The Scrapbooks

No Stone Unturned - Jean Stone and the Story She Kept

There is something immediately striking about Jean Stone's scrapbooks. Each cutting has been carefully trimmed, no ragged edges, no torn margins. Each one is mounted neatly on the page, dated in Jean's distinctive handwriting, the source newspaper noted below. Nothing is careless or accidental. These aren’t the scrapbooks of someone who happened to keep a few cuttings. They are the work of someone who understood, with absolute clarity, that she was preserving something important - somebody had to keep the record.

The scrapbooks begin in the early 1960s, when disability sport in Scotland was in its infancy. The Scottish Paraplegic Association had only recently been founded, and Jean was at the centre of it as a young occupational therapist at the Thistle Foundation in Edinburgh. The early pages capture a movement finding its feet: reports of the first Scottish Paraplegic Games in 1961, fundraising appeals, letters to newspaper editors debating whether it was right to spend public money sending disabled athletes abroad to compete.

One story above all runs through the earliest scrapbooks. In 1962, Scotland sent a team of 15 athletes (13 men and two women) to compete in the first Commonwealth Paraplegic Games in Perth, Western Australia. The logistics alone were formidable. The team needed to raise £7,000 entirely through public appeal. Jean kept every cutting: the launch of the fundraising campaign, the letters to doctors and businesses, a sceptical letter from a Glasgow physician asking whether the money might be better spent on wheelchairs and crutches, and the passionate response from team leader James Laird making the case for why sport mattered as much as equipment. Then, on 24th October 1962, the Daily Record headline: "MONEY WORRIES OVER." The target had been exceeded.

There are departure photographs too. A cutting from the Edinburgh Evening News, November 6th 1962, headlined simply 'ENDEAVOUR', showing the full team of 15 lined up at Turnhouse Airport in front of their plane, hats on, smiling, ready.

Three weeks later: the Evening Dispatch, November 23rd, 1962. "Victorious Paraplegics Fly Back From Australia With Sixteen Medals." Jean kept that too.

What makes the scrapbooks remarkable is not just what they contain but what they represent. At a time when disability sport received very little mainstream attention (and when it did, it often used language that jars deeply today) Jean was quietly and methodically building a record. Athlete by athlete, competition by competition, cutting by cutting. The scrapbooks extend far beyond the UK too: there are pages from Japanese newspapers covering the 1964 Tokyo Paralympic Games, coverage of British medal winners at multiple Paralympic Games, and features on individual athletes whose stories might otherwise have been entirely lost.

She did all of this, as one of our cataloguing volunteers observed, long before an organisation like the National Paralympic Heritage Trust existed to do it. Jean took it upon herself. To her this history mattered. And she made sure it survived.

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The Jean Stone Collection has now been catalogued and will soon be searchable via the Buckinghamshire Archives Disability Sports Catalogue.