Reid, Mireylees

BORN IN 1896 IN PORTLAND in Victoria, Mirey Reid was the only daughter of Lucy Marsden and Henry Newman Reid, the founder of Australian ice sports. Her father was the advisory director of the Portland Western Districts of Victoria Freezing Company when she was born, and she also lived in Adelaide, but grew up in Haverbrack Avenue Malvern in Melbourne, completing Form 4 at Toorak College in 1909. She skated and played hockey on the ice at Australia's first ice rink in Adelaide in 1904, when she was about nine years-old, and then in Melbourne in 1906. [1] It is possible she earlier skated overseas, because she said she had been placed on the ice from the moment she could walk.

Reid developed under Professors Caldwell and Brewer in Adelaide and Melbourne, then Professors Webster and Claude Langley. She may have attended the opening celebrations of the Sydney Glaciarium when Langley and his pupils performed a figure skating exhibition there on July 27th 1907, two days after it had officially opened. Reid was a contemporary of skaters such as: Melbourne's Billie Clegg, a student at Princes in London; Sydney's Fannie Trotter, the first Australian woman to compete at the ISU World Championships, but representing Sweden; and Sadie Cambridge, the first Australian to be inducted to the Skate Canada Hall of Fame with her partner Albert Enders.

The National Ice Skating Association of Australia formed in Melbourne in 1911 when Reid was 15. She won the first NISAA Ladies Figure Skating title before ISU affiliation, the same year her brother Hal became the inaugural Men's champion. After the war, she moved to Sydney with her parents, and joined the Sydney Figure Skating Club started by Chas Maclurcan.

Between 1919 and 1926, Mirey and her brother Leslie won the state waltzing title eight years straight, as well as a ten-step competition. [1] She won the first figure skating championship of NSW in 1925, the year the National Ice Skating Association of Australia (NSW) formed from the Sydney Figure Skating Club, despite the NISAA in Melbourne which preceded it by fourteen years. Reid won the state title again in 1931, but did not defend it in the years that followed. She was National Ladies Champion in 1935, five seasons after the two associations in Melbourne and Sydney finally agreed to work together.

The inaugural winner of the Croll Cup for women's single skating in 1932, Reid successfully defended it each year until the Victorian champion, 14 year-old Betty Cornwall, wrested it off her in 1936. She also won the women's national title for the quarter-mile speed skating event, and the state title for the half-mile.

The first coach of young show skater, Pat Gregory, who went on to the British Gold Medal standard of free and figure skating in 1947, Reid performed in such shows as Hollywood Ice Fantasy at Sydney Glaciarium in 1947, and trained skaters for the end-of-year carnivals—the biggest ice events in Australia during the 1940s.

Still teaching in 1950, at the age of 54, she entered a special contract with the newly opened Ice Palais in Perth, Western Australia. On her return to Sydney Glaciarium in 1953, she taught with such professionals as: Rona Thaell, Alison Lyons, Dorothy Coulter, Loretta Brain, Shirley Daley, Mary Hill-Trevor, Bill Black, Leo Marshall, Percy Wilson, Val Cullen, Betty Rossbridge, Hazel Edwards, Dawn O'Donnell, Robert Hamilton, and Margaret Miller. [2]

Although Reid never competed internationally, she was one of Australia's first home-grown women's ice skating champions. She made one of the earliest and most significant contributions to competitive ice skating in Australia, particularly for women in New South Wales, during some of its most difficult years. Fortunately for local skaters, she remained at home while others such as Enders and Cambridge based themselves overseas.

Reid never married, but lived near her brother Leslie and, like her brothers, she also played ice hockey. The emergency goalkeeper with the New South Wales women's team in 1924 when they won the Gower Cup, she played at least one interstate contest when the state keeper became unavailable, [1] and she could still play well into her fifties when she returned as goalie for the Western Witches in 1949. [3]

Mirey Reid died suddenly at 60 in Sydney on March 2nd 1956, survived by a nephew Andrew, and a niece Aidrie, the children of her older brother Hal who moved to America. Her skating and coaching career spanned a half-century and more.