Mary Bagot Stack

After an education at Alexandra School and Alexandra College, Dublin, she enrolled in 1907 as a trainee teacher at Mrs Josef Conn's Institute of Physical Training in London. She had met Mrs Conn in Paris and was inspired by her specialisation in exercises to promote health. By 1910, she had moved to Manchester and set up her fitness centre with private classes, large classes for women factory workers and also treated private patients.

Stack was born on 12 June 1883 in Dublin, to parents from the Irish Protestant professional class. Her father was a dentist, Richard Theodore Stack (d. 1909). She contracted rheumatic fever at the age of 17. She married in 1909 (Albert Thomas James McCreery, a doctor) but this was short-lived ending in divorce. She married again on 10 March 1912 to a third cousin, Edward Hugh Bagot Stack (1884 - 1914), a captain in the Gurkha Rifles, who was killed in the First World War. She travelled with him to India, living in Lansdowne, a hill station near the Himalayas, but returned to the UK at the outbreak of war with her newborn daughter. She died in London on 26 January 1935, aged 51 after suffering from thyroid cancer.

Her first child died at birth in 1913. The second, Ann Prunella, was born in India on 28 July 1914.