Personal Reminiscence of Ida Hadley

This is part of a personal reminiscence of the earliest days of Bedford Physical Training College written by Ida Hadley in 1944.  Ida was amongst the first set of students who attended the College in 1903-1905.  This reminiscence, along with several others, was collected with the intention of being used to form “some record of the College from its beginning” and published after the end of the Second World War in 1945.  Although no such publication appeared in 1945, similar requests were made of former students in the 1970s and ultimately led to a series of oral histories collected and recorded by Sheila Fletcher as research material for Women First: The Female Tradition in English Physical Education 1880-1980 published in 1984.

Oral histories have been described as ‘the first kind of history’. They are the passing on of knowledge, memory and experience by word of mouth. Bedford Physical Education Archive holds the oral histories collected by Sheila Fletcher.  They are an important historical resource as they preserve a diverse range of personal experiences that generally are not well documented in written sources in the Archive. Their personal nature makes them a great primary source for people wanting to discover more about a certain era and what it was like to be a student or member of staff at the College, providing an insight into the impact events had on the people alive and involved.

Partial reminiscence of Ida Hadley, 1944

Ref: BPEA HRef 7/2/2