I have a poem, ‘Movement is Life’, up at Poems and Pictures, here, on the Mary Evans Picture Library website. I’m grateful to the editor, Gill Stoker. The poem’s title derives from the motto of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, a British then worldwide mass fitness organisation whose sessions my mum attended twice a week for the best part of fifty years. Founded in 1930 by aristocratic Nazi sympathisers, it was modelled on similar organisations in Germany, though it has long since been rebranded as the Fitness League. I hasten to add that all the Nazi connections were long since forgotten by the time my mum joined, in the Sixties. Many of her best friends were ones she met at League, as they all called it.
Poems and Pictures
Published
Matthew Paul 
Love the poem, Matthew. I’d never heard of The League…
Thanks very much, Ali.
Nice one, Paul
Enjoyed the poem ‘Movement is Life’, could relate to parts of it.
Wonderful poem Matthew. The picture site is a real find.
I remember football matches in the 50s where the half-time on-pitch entertainment was provided either by the League or a brass band – or sometimes both.
They still had something similar in the early 80s when I first started going to football regularly.
Great to have references to The Teardrop Explodes and The Dharma Bums in the same poem!
Julie x
Yes!