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Lawrence Demmy, Jack Wake and Jean Westwood. Photo courtesy "Ice Skate" magazine.
The son of Gertrude (Marcovitch) and Albert Dembovsky, Lawrence Demmy was born November 7, 1931, in Manchester, England and grew up in the nearby town of Prestwich on Bishops Road in Sedgley Park. By day, his father worked as a manufacturer and salesman of Mackintoshes; by night he was the Jewish featherweight boxing champion of Northern England. The extended Demmy (Dembovsky) family of Manchester was all involved in the family raincoat business. Lawrence's uncle Gus was a well-known boxing promoter and bookie. Lawrence also dabbled in boxing while attending Stand Grammar School in Bury. His younger brother Franklyn was the school's senior sports champion.
Lawrence started skating at the age of fourteen when the Manchester Ice Palace in Cheetham Hill reopened after the Second World War. He wasn't the only skater in the family. His cousin Michael took up the sport as well and was an early partner of June Markham before she teamed up with Courtney Jones. Lawrence placed second in the Northern and Midlands Ice Dance Championship and finished sixth in his first British Championships in 1950 with Janet Hudson before teaming up with Jean Westwood in the autumn of that year. It was a partnership concocted by the Ice Palace's manager, Jack Wake, who himself was a British Open Professional Champion in ice dancing in thirties - and a match in heaven it was not. In a February 16, 1998 interview in the "Times Colonist", Jean admitted, "I hated Demmy. In my mind's eye, I would superimpose my boyfriend's face on his whenever I looked at Demmy in competition. For all the world, we looked as if we were passionately in love. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. But both of us wanted to be World Champions. We were of value to each other, of use to each other."
Jean Westwood and Lawrence Demmy. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine.
If Jean and Lawrence's partnership wasn't all roses, you certainly couldn't have guessed it when you saw them skate. In their very first competition together, the International Ice Dancing Competition at the 1951 World Championships in Milan, they bested eleven other couples and earned first place. Upon returning home to England, they were met at the London Road Station at two o'clock in the morning by a crowd of family, friends and fellow skaters. Among the crowd were Ethel Muckelt and Kathleen Shaw, two of England's biggest skating stars of the roaring twenties.
Jean Westwood and Lawrence Demmy presenting an award to British skater Elaine Skevington. Photo courtesy "Ice & Roller Skate" magazine.
In the years that followed, Jean and Lawrence made history as the first ice dance winners at both the European and World Championships. They were European Champions twice, World Champions four times (five if you count 1951, which you should) and British Champions twice. Lawrence made history as the first ice dancer of Jewish heritage to win all three of these prestigious titles.
Jean and Lawrence's list of honours didn't stop there. They were the first ice dancers ever to be recipients of the National Skating Association's prized Vandervell Trophy, British junior pairs champions, senior pairs medallists and winners of the Northern and Midlands Dance Championship, Open Dance Trophies of Liverpool, Manchester and Nottingham Skating Clubs, Wembley Open Fourteenstep Competition and Northern and Midlands Blues Competition, Northern and Midlands Pair Skating Competition. They worked with a who's who of top British instructors, including Miss Gladys Hogg, Len Liggett and Thelma Jenkinson. Lawrence passed his Gold Dance test with Miss Hogg; Jean took hers with Len Liggett because he insisted Lawrence "wasn't good enough. Lawrence, as World Champion, was not impressed," recalled Jean.
Jean and Lawrence's partnership ended in 1955. Lawrence was serving with the RAF at the time. He became engaged to his first wife, Patricia, and decided to focus on running his own businesses - a light engineering firm and a company that manufactured electrical components. Jean went overseas and became one of North America's most successful ice dance coaches. Lawrence remarried to Pamela Coverdale in 1960 and settled in North Humberside, East Yorkshire. The couple had three children.
Jean Westwood and Lawrence Demmy. Photo courtesy "Ice Skate" magazine.
Lawrence's contributions to ice dancing after retiring from competitive skating were quite remarkable in their scope. He established an open ice dance event in Manchester, the Lawrence Demmy Trophy, that was quite popular in the sixties. He was a judge and referee at countless British Championships and judged at the first international ice dancing competition for juniors in Oberstdorf, West Germany in 1961. His first ISU Championship as a judge was the 1964 European Championships in Grenoble. He ruffled some feathers as the only judge on the panel to place the top British couple, Linda Shearman and Michael Phillips, in first in the compulsories, but the following year joined the Ice Dance Technical Committee as a substitute. He became a Committee Member in 1967 (the first former World Champion to do so) and served on the Committee for over twenty years, fifteen years of which he was the Chairman. From 1984 to 1994, he served on the ISU Council and from 1993 to 1998 served as the ISU's Vice-President for Figure Skating. In 1994, he lost a bid for the ISU Presidency to Ottavio Cinquanta. In 1998, he was made an Honorary Vice-President of the ISU. He was the Assistant Referee of the very first Olympic ice dance competition in Innsbruck in 1976 and Referee of the dance events at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, 1984 Games in Sarajevo and 1992 Games in Albertville. During his long tenure as an ISU Official, he was involved in many sweeping changes in ice dancing - from the introduction of the OSP to the introduction of small lifts and jumps to the increase in value of the free dance.
Christopher Dean, Jayne Torvill and Lawrence Demmy at the British Embassy in 1983. Photo courtesy "Ice & Roller Skate" magazine.
The anecdotes from Lawrence's decades-long career as an ISU Official run the gamut. For starters, in 1984, he proposed a Pacific Championship as an alternative to the European Championships. This concept would later be realized, over a decade later, when the first ISU Four Continents Figure Skating Championships were held in Halifax in 1999. He was one of the brave officials who approached Suzanne Bonaly in the nineties and told her, in no uncertain terms, that her daughter Surya was to stop doing backflips on official practice sessions because it was spooking her competitors. He was behind the suspension of Tatiana Danilenko, a Soviet judge who gave high marks to a Soviet skater who fell twice. He was vocally opposed to professionals reinstating to the amateur ranks to compete in the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer. As early as 1976, he was behind an ISU push for "modest and dignified costumes". For over ten years, Lawrence earned somewhat of a reputation for being the 'fashion police', for his role in drafting rule changes to push back against theatrical costuming. After the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, he remarked, "It's becoming a glitter competition. It's a question of who can spend the most money and have the most dazzling outfit. There have been one or two skaters with bare midriffs, no sleeves, almost allowing for bikini tops, decorations and feathers in the hair. It's gone a bit over the top. We have to bring it back."
What's interesting about Lawrence is that, despite drafting numerous rule changes to 'reel in ice dancing', he was also a big supporter of skaters that pushed the envelope. He praised couples like Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (whom he advised), Lyudmila Pakhomova and Aleksandr Gorshkov, Natalia Linichuk and Gennadi Karponosov and Natalia Bestemianova and Andrei Bukin, and was a particular fan of 'Min and Mo' - Irina Moiseeva and Andrei Minenkov. He believed that the judging of the compulsory dances, OSP/original dance and free dance should be independent of one another. At a press conference at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, he remarked, "We have to change the attitudes of the judges. They have to realize there are three distinct stages, and they have to judge them on style and merit. That's not what's happening and it's beginning to look ridiculous. We have to rectify that. We've got to continue to look for new concepts, as Torvill and Dean did. I had [the Duchesnays] second in the original set pattern and free dance and I just couldn't understand it. It's madness. I think their program was fabulous. The more unconventional it is, the better I like it. If we don't accept new concepts, the event is going to stagnate."
In 1992, Lawrence remarked at a press conference, "In my day, the competition was four compulsory dances, which were worth sixty per cent, and one free dance. It's fair to say you were inclined to work harder for the biggest reward. For many years, there [were] no lifts or jumps. It was purely dance steps. That's very restrictive. When I became chairman, I looked to improve the integrity of ice dance. For many years, it was the poor relative."
Though he may have sought to improve the integrity of ice dancing, Lawrence's own integrity would be called into question more than once. When Lawrence suspended six out of nine judges from the dance event at the 1993 World Championships in Prague for inappropriate conduct, the suspensions didn't stick, because protocol wasn't evidently followed. At another event, when an official wanted to file an official complaint about the judging, Lawrence brushed them off and told them it was too late.
Lawrence was a polarizing figure among his peers at the ISU. He developed a close friendship with Courtney Jones, but in her 2004 book "Cracked Ice: Figure Skating's Inner World", Sonia Bianchetti Garbato expressed no love for him whatsoever: "He could change his opinion whenever it suited his personal interests, with no shame whatsoever... He fooled me for years. It took me a little longer to realize how dangerous this man was. He was so good at double-crossing and I was so trusting... [He] could not stand my popularity and did not miss the opportunity to attack me." When he ran against Ottavio Cinquanta for the ISU Presidency in 1994, Cinquanta, the sitting President Olaf Poulsen and Tjaša Andrée-Prosenc mounted a campaign against him. Some felt his loss was karma working its magic.
In 1998, Lawrence lost his seat on the ISU Council when he was defeated by Japan Skating Federation President Katsuichiro Hisanaga. He retired in Spain for several years, before returning to England and settling in Hull, North Yorkshire. He passed away on December 9, 2016, at the age of eighty-five. For his contributions to the skating world, he (along with partner Jean Westwood) were the first ice dancing duo to be inducted to the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 1977. He became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1983.
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