Doreen Brown Ends Phase In Notable Swimming Career

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30892, 27 October 1965, Page 15

Doreen Brown Ends Phase In Notable Swimming Career

“pEOPLE often say ‘why 1 do you do It?* But you don’t stop to think. Somehow you become involved in the work and you continue if you’ve got it in you.” The speaker was Miss Doreen Brown, swimming administrator extraordinary, who stepped down from the post of secretary of the New Zealand Amateur Swimming Association at the annual meeting last weekend.

Doreen Brown and swimming administration have been synonymous for many years; ever since a fateful annual meeting of the Christchurch Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Club when, as a 16-year-old with an advanced sense of responsibility, she agreed to become club secretary. “I was very raw and knew nothing about administration —I made some awful blues,” she recalled this week.

But having become involved with the running of a swimming club Miss Brown found that she did indeed “have it in her.” Her inherent love of swimming and her proficiency at clerical work were blended harmoniously—and the Christchurch Ladies’ club, the Canterbury centre and the New Zealand association have never ceased to sing her praises. She was secretary of the Canterbury centre from 1937 to 1945 and again from 1949 to 1960, secretary of the national body from 1960 and she continues to serve her own club faithfully and well.

This year, however, she felt the time had come to relinquish her national post and make her knowledge and experience available to her successor. She has deep and sincere feelings about this point. In 1960 she was appointed secretary after the death of Mr B. O’Neill and found herself virtually alone in a field of complexities.

“It was a terrible hurdle to take over the secretaryship with no-one to guide me,” she said. ,A

The best possible news to follow her resignation is that Doreen Brown will not be lost to swimming. She will retain her place on the New Zealand council, as resident delegate for the West Coast centre, and she hopes to embark on more field work, helping the earnest little clubs of rural Canterbury in teaching and coaching and with advice on administrative matters.

“There are many avenues in which a person of my years can find plenty to do,” she believes.

Pausing at this milestone in her career to look back to her early days with the Christchurch Ladies’ club, Miss Brown salutes the efficiency with which swimmers tackle their assignments now but mourns the passing of

the lighthearted atmosphere that once pervaded every Saturday afternoon carnival. “The races were all handicap events and I was just as likely to start with Gwitha Shand, the champion of the day, as I was to compete lower down the list, where I belonged. "Nobody worried about being beaten and officials were just as relaxed, too. If someone wanted a yarn while carrying a result from one end of the pool to the other, he stopped and had it

“The Intensive training of today just wasn’t known. The average swimmer would do two or three lengths and then start to fool around, or have a game of water polo. “I’m not recommending that we go back to those days—it was a bit too free and easy. Championship meetings should be run properly and efficiently, but at Saturday afternoon carnivals I think everyone could afford to relax a little.” Miss Brown has many glowing memories from her career in swimming. One of the most vivid is of a trip to Hawaii in October, 1922, with her mother, “Auntie” Brown, Gwitha Shand and Pauline Hoeft, an Auckland girl of GermanSamoan parentage who was the national women’s sprint champion. “When the two girls were invited to make the trip there was no suggestion of paying for a chaperone, and it was close enough to the Victorian era for people to be horrified at the prospect of two girls travelling unattended. “The N.Z.A.S.A. said it had no money to pay for a chaperone, so the team could not go. Then mother said she would go at her own expense——and little Dorrie tagged along, too.” Miss Browm’s mother’s Christian names were Mary Ann Matilda, but she was known throughout the swimming world as “Auntie.” She was renowned for her thoughtful and kindly care of a multitude of swimming and basketball teams; boys as well as girls would turn to her for help. A tiny T. C. Morrison, now chairman of the New Zealand Rugby Union’s council, was one of her charges. But in Hawaii she had a difficult task trying to soothe Miss Hoeft, who was most upset by a band playing “all the sob tunes of the day,” and failed to reproduce her New Zealand form. Miss Shand, however, was made of sterner stuff. She won her specialty event, the 440 yards freestyle, in a time which the annual re-

port of the N.Z.A.S.A, said was “thought to be a world record.”

Swimming tours to and from New Zealand have reached unprecedented levels of Intensity in the last five years and the council now can organise a tour in less than a week. In fact, Miss Brown had only five days to prepare for an Australian tour by the 1962 New Zealand team, of which she was manager.

Other aspects of the council's work have followed a similar pattern. Miss Brown can recall the time when the council went into recess for the winter. But that does not happen now. During the 1064-65 year the council met 15 times and there were 34 committee meetings as well. On the lighter side, Miss Brown remembers a starter at Timaru—“a man utterly devoid of humour” —who fired his sawn-off shotgun at a carnival one night and a dead duck fell at his feet.

“But he wouldn’t laugh,” said Miss Brown. “He was properly disgusted.” The first case of a swimmer going to the mark without a costume also occurred at Timaru. A girl swimming for Canterbury had competed in one event and then removed her costume and wrapped herself in a towelling cloak.

“At her next call she mounted the block, the chaperone removed her cloak, and Elsie was stark naked.”

There have been few rewards in swimming for Miss Brown, other than scattered moments of enjoyment and the knowledge of a job well done. But the friendship made in swimming and lifesaving circles will endure.

“It's the little things that delight you,” she said. “Girls I taught keep in touch with me, even if its just by sending a card at Christmas.

“On a recent DCB flight from Christchurch the hostess who wished me a pleasant trip turned out to be a girl from one of my life-saving classes. That really mad* my day.”