Born March 27, 1900, in Brooklands, a suburb of Greater Manchester, England, John 'Jack' Ferguson Page was the only child of Frank Ferguson Page and Ellen 'Nellie' Annie Chate. He grew up wanting for nothing at a posh home at Beechthorpe, St. Margaret's Road in Dunham Massey, Altrincham, his needs attended to by a live-in cook, housemaid and nursemaid. His father, a former bank clerk, was a very successful stockbroker and his grandfather, also named John Page, was the superintendent of a Manchester market.
Photo courtesy "Skating World" magazine
Jack won the British title in 1922 on his first try, defeating his Manchester training mate Ethel Muckelt. The following year, he defended his title and teamed up with Ethel to take the pairs crown. In the years that followed, Jack became an NSA Gold Medallist and won an astonishing total of eleven British men's titles and nine consecutive British pairs titles with Ethel.
Ethel Muckelt and Jack Page. Photo courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.
A. Proctor Burman, Kathleen Lovett, Kathleen Shaw, Ethel Muckelt and Jack Page in 1928
Internationally, Jack's record was equally as impressive. He won the first international competition he entered, the men's senior non-championship class at the 1923 World Championships in Vienna, defeating eight other skaters from Austria, Germany Czechoslovakia and Finland. With Ethel, he claimed the silver medal in the pairs event at the 1924 World Championships in Manchester, and in 1926 he took the bronze medal in the men's event at the World Championships in Berlin. He placed in the top ten in both singles and pairs at both the 1924 and 1928 Winter Olympics and amassed top six finishes in singles or pairs in every European and World Championships he entered from 1924 to 1929. Along the way, he defeated an impressive roster of skaters, including Olympic Medallists Martin Stixrud, Georges Gautschi, Bud Wilson, Sherwin Badger and Robert van Zeebroeck. In 1930, Herbert Ramon Yglesias remarked, "Mr. J.F. Page, not only by his actual victories but in his placings above many good Continental skaters, has carried English skating a real step forward. He has set a standard that will need much effort to keep up." Others were not so kind in their analysis of Jack's skating. In a review of the 1928 Winter Olympics penned for "Skating" magazine, Joel B. Liberman noted his strong figures, spread eagle and dance steps but criticized the "complete absence of spins and a scarcity of jumps."
Some felt Jack was robbed at the 1927 World Championships in Davos. T.D. Richardson recalled, "He was an extremely fine school figure-skater, but he had absolutely no musical ear at all - the sort of man who has to be told to stand up when the National Anthem is being played. While this was undoubtedly a great handicap he was, on the whole, badly treated by Continental and World judges. I had him first on my card at Davos in 1927, when he was the only skater who did not fall at least once. Most of them, including the winner, were tumbling about in the high wind and driving snow. But nothing could disturb Jack Page, and as Böckl the winner himself said afterwards: 'If ever anyone deserved the title Jack did so on that occasion'."
At the 1928 World Championships in London, Jack skated before King George V and Queen Mary of Teck. After the competition, a group of skaters were invited to the Royal Box to be presented to Their Majesties. The King congratulated Jack and asked him how long he had been skating. When he told the King he'd only started after the War, the King expressed surprise and said thoughtfully, "That is very wonderful." At those same World Championships, Jack joined forces with three of the world's top skaters - Sonja Henie, Maribel Vinson and Willy Böckl - to demonstrate fours skating to the enthusiastic British crowd.
Top: Mr. G. Fuerst, Nancy Beard, Thomas Harris, Mrs. Maurice Harris and Jack Page at the Park Lane Hallowe'en Ice Carnival in 1929. Bottom: Jack Page, Lady Maude Hoare and Mrs. Slesinger at the Park Lane Hallowe'en Ice Carnival in 1929. Jack won best men's costume!
By the time Jack and Ethel retired from competition in 1933, they had already made a lasting impression on future generations of British skaters. Rosemarie Stewart recalled, "We last saw [Muckelt and Page] skate in England in 1932 at the Imperial Ice Club Purley. Their excellent program consisted almost entirely of spirals, dance steps, and field figures, with only one or two simple jumps, such as the flying-three, and about two spins. Nevertheless, their program was very successful. From watching them, incidentally, Robert Dench learned how to put together a program."
In his book "Our Skating Heritage", historian Dennis Bird recalled, "He had a sense of humour... He evidently had a low opinion of the judging in championships, and after winning his last British title he sent a letter to the 'Skating Times' pointing out that the judges did not notice that he skated one figure twice on the left foot, instead of once on each foot as required by the rules. 'I think,' he wrote, 'This is the first time I have won a Figure Skating Championship and have been marked for a figure which I did not skate.'"
In June of 1932, Jack married fellow skater Leonie Wilson at Christchurch, Denton. Following in the footsteps of his father, he also became a stock broker, opening his own firm at St. Ann's Square called J. Ferguson Page and Company. He remained active within the National Skating Association by serving as a national and international judge. In 1937, he judged the pairs event at the World Championships. As of 1939, Jack and Leonie lived at Sunny Corner, Planetree Road, Hale, Cheshire.
Jack survived World War II but was found dead in his office of apparent coal gas poisoning in Manchester on Valentine's Day, 1947. He was forty-six years old. An inquest into his death resulted in "a verdict of suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed." The February 18, 1947 issue of "The Guardian" reported, "Mrs. Leonie Page told the city coroner... that last November when she told her husband she contemplated divorce proceedings, he left the house. He had been to see her many times since, and on every occasion had begged for a reconciliation. When he told her he would take his life if she did not stop the divorce proceedings, she said it was a lot of nonsense and he would feel better after his holiday in Switzerland. When he returned however, he seemed to be of the same mind. His last call at the house was on the day of his death." The fortune he left his wife would be equivalent to over one and a half million dollars in today's currency.
Skate Guard is a blog dedicated to preserving the rich, colourful and fascinating history of figure skating. Over ten years, the blog has featured over a thousand free articles covering all aspects of the sport's history, as well as four compelling in-depth features. To read the latest articles, follow the blog on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. If you enjoy Skate Guard, please show your support for this archive by ordering a copy of "Jackson Haines: The Skating King" and pre-ordering "Sequins, Scandals & Salchows: Figure Skating in the 1980s", which will be released this fall where books are sold: https://skateguard1.blogspot.com/p/buy-book.html.
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