The slew of global tributes to Anglo-Jewish tennis star Angela Buxton has fallen on her lifelong fight against antisemitism.
But none, Jewish or not, has referred to her late ex-husband Donald Silk, whose particular trials almost matched her own.
Later, as ZF chairman, Silk took Buxton and their three infant children to Kibbutz Amiad, Galilee for four months from July 1967, telling colleagues that he wanted to give a personal example of service to Israel.
In May 1980, Silk featured in an episode of The London Programme, Donald Silk - Alderman of the City and then in May 1994, his son James Henry from a second marriage, became the youngest person ever to address a public planning enquiry at a hearing in Oxford.
But there is much more to Silk’s years in London politics than first apears and the story makes me wonder, for the umpteenth time, how much any anti-Jewish sentiment is genuine racial hatred and what proportion is sparked by personal animus.
If there are no friends in business, there are at best only friendly foes in the highly competitive worlds of politics and sports. So first, perhaps we should be unsurprised that with two ultra-strong egos in a confined space that the Silk-Buxton marriage survived barely a decade.
Then we come to Silk’s later life, during which, according to his obituary in The Times, the “campaigning City of London councilman fought an epic battle to bring voter power to the governance of the City of London. Twice he was elected as an alderman, twice he was rejected by the Court of Aldermen. One of his leading and most relentless opponents was Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen, one-time Lord Mayor of London. Because City aldermen could succeed almost automatically to the Lord Mayoralty, Sir Bernard and his fellow aldermen had a veto over who was 'suitable' and who was not — and never mind the voters”.
This action could never be ascribed to anti-Jewish sentiment as Sir Bernard was not only a scion of the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy but like his father, Sir Robert had helped to further the economic development of modern Israel. Moreover, his mother, Alice died in Mandate Palestine in 1935 following a motor accident.
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All this returns me to Buxton and Althea Gibson who indeed suffered institutional racism because of their respective colour and ethnicity in an era when it was still acceptable. But I suggest they also faced peer hostility and all the consequent isolation due to a cocktail of other players’ inevitable professional jealousy stirred with drops of covert sexual tension.
It must have been easy for later champions like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova to heap lavish praise upon Buxton. After all, she was nine years King’s senior and had been at her professional peak the year Navratilova was born, thus never posing a threat to either of them.
It is proverbial that great sporting events make fantastic theatre so the main ‘actors’, just like Maureen Lipman has remarked, must find it difficult to “distinguish between wanting a job and wanting to show off”.
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The story of Buxton and Silk - and of course, Althea Gibson - gives us a chance to examine the demarcation lines between race hate and personal dislike as the former is often used to attack a victim’s perceived weak point.
This is where the estimable work of the Israel Tennis Centres serves an ace as it brings together children from throughout the Israeli ethnic divide while teaching them a great sporting skill and producing some players of international repute.
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So I close by inviting readers with personal memories and photographs of Buxton, Silk and Gibson and their extended families to share them with us here.
Those interested, please drop a note in the comments box and we’ll take it from there!
© Natalie Wood (23 August 2020)
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