Diana Kingsmill Wright

Diana Kingsmill Wright (24 December 1908 – 24 January 1982) was a Canadian athlete, journalist and activist.^[3]

Biography[]

Diana Kingsmill Wright was born in Ottawa, Ontario, 24 December 1908. She was the daughter of Naval Service of Canada admiral Sir Charles Kingsmill,^[3] She was raised and educated in Canada and England.

In her youth, she was a competitive figure skater, who was a winner of the Devonshire Cup.^[4] She was later a member of the Canadian alpine skiing team at the 1936 Winter Olympics,^[5] and competed despite having suffered a broken hand.^[6]

She married Victor Gordon-Lennox, the son of British politician Walter Gordon-Lennox, in 1932.^[7] In this era she was a friend of actor David Niven,^[3] who wrote about her in his autobiography The Moon Is a Balloon.^[8]

She returned to Ottawa in 1940 after separating from Gordon-Lennox.^[9] She remarried to historian J. F. C. Wright in 1944, in the Parliament Hill office of J. S. Woodsworth,^[10] and moved with Wright to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.^[3] Active in the Saskatchewan chapter of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the Wrights became co-editors of Union Farmer, the newspaper of the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union, in 1950.^[3] Wright committed suicide in 1970.^[10]

In the 1960s, she was active in Voice of Women, and leased the Kingsmill family summer home on Grindstone Island to the Society of Friends to serve as a Quaker retreat centre and an institution for peace studies.^[11] She later served as editor of Environment Probe,^[3] and served on an advisory committee to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on its coverage of agriculture and farming issues.^[3]

References[]