gordon was an NISAA council member and judge in 1931 when the rival state associations finally found a way to cooperate, a major rink developer with Ted Molony, and one of Australia's pioneering professional skaters and instructors. He died in Melbourne at 94 on April 22nd 1989. [108]