| Biography | Prunella Stack was born in India, daughter of a Gurkha Rifles officer, Captain Edward Hugh Bagot Stack, and his wife, Mary. In September 1914, he and his men embarked for France; Mary and her baby sailed for Britain. Edward was killed at the front before his wife and daughter landed. Other war widows turned to spiritualism, despair or cocktails, but as a bride in India, Mary had observed with interest the physical differences between the immobile imperialists, corseted, petticoated, shod in button boots at least a size too tight, and Indian women of all castes, able to bend from an unconstrained waist, their feet free in sandals. "Movement is life," she concluded. Movement could also be female emancipation, newly important in postwar Britain; mental as much as bodily health; and perhaps a cross-class and cultural force for peace.
Mary had vim enough to set up her first classes, then the Bagot Stack Health school, in London, where she taught teachers among them Prunella, who qualified in 1930, aged 16, yet already a veteran demonstrator of Mary's techniques. Mary's health worsened through Prunella's childhood, but, wanting to reach many more women, she started the Women's League of Health and Beauty in 1930, when "leagues" were all the rage, membership fee two shillings and sixpence, uniform an affordable sleeveless blouse and satin knickers (abbreviating over time from bloomers to shorts). The choreography of the era, adopted alike by communists, fascists and Busby Berkeley in Hollywood, was for synchronised mass formations, and the League created its own sprightly, not too sexy, version, first shown publicly in the Albert Hall in 1931.
By the time 5,000 members lifted their arms in unison in Olympia in 1936, young Prunella was head of the League. Mary had died, and Prunella had inherited her task, expanding British membership and extending it to the empire. She addressed the prime minister Neville Chamberlain's National Fitness Council; the government had discovered keeping fit as a cheap route to express modernity, defy the Depression and discreetly prepare for war. Prunella was the League's best advertisement, the picture papers' "Perfect Girl" of unaffected manners, unpainted fingernails and longer, more lensworthy, legs than any film star.
In 1937, a Scots MP invited her to open a school swimming pool with an inaugural dive. She obliged, and met the MP's brother, Lord David Douglas- Hamilton, youngest son of the 13th Duke of Hamilton. He soon proposed the setting-up of a Highlands fitness school, and marriage. She agreed to both, and off they went, mountaineering together in the Alps post-honeymoon.
Prunella led a League delegation to an international congress of physical fitness in Hamburg in 1938; she was unnerved by the Nazi Strength Through Joy devotees, but courteously hosted a German return visit the next year. Soon, the alert women of the League were volunteering for war service: Prunella retreated to Dorset for the duration, to take care of her two baby sons.
David achieved wartime glamour as an RAF squadron leader, surviving the RAF's most brutal years and air battles, only to crash short of the runway because of engine failure on return from a mission just after D-day in 1944. Mary had been 30 when she was widowed, and so was Prunella. But there was work for her to do in Britain, and in the Commonwealth that was displacing the empire. Women had had adventures beyond a little light exercise in the war years, and as a friend of Kurt Hahn, who founded Gordonstoun school and Outward Bound, Prunella began to imagine an equivalent organisation to offer excitement to girls: hardly SOE, but better than back to the apron.
Another friend was Alistair Albers, who taught her boys Zulu dances and invited them all to visit his native South Africa. She accepted, and they married there in 1950. She decided that the League would ignore the new racial laws the League welcomed women of all shapes and sizes, also all creeds and colours and opened unsegregated exercise classes. Alistair and Prunella climbed for fun, tackling Table Mountain several times; but on an ascent on Easter Day in 1951, he lost his hold and fell to his death.
The League, and her strong religious faith, sustained her through her second widowhood. Defying the authorities, she led a multiracial team to the 1953 coronation in London. The organisation continued, with Prunella as president, and still continues, now called the Fitness League, although overshadowed, as decades passed, by the commercialisation and sexualisation of female exercise; few gyms teach women how to walk with bowls balanced on their heads (Mary's idea to maintain spinal flexibility, based on her Indian memories), or stress female co-operation rather than competition. Girls were eventually admitted to Outward Bound, and so was Prunella, as vice-president of its trust from 1980, the year she was also appointed OBE.
After her return to London, she had a happy third marriage, to Brian Power, a barrister whose fascinating past of war and farflung places matched her own. In lieu of retiring, they bought an austere croft on the isle of Raasay in the Hebrides, and there encouraged each other to write (she an autobiography and manuals of movement, he a fine memoir of a vanished China), and to stay lithe, pedalling their bicycles, right up to his death in 2008. |