Object number
2024/22/1-2
Description
Ice skates with leather boots and iron blades. From East Anglia, worn by Lily May Blenkinsop. They were used for skating on the Fens.
A pair of ice skates with leather boots and iron blades. The small boots have iron blades secured to the soles. The skates came from East Anglia, and were worn by Lily May Blenkinsop who learnt to ice skate whilst at boarding school in St Ives in the 1890s. They were used for skating on the Fens, which regularly froze in winter. She continued to skate throughout her life. They are marked 'Embekay' and probably date from the 1930s. They were donated to the museum by the wearer’s great niece.
Physical description
1 pair of skates: leather, metal
Archival history
Email from donor to MERL, 5 April 2024 - ‘Both pairs of skates belonged to my great-aunt Lily May Blenkinsop, 1882-1968, and were passed to my mother (in Fen Ditton, just NE of Cambridge) at the death of Lily's daughter Donna in December 1993. Lily May Blenkinsop was one of 9 children of a marine insurance agent in Hartlepool. Lily with 3 sisters came in the middle of the family, and when she was young the job of these 4 was to cook dinner for their father and older brother. … Lily May Blenkinsop left [Hartlepool School] for boarding school in Aug. 1896. We know it was a 'boarding school in St Ives' from family including her own account, but I think great Aunty Lily's school must have been Slepe Hall Boarding School St Ives http://saintives.org.uk/slepe.html That is where she learned to ice-skate and to swim, another thing she was keen on. … [ice skating was] a hobby she loved all her life (she died in Essex in 1968, having married a Methodist minister).’
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