Diana Kingsmill Wright

Diana Kingsmill Wright (1908–1982) was a Canadian athlete, journalist and activist.^[1] The daughter of Naval Service of Canada admiral Charles Kingsmill,^[1] she was born in Ottawa, Ontario and raised and educated in Canada and England.

In her youth, she was a competitive figure skater, who was a winner of the Devonshire Cup.^[2] She was later a member of the Canadian alpine skiing team at the 1936 Winter Olympics,^[3] and competed despite having suffered a broken hand.^[4]

She married Victor Gordon-Lennox, the son of British politician Walter Gordon-Lennox, in 1932.^[5] In this era she was a friend of actor David Niven,^[1] who wrote about her in his autobiography The Moon Is a Balloon.^[6]

She returned to Ottawa in 1940 after separating from Gordon-Lennox.^[7] She remarried to historian J. F. C. Wright in 1944, in the Parliament Hill office of J. S. Woodsworth,^[8] and moved with Wright to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.^[1] Active in the Saskatchewan chapter of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the Wrights became co-editors of Union Farmer, the newspaper of the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union, in 1950.^[1]

In the 1960s, she was active in Voice of Women, and leased the Kingsmill family summer home on Grindstone Island to the Society of Friends to serve as a Quaker retreat centre and an institution for peace studies.^[9]

She later served as editor of Environment Probe,^[1] and served on an advisory committee to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on its coverage of agriculture and farming issues.^[1]

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