"OPENING DAY of the Olympic Games, the youth of fifty-three nations assemble together in the huge Maifield near the Stadium. Faces that will soon be grim and strained in competition are smiling …” wrote celebrated Halifax runner Aileen Meagher about her experience in the Olympic Games where she brought home a medal.
“… Then at a signal, everyone lines up behind his own flag. Down the avenue of flags,… trumpeters ring out a welcoming fanfare … we hear the gentle, almost sighing sound of Germany’s national anthem, “Deutschland”, “Deutschland”. … we hear the thunderous “Heil” … then comes Hitler — Der Fuhrer.”
These particular Olympics, though were the infamous 1936 Berlin Games hosted by Nazi Germany.
- This story appears in the third Backyard History book 'Rebellious Women In The Maritimes' … order it here!
Aileen Meagher’s athletic career was perhaps most astonishing because it had only begun five years earlier, in 1931.
She was then freshly enrolled in Dalhousie University, where she entered a track meet for new students. She had never entered a competition before, and few knew she was a runner.
She was born in 1910, a time when, as she phrased it: “a lady did not run.”
Seemingly nonplussed by this, she had an early and enduring love of running since childhood, shrugging off any controversy by simply saying: “I just liked to run.”
As a child, she cut up her brother’s pants to make herself running shorts. “My parents,” she later said were “not too sure…”
She was educated in a convent school, where her running was discouraged by the nuns, who found it “shocking.” Meagher later recalled that “The nuns were ashamed of me.”
Her lifelong secret self-taught training in running paid off in that first competition she ever entered at Dalhousie University: she won every foot race.
Dalhousie’s track coach was shocked, and impressed, telling her that she might one day compete in the Olympic Games.
Aileen Meagher had never heard of the Olympics.
Only one year later she travelled to Los Angeles to represent Canada in the 1932 Olympics.
A last-minute leg injury prevented her from competing.
In 1933, Aileen Meagher graduated from Dalhousie University, becoming a teacher. She remained in Halifax where she taught at St. Patrick’s Boys School and lived on Seymour Street, where she could be close to Dalhousie’s track.
“I wouldn’t have dared run on city streets the way people do today,” she later remarked in an interview. “So, I ran around the track. … There was nobody to run with me.”
She continued to compete internationally, despite being a teacher, which led to the press affectionately nicknaming her “Canada’s Flying Schoolmarm.”
It also wasn’t clear that Aileen Meagher was going to participate in the 1936 Olympics either. It was not because she was an inadequate athlete — she had represented Canada at the 1934 British Empire Games in London, bringing home three medals including the gold in the 660-yard relay. The following year she shattered four Canadian sprint records, leading to her being named both Canadian Woman Athlete of the Year and the Canadian Athlete of the Year.
Rather it was because the 1936 Olympic Games were being held in Berlin, and at the time Germany was ruled by Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Aileen Meagher had always raced wearing Dalhousie’s black and gold, at the university’s convocation that May several top officials at the school had made a fiery stand against “Hitlerism,” declaring they would have “nothing to do with the sending of athletes to Germany.”
Canada’s Olympic Committee, on the other hand, was of the opinion that sending athletes and international attention might have a moderating effect on Hitler personally, and Nazi Germany more broadly.
The reaction across the Maritimes’ newspapers, and with the public, to the news that Aileen Meagher might not be allowed to compete in the 1936 Olympics was swift and angry.
In the end, it was decided that Canada would send 97 athletes to the Olympics in Berlin, only 18 of whom were women. Among them was Aileen Meagher.
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Frederick T. Birchall, who was reporting on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games for the New York Times, filed a report detailing the opening ceremonies. He instantly put down the lofty notions that organizations like Canada’s Olympic Committee had that the games would somehow moderate the Nazis, calling the opening “a great day for Hitler … he was the object of enthusiasm exceeding all bounds. … Something like a million persons gathered along the Via Triumphalis between the Lustgarten and the stadium to cheer his passing.”
Aileen Meagher was more focused on the athletes at the opening ceremonies than the propaganda coup, later writing:
“The huge Olympic bell rings out and, answering its call, the youth of the world, moving with beauty and strength, enter the stadium and stand in the field. Soon the green of the grass is almost hidden by the bright blazers and uniforms of the competitors."
The New York Times reporter wrote, “The athletes marched in a procession once around the arena, saluting the dais, each nation according to its custom, as they passed; then, turning across the field they took their stand in columns great and small in front of the Fuehrer…”
At this point, the athletes were, by tradition, expected to salute the head of state, which meant saluting Hitler.
The Nazi leader wanted the athletes to give him the Hitler salute.
Canadian athletes gave the salute to Hitler, but with their outstretched arms facing to the side of their bodies at a 90-degree angle — clearly the ancient Olympic salute, not the Nazi salute that Hitler desired.
As the ceremonies continued, Aileen Meagher recalled: “Der Fuehrer then proclaims the Games open and the Olympic flag, five interlocked rings, representing the continents, goes up. Salutes are fired, carrier pigeons wheel overhead, the great zeppelin, Hindenburg, cruises slowly by and the blare of the trumpets is almost unheard in the roar of a hundred thousand voices. Then the huge well of sound is no longer thunderous with applause, but resonant with the deep solemnity of the Olympic hymn.”
At this point a runner entered, carrying a torch that had been lit in Greece, the centre of the Ancient Olympics. This was the first time the Olympic flame ceremony we are familiar with today ever happened, and it was promoted as a symbol of Nazi propaganda.
Aileen Meagher described the runner’s entrance “As the last ringing notes fade, the torch bearer appears dramatically at the head of a flight of steps, carrying in his upflung hand the fire that has been brought by runners from far away Olympia in Greece. He runs the length of the stadium and kindles the flaming torch that will flare against the skyline all during the games.”
Aileen Meagher was representing Canada in the women’s 400-metre relay, which reporter Frederick T. Burchill of the New York Times called “the climax of the 1936 Olympics … A record crowd gathered for the marathon, the most widely advertised Olympic event.”
Aileen Meagher and three other Canadians took their places on the start line for the big women's relay race: Dorothy “Dot” Brookshaw; Jeanette Dolson; and Hilda Cameron; all of whom were from Ontario.
The big attraction for the home crowd was the German women’s relay team, widely thought to be unstoppable, who had set a new world record in the 400-meter race the day before. Expectations for the German team were so high that Adolph Hitler was in attendance at the race, watching.
The specially built stadium was filled to capacity with 100,000 people in attendance.
The gun was fired and the racers took off … and the German team promptly dropped the baton.
Burchill wrote that “Black despair settled on the generally vociferous German crowd.”
They were disqualified.
Aileen Meagher and the Canadians continued to race, as the crowd focussed on the defeated German teams, with Burchill writing that “with tears rolling down their cheeks they were taken up to Hitler’s box where he consoled them as best he could, assuring them he knew they would have won.”
Aileen Meagher and Team Canada won the bronze medal.
After all the hype, it was oddly an oddly anti-climactic ending.
Halifax's Bluenose Magazine had asked Meagher to write an article while she was there describing what the Berlin Olympics were really like.
Evidently taking her assignment very literally, she penned a fascinating stream-of-consciousness article, offering Maritimers vivid glimpses of pre-war Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics:
“The Games lasted two weeks, fourteen vivid days of varying impressions;
. . . the strange solemnity of placing a wreath on the grave of the Unknown Soldier, and the half twinge of fear evoked by the guard of honour, whose helmeted heads were so grimly similar to those soldiers of twenty years ago …”
“…a victorious German girl, laurel crowned, carried home on the shoulders of her teammates, and let down to pass through a gate of flowers, stands excited and flushed while her companions dance and sing around her …”
“…a little dachshund puppy who looks gravely at his master grasping a long sausage in one hand and a frothing stein in the other, and then waddles over to make friends…”
“…the wall of black-shirted guards that hold back the pushing throng of spectators as Herr Hitler steps into his car…”
As for the Canadian Olympic Committee, as the games closed they were pleased with their decision to have Canada represented at Hitler’s games, declaring that the 1936 Olympics had been “harbingers of international goodwill and harmony between nations.”
They couldn’t have been more wrong, and three years later the world went to war.
As for Aileen Meagher, she had a fascinating career shift later in her life. Just before her 40th birthday, Aileen Meagher enrolled in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She showed immense talent from the beginning, and before even finishing school she began exhibiting her art. She went on to become an award-winning artist.
When she was 73 years old, Aileen Meagher granted one of her last interviews. It was with her next-door neighbour Duncan Mills, age 10 years old, for a school project he was working on.
The little reporter summarised the rest of her life:
“She was a school teacher for 35 years.
She has travelled all over the world. She has been to Australia, Africa, Spain, Kenya, China, Greece, Ireland and Western Samoa.
Her hobbies are working in her garden and painting.
If she could rule the world for one day, she would stop everyone from fighting.
The most important lesson she has learned in her life is that she is too shy.
I like her a lot.”
Today Aileen Meagher is recognized by the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame as one of the province’s greatest athletes of all time.
- This story appears in the third Backyard History book 'Rebellious Women In The Maritimes' … order it here!
