History
On Saturday 1 February 1879 a number of prominent men of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire met in the Guildhall, Cambridge, to set up the National Skating Association with the aim of regulating the sport of fen skating. A Cambridge journalist, James Drake Digby, had thought that the Fen speed skaters were worthy of national recognition and he was also concerned that betting was leading to malpractice. He thought that skating needed a national organisation to control it, like the Jockey Club. The founding committee included several landowners, a vicar, a fellow of Trinity College, a magistrate, two Members of Parliament, the mayor of Cambridge, the Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, the president of Cambridge University Skating Club, and Neville Goodman, a fellow of Peterhouse College.
The newly-formed National Skating Association held their first one-and-a-half-mile British professional championship at Thorney in December 1879. There was a field of 32, including former champions Turkey Smart and Tom Watkinson. Fish Smart beat Knocker Carter in the final. His reward was a badge, a sash and a cash prize, given as an annual salary in instalments in order to encourage the champion to "keep himself temperate". The NSA also established an amateur championship, which was held for the first time at Welsh Harp, London, in January 1880, and won by Frederick Norman, a farmer’s son from Willingham. The professionals were labourers who skated for cash prizes; the amateurs were gentlemen who skated for trophies.
In 1892 the NSA aided in the foundation of the International Skating Union (ISU). The NSA hosted the first international ice skating competition in Britain in Birmingham in 1899 and has hosted all events in the UK since in various locations.
In 1894 the National Skating Association decided to move their headquarters from Cambridge to London, from where they concentrated on figure skaters and rinkmen. Their new base, the National Skating Palace, is now better known as the London Palladium.
Until 1990, when an independent society was formed, the NSA was also the UK's governing body of roller skating. As a consequence of the segmentation, the NSA became the NISA (National Ice Skating Association), the headquarters of which are now based at the National Ice Centre in Nottingham.
Read more about this topic: National Ice Skating Association
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“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)