No Sex Please, We're British...

Lillian and Wally Kinnear

The loyal readers of HTBS know by now that the Daily Mail, one of Great Britain’s infamous tabloids, is hardly HTBS’s daily read, but we cannot help linking to an article in the paper about Jenny Searle, Greg Searle’s wife, who, according to the tabloid, is unhappy to have her handsome husband off training to try to get his second Olympic rowing gold medal at the London Games. As you all know, he took his first one twenty years ago at the 1992 Barcelona Games.

It’s a funny article (many of the Daily Mail’s articles are, although not all of them are supposed to be; another humorous thing is that the majority of the paper’s readers seem to have no sense of humour at all, I mean, read the commentaries!), but before you click on the link to the article, I would like to put the content in the article in perspective with what another wife of an Olympian said one hundred years ago, when Lillian Kinnear, wife of the 1912 Olympic sculling champion Wally Kinnear,

“used to go around and tell all the wives that their husbands were in training - no sex! They were going to Henley Regatta, no sex. She would really lay the law down. It was one of the wives who told me this, she said that she put the fear of God into you.”

The above is a quote from Tim Koch’s entertaining post The Story of Wally Kinnear, Or ‘Not Tonight…’ (22 May, 2011). It seems to be the opposite with Jenny Searle – well, if we are to believe the article in the Daily Mail! Read first Tim’s piece about Lillian Kinnear before going to the article about Jenny Searle here.