Inside the Jean Stone Collection

Click here to explore highlights from the Jean Stone Collection: A Life in Pictures

Jean Marshall Stone was born in Fife, Scotland in 1933. She left school without a career plan but was drawn to occupational therapy, eventually becoming Head Occupational Therapist at Astley Ainslie Hospital, serving the whole of the east of Scotland. Her entry into disability sport was almost accidental. In 1959 she was working at the Thistle Foundation in Edinburgh when she encountered a less than successful team returning from the Stoke Mandeville International Games. The following year, two weeks before the 1960 Games (which would determine selection for the first ever Paralympic Games, in Rome) a physiotherapist broke her arm. Jean stepped in to take her place. As Richard Brickley MBE, who knew Jean for decades, puts it: "I suppose the rest is history."

Rome 1960 was Jean's first Paralympic Games. She spent much of it on manual handling duties, helping athletes in and out of inaccessible transport and accommodation. She felt undervalued, she hadn't been given a uniform, and even the athletes themselves had to hand back their blazers. But this was the beginning. Richard Brickley, who knew Jean for decades, recalled that she socialised, sightsaw, and visited restaurants and cafes in imperial Rome during her first Games and what followed was five decades of extraordinary service.

Jean was a founding member of both the Scottish Paraplegic Association (SPA) and in 1962, wrote to the Secretary of State for Scotland (with the personal support of Sir Ludwig Guttmann) to push for a formal recognition of disability sport in the nation. This letter led directly to the establishment of a representative pan-disability sports organisation for Scotland the following year, the Scottish Sports Association for the Disabled. This broader organisation built on the SPA foundation, expanding its remit to include athletes with sensory and learning disabilities, as well as other physical impairments.

With Jean’s guidance, the SPA had begun sending a Scottish team to the Stoke Mandeville Games and by 1966 she was organising for 20 team members to compete, travelling by air. Jean was heavily involved in the Third Commonwealth Paraplegic Games in Edinburgh in 1970, for which she was awarded the MBE, an honour that, according to those who knew her, she had been on the verge of using as a reason to retire. The athletes had other ideas. They told her she couldn't possibly leave now. She stayed for another 49 years! In 1974, she managed the Scottish team, fundraising and overseeing logistics for getting the team to the Commonwealth Paraplegic Games in Dunedin, New Zealand.

The Scottish team in the athletes parade at the 1966 Commonwealth Paraplegic Games in Jamaica,

led by a member of the Jamaica Defence Force.

The Toronto 1976 Paralympic Games marked the first Summer Games to include amputee and visually impaired athletes. Jean’s involvement with the pan-disability SSAD no doubt placed her in a good position to serve as team manager at the Toronto 1976 and Arnhem 1980 Paralympic Games. Whilst she managed the GB team internationally, her day job remained in Scotland and in early 1984, Jean took early retirement from her career as an occupational therapist and moved to Stoke Mandeville, but keeping a base in Scotland. Here, she would assist Joan Scruton and the British Paraplegic Sports Society (now WheelPower) with the organising of the 1984 Paralympic Games in Stoke Mandeville.

In her time, Jean established two major events for Wheelpower, the National Junior Games and the Inter Spinal Unit Games which launched in 1988. Both continue to benefit young people and newly paralysed people today.

Jean went on to serve as Secretary of the technical committees responsible for organising the Seoul 1988 and Barcelona 1992 Paralympic Games. When the International Paralympic Committee was formed in 1989, Jean was at the heart of developing its sports technical structures and rules, helping to create, as Martin McElhatton CEO of WheelPower put it, "the blueprint of the Paralympic Games, much of which continues to this day." In 2003 she was awarded the Paralympic Order, the highest honour the Movement can bestow.

Click here to explore highlights from the Jean Stone Collection: The Paralympic Order

Jean died in January 2019, the day before NPHT were due to record her oral history leaving behind her a remarkable legacy.

“I was waiting for Jean to arrive to record her oral history. She had been working supporting plans for the Heritage Centre displays. Jean was never late or forgetful and in the end I contacted WheelPower concerned that she hadn’t shown. Little did I know that opportunity had passed. So this collection is a real gift in capturing her story through her personal items, records and photographs.” Vicky Hope-Walker CEO NPHT

Jean donated her extensive collection to WheelPower, which is now on long-term loan to the National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT) who have catalogued it and made it available to the public.

What the project team found inside the 104 boxes, was not simply a professional record. It was a testament to a life lived in devoted, joyful service and to the absolute conviction that this history was worth preserving.

A Meticulous Record Keeper

As with many personal collections, the archive is a puzzle with some pieces missing and putting together a full picture of Jean as a person has not been straightforward. Her professional records are thorough; the more private details of her inner life are harder to find. But what the collection reveals, unmistakably, is Jean’s devotion to disability sport.

Her scrapbooks are a case in point. Cutting after cutting, carefully trimmed, dated and mounted in neat sequence, they trace the arc of disability sport from its earliest days during her time in Scotland, through to the international Paralympic Movement. There are reports of the very first Scottish Paraplegic Games in 1961 to fundraising appeals to send a team of paraplegic athletes to the first Commonwealth Paraplegic Games in Perth, Australia in 1962, and their successful return with sixteen medals. Jean kept the whole story.

Click here to explore highlights from the Jean Stone Collection: The Scrapbooks

A Jean Stone Project volunteer said:

“It seems Jean took it upon herself to be the unofficial archivist of the early Paralympic Movement”, long before the NPHT existed. We are incredibly lucky that she did.” 

Her photographs tell a similar story. From Seoul to Barcelona, Lillehammer to Hong Kong to West Berlin, Jean travelled the world in service of the Paralympic Movement and wherever she went, she photographed not only the sport but the infrastructure around it. A bilingual directional signpost in Seoul framed against cherry blossom. A wheelchair user giving a delighted thumbs-up from inside a hot air balloon basket. Close-up studies of wheelchair designs spanning decades and continents. Where another visitor might have photographed a landmark or a monument, Jean photographed a ramp, a sign and her colleagues, reflecting her instinctive preoccupation with access and inclusion, and one that ran through her life's work.

Click here to explore highlights from the Jean Stone Collection: The Wheelchair Photographs

The collection also illuminates figures beyond Jean herself. Among its contents are records relating to Joan Scruton MBE, another pioneering woman at the heart of the early Paralympic Movement (someone the NPHT hopes to explore in greater detail in future projects). In one remarkable newspaper spread from November 1962, amid photographs of the Scottish team preparing to fly to Australia, there is a small portrait captioned simply: "Miss J. Stone (Thistle Foundation)." Jean, young and unassuming, pictured among the athletes she served. It is one of the very few times the collection turns its gaze on her.

A Community Brought Together

In July 2025, NPHT was awarded the ‘Archives Revealed’ grant for our cataloguing project: ‘The Jean Stone Collection - celebrating influential women in the Paralympic Movement’.

A project archivist was appointed to lead the cataloguing of the Jean Stone Collection. Alongside her, a team of 14 volunteers were recruited and trained, several identifying as disabled or neurodiverse. Volunteers ranged in age from 16 to over 60, some with previous experience of archival work, others entirely new to it. Over nine months, the team worked through all 104 boxes, listing and describing the documents, photographs and objects Jean had preserved.

For many volunteers, the project was their first encounter with Paralympic heritage - and with archive work altogether. One volunteer shared:

“I've never done anything like this before, but all the people I have met have been very friendly and clear in their instructions. It has been a very valuable experience. It feels great to give back to the community, especially in a way that is very unique to the history of the area that I have grown up in. Sometimes it can be daunting to try and navigate the 'real world' on your own, but my experience with the NPHT has taught me that there's (hopefully) nothing to worry about.”

What became clear through the process was that Jean had not simply kept records, she had preserved the experiences of the people of the Movement. Athletes she had managed, colleagues she had worked alongside, moments she had witnessed. Charlie Bethel, who worked with Jean at WheelPower, described her as "a walking encyclopaedia of disability sport", someone who always had the answer, always had time, and was, he said, "the greatest mentor anyone could ever have." Pauline Betteridge, Chair of British Wheelchair Archery, remembered that Jean could "calmly and quietly get things done" and that she always had time after a meeting to chat and catch up on the gossip.

That warmth is present throughout the archive too, if you know how to look for it. It is there in the personal letters Jean kept from athletes she had helped. It is there in the handwritten notes she added to newspaper cuttings. And it is there, perhaps most vividly of all, in the memories captured. One colleague remembered in a book from Jean’s memorial service, that when conditions at Stoke Mandeville were inadequate (which in the early days they often were) it was Jean who directed the squad to a nearby transport café for a decent breakfast, and to the Bell Pub in the evening for what she cheerfully called "apres sport".