High jumper Phyllis Green (© Courtesy of Bourne Hall Museum)
Phyllis Green’s milestone of becoming the first woman to clear five feet in the high jump is not as celebrated as the likes of Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile, but it remains a hugely important landmark.
This feat has its centenary on Friday 11 July and provides an opportunity to reflect on the short but spectacular career of a super-talented teenager from south London who briefly became a sporting celebrity in the 1920s.
Green joined the London Olympiades Athletic Club, the first women-only club in Great Britain which had been formed in 1921, in either late 1924 or early 1925 and was probably inspired by the growing attention given to women’s athletics, changes in the social climate, as well as a supportive father who himself had been a club athlete.
After winning myriad athletics prizes at Peckham High School for Girls, in what appears to be her first ever outing for her club, the 17-year-old Green cleared 4’11½” (1.51m) on 6 June 1925, an era when British competitions were measured in feet and inches.
“A wonderful new girl athlete was discovered during the women's inter-club athletic contest at Stamford Bridge [in west London] on Saturday,” eulogised the British newspaper the Daily Mirror, alongside photos of her on their front page. “Though she is only just over 17 and was competing for the first time at an open meeting, Miss Phyllis Green broke world record.”
In fact, it actually equalled the mark of Belgium’s Ellen van Truyen from the previous year, but it would be little more than a month before Green made the record her own.
Celebrity status
Her instant fame was such that the Daily Mirror even despatched a photographer to take pictures of her the following week while she was on holiday at the seaside.
However, Green was back in action on 5 July, representing London in an inter-city match involving Brussels and Paris in the Belgian capital and once again cleared 1.51m. One week later, she returned to Stamford Bridge – on the grounds of what is now the home to two-time Champions League winners and Premier League powerhouse Chelsea – for the third edition of the Wormen’s Amateur Athletics Association (WAAA) Championships and duly made history by clearing 5’0” (1.524m).
“For that marvellous moment, even as you realise that you have cleared that far greater height than your fellow competitors, you feel as though you are in the clouds trailing glory behind you. I can’t imagine anything that is comparable with this experience,” she wrote, almost predicting her record, when writing in the Daily Express the previous week in a column entitled ‘Sports Thrill for Girls’.
Finishing off her superlative summer, Green took maximum points for Great Britain in a match against Canada and Czechoslovakia when clearing 4’10” (1.47m), again making the front pages of several newspapers.
Phyllis Green (© Courtesy of Bourne Hall Museum)
Sweet charity in Chiswick
She went on to even greater heights in the following two years and commanded plenty more headlines.
Green won both the high and long jump at the 1926 WAAA Championships and later that summer, at the Chiswick Charity Sports on 2 August, she cleared 5’1⅛” (1.5526m) to improve her own official world record.
Sadly, for reasons that are not clear, she was not part of the small British team that competed at the 1926 Women's World Games in Gothenburg later that month, a competition won by France’s Helene Bons with 1.50m. However, Green continued to ascend upwards in 1927.
At the WAAA Championships in Reading, she won the high jump for the third consecutive year, clearing 5’2¼ from a grass take off, a mark which was to ultimately to be her personal best.
Translating metrically to 1.58m, Green’s jump theoretically equalled the world record of Canada’s Ethel Catherwood but it was not ratified by the France-based International Women's Sports Federation – which governed women’s athletics at the time before the International Amateur Athletic Federation brought it under its aegis in 1934 – as it was ³⁄₁₆ths of an inch less than Catherwood had jumped in a local competition in September 1926.
And then Green disappeared from the sport almost as meteorically as she appeared just two years earlier.
No records exist of Green ever competing again after the end of 1927 and she did not make it to the 1928 Olympic Games. If she had competed in Amsterdam, she would have gone head to head with Catherwood, who eventually won the gold medal with a leap of 1.60m (re-measured and ratified at 1.595m) and would also have had a tilt at the accolade of Britain’s first woman athlete to win an Olympic medal, an honour eventually achieved by their 4x100m team who finished third four years later in Los Angeles.
Mysterious disappearance
Why Green suddenly retired from the sport she was so successful at, despite still being only 19, remains unanswered to this day.
Local historians in Ewell, the town close to London where Green lived for many years from the late 1930s until she died in 1999, have recently been delving into her family archives. They have speculated, with some substance, that it may have been to help with her family’s increasingly successful undertaking business. After all, despite her celebrity, there were no shoe contracts, no sponsorship and no appearance fees for women athletes in the 1920s.
Six feet in imperial measurement was subsequently scaled when the Romanian legend Iolanda Balas cleared 1.83m in 1958 while seven feet (2.14m) now beckons after Yaroslava Mahuchikh improved the world record to 2.10m last year. But Phyllis Green will always have her place as one of the early icons of women’s athletics.
Phil Minshull for World Athletics Heritage
(With thanks to Sue Dalloe and Vicky Rowley at the Bourne Hall Museum for their assistance)
