‘Our Olympian grandma from Leeds refused to stand for Hitler’

“There were stormtroopers all the way around the arena, Swastika flags everywhere, and apparently, when all the athletes were in the stadium and Hitler entered, they were made to stand – and my grandma refused to stand.”

Damian Quarmby proudly recounts the tale of his grandmother, Doris Storey, attending the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a teenage competitor and bravely making her feelings about the Nazi regime clear.

Doris, a 17-year-old machinist from East Leeds, was making her first international appearance and was tipped for gold medals in the 200m breaststroke and freestyle relay.

The Berlin Olympics were a far cry from her home in Leeds, where she had balanced her swimming career, training three times a day at the York Road Baths, with working in the famous Montague Burton menswear factory.

Swimming was Doris’s dream and she had won multiple trophies for Leeds, Yorkshire and even the company she worked for.

“Burtons had their own sports team and they were very supportive of her, gave her time off,” Damian explains.

“As time progressed, she was then spotted at the York Road Baths and, in a short space of time, from about 15-16 years old, she excelled and was put forward for the Olympics.”

“Broad of shoulder” and “tapered”, Doris could glide through the water “like a duck”, says Damian.

“They couldn’t actually understand how she was winning these races,” he recounts.

“Pathé decided they would conduct a filming experiment and they built a glass tank for her and put the camera on some stilts that ran alongside the glass tank to see how she was doing it.”

Eventually, Doris was selected to swim for Great Britain, and so she made her journey to Berlin for the Olympics and came face-to-face with Germany’s Nazi regime.

“It was quite an overwhelming experience for her,” Damian says.

“She was only young when she travelled there, and the Olympics was Hitler’s biggest sort of propaganda machine.”

However, that did not stop Doris from making her feelings about the regime clear – leading to her refusing to stand for Hitler.

“She had a coach sat next to her and he was saying, ‘stand, stand’, and she wouldn’t,” Damian says.

“She had real principles and values, and at the last minute the coach had to grab her, put his hand underneath her arm and lift her up so she wasn’t spotted.”

After what must have been a terrifying introduction to the Olympics, Doris – who was a favourite for a gold medal – had a disaster.

“She was fastest and she was set to win gold, but on the day when she was walking down to the pool she slipped and fell over and badly sprained her wrist,” Damian says.

“The doctor for Team GB said, ‘you can’t swim’ and grandma said, ‘well, if I don’t swim, nobody’s going to represent England. I want to swim’.

“So, against the doctor’s orders she went ahead and competed.

“She set off fantastically. She was up on the first three competitors, but as the pain kicked in, she ended up falling back, but she still didn’t come last. She came second to last with the injury.”

Two years later, Doris was offered the chance to try again, this time at the 1938 British Empire Games in Sydney, the forerunner to the Commonwealth Games.

She travelled to Australia alongside other members of the Great Britain team, and, with their boat, the SS Ormonde, due to take more than four weeks to get there, it gave Doris and her colleagues plenty of time to keep up with their training – sometimes using unusual methods.

“They were made to train at the back of the boat in open sea with a shark-proof cage they’d lower down,” Damian explains.

“They’d swim in it as the boat was going along, and the Olympic diving team would dive off the side of the ship.”

As Doris’s grandson goes on to say, this approach did have its risks.

“There’s one particular tale she told us: one of the high divers was diving off the side of the boat and grandma was transitioning, coming out of the shark cage across to the boat.

“She turned around and thought she saw a fin, and she did see a fin, but she thought it was a shark and she’s like, ‘shark, shark!’.

“The diver had just surfaced and she swam over to him and she was petrified. Apparently, she grabbed hold of him but she nearly drowned.

“It turned out it was a porpoise that had been swimming close by.”

Once in Sydney, Doris went on to victory: winning two swimming golds in the 220 yard breaststroke and 3×110 yard medley.

By this time, World War Two was looming, meaning Doris would not get another chance to show off her swimming talents for the duration.

Then, in 1948, as she was ready to compete in the post-war “austerity” Olympics in London, her career came to a sudden end.

Damian explains: “She was still tipped to be a contender, but one of the Olympic committee – which was made up of men – spotted my grandma handing over her baby, our father Ron, to her sister Thelma.

“He made a note of this and then between the committee they decided it wasn’t appropriate for a mother to be away from her child for such a long time, so she was scratched off even though she probably would have been very competitive.”

Despite this, Doris never lost her love for swimming, instilling in her son Ron and grandsons Darren and Damian a love of the sport.

Darren says sadly none of them could match her talent.

“In my late 20s, I was swimming at the gym six times a week and I bought one of these watches that could measure how many lengths of the pool you’d done,” he says.

“As much as I tried, I could not get anywhere near my grandma’s time – I mean nowhere near that time, and I was trying hard.

“She was naturally talented, as well as strong.”

Doris could swim a 25m length in eight strokes and she even set a world record for the 100 yard breaststroke, something she held on to despite her “humble” retirement working with her husband in a fish and chip shop in East End Park, Leeds, he adds.

Darren says: “She always wore this medal around her neck and it was only as we got older we’d ask her about this medal and it was a world record.

“She held the record for a lot of years before it got broken – it was decades.”

The Quarmby brothers say they have always kept Doris’s trophies, medals and other memorabilia collected on her travels in the blue suitcase she took all the way to Hitler’s Germany in 1936 and to Australia in 1938.

Meanwhile, they say they are proud their grandmother is now remembered in other ways in her home city.

First, a blue plaque bearing her name is to be placed on the building where Doris once trained in Richmond Hill.

Second, just a short distance from the estate where she grew up in Seacroft, a new apartment building features a mural by artist Alexandra Elstone depicting the gold medal-winning swimmer.

Not only that, but the building is called Doris Storey House, the name chosen by children from Seacroft’s Beechwood Primary School after being inspired by great sporting stars from the city.

“Of all the people from Leeds who were famous, they wanted pick somebody out and they chose my grandma,” says Darren with a smile.

“It was really humbling.”