Peerless: Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson Picture: Peter Jackson
Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson is 54, winner of 11 Paralympic gold medals and 13 World Championship medals, a greatly active member of the House of Lords, familiar and accomplished television broadcaster and member of countless bodies from the Lottery Advisory Panel to the London Marathon Board.
She and her husband Ian, a fellow wheelchair athlete and research chemist on Teesside, will celebrate their silver wedding on May 1. Carys, their daughter, is 22.
Dame Tanni has spina bifida. “If I had been born two years earlier I would have been taken away, not fed and allowed to die” she tells the Sporting Memories session – memorable, indeed – at Bishop Auckland this morning.
She’s proudly Welsh, took her House of Lords oath in 2010 in both English and Welsh but has long lived up here. Formally Carys Davina Grey, she became Tanni when her two-year-old sister pointed at the new baby and said “Tiny”, which sounded a little different with a Welsh lilt.
Inspired by her grandfather’s adage to aim high even if you hit a cabbage – “I never really knew what it meant, though” – she has soared, succeeded and managed to avoid most of life’s cabbage patches. Always articulate, occasionally emotional, she also proves a hugely entertaining speaker.
There’ve been many hurdles. “I was five when someone first asked me why my parents hadn’t terminated the pregnancy” she recalls. “It wasn’t the last time it happened. Discrimination is fairly relentless at times, sometimes it’s never ending.”
Best not to mention, she supposes, her long-time campaign for step-free access to trains, though the latest date is 2070.
Her parents fought her corner, too. Her father, an architect, said to be “very calm” but her mother, a baker, the feisty one. Tanni herself talks several times of her own “robust conversations”. They may be imagined.
Her parents were also determined that she should have a mainstream education – “we visited a special school when children of 15 were still playing with sand and water” – after which she attended Loughborough University. “If it was good enough for Seb Coe it was good enough for me” she supposes.
Carys, their daughter, accompanied her mum both to athletic events – “she’d build sand castles in the long jump pit” – and, later, on television engagements.
Tanni talks of an event when she’d won gold and saw the little girl running towards her. “Mummy darling, you’re brilliant, I love you” she said, before turning to the person looking after her.
“Now can I have my ice cream” said Carys.
These Sporting Memories sessions are hosted by Bishop Auckland FC director Terry Jackson, a skilled interlocutor who this morning barely gets a word in edgeways. Were the art of the raconteur to be an Olympic event, Tanni would win gold at that, too.
Terry does manage a couple of questions near the end, however, the first recalling that though Carys was born in Wales it was on Yorkshire soil – thanks to the little pouch of earth taped to her mother’s back.
The second’s about the identical tattoos which Tanni and her husband have on their right foot. They simply say “Expired” followed by –/–/–. The survivor fills in the date.
It was a special morning. Dame Tanni is a lovely Lady.
*Proud Welsh heritage notwithstanding, Dame Tanni took the title Baroness Grey-Thompson of Eaglescliffe in the County of Durham – and none of this Cleveland or Tees Valley malarkey – when made a life peer.
“I’m very proud of being Welsh but I love where we are now. I can’t see us living anywhere else” she tells Bishop.
Eaglescliffe’s south-west of Stockton, a station on the Darlington to Saltburn railway line and not to be confused with the adjoining parish of Egglescliffe (though, of course, it always is). Tanni isn’t the first international sports person, or headline maker, with close links to the place.
That was Cec Parkin (1886-1943), a railwayman’s son and cricketer good enough to make his Yorkshire debut in 1906 but who never again played for the county after Lord Hawke, the imperious skipper, discovered that the new man was born on the north bank of the Tees and by at least 20 yards.
Lord Hawke was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.
Thereafter Parkin spent several years playing Minor Counties for Durham and club cricket, mainly in Lancashire, before joining the Red Rose county – who didn’t much care which side of the river he landed – with huge success. In 1923 he bagged 209 wickets at 16.94.
Parkin made ten England appearances – one of the few to have opened both batting and bowling – and was named one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the year in 1924. Some accounts say he was an off-spinner, others a leggie. Probably he could turn his hand to both.
“He used to experiment with new deliveries by bowling them to his wife in the nets and occasionally sent her home with bruised fingers” says Wiki.
He was also a conjurer, more trickery, and a newspaper columnist and author so outspoken that it sometimes got him into trouble with the authorities. That’s one of his books, appropriately titled, above – but at least he didn’t have old Hawke-eye to answer to.
Grass Routes 