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| Mum on the right with her friend doing the Lambeth Walk |
It
occurred to me recently that although I’ve blogged about my dear old Dad and
his soldiering days, I haven’t talked about my lovely Mum, Emily (and known
fondly as Em). She was born in Horwich, near Bolton, in 1911, the youngest of
three sisters. She also had an older and two younger brothers. Life was very
hard for my grandmother, also an Emily, because my grandfather, as a private in
the 1st Battalion of the ‘Six VCs before breakfast’ Lancashire
Fusiliers, had died during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. At 39, with a young
family, he would not have had to go to war except that he was a reservist,
having served with the Lancashire Fusiliers previously between 1894 and 1899.
Mary Ellen, her mother’s sister,
lived with them, off and on, sleeping on the sofa because there was no bed to
spare. As she was lame and unable to work, she helped out where she could.
Labelled ‘an interfering old bugger’ by my Auntie Mary, she was nevertheless a
great influence on my mother’s life. She loved to sing and taught Mum many of
the songs she knew, not all of them respectable. Mum got into trouble once at a
tea party for war orphans for singing one of Auntie Mary Ellen’s songs, about a
young woman who pretended to be a soldier in order to stay with her soldier
sweetheart. It was the phrase, ‘her lily white breasts,’ which earned her a
telling-off from the good ladies of the Co-operative Guild. She also had a
suitable saying for every occasion and these have passed down through Mum until
they have become family mottos. Sayings like ‘It’s a long lane that has no
turning,’ and ‘As one door closes, another opens,’ have been held on to over
and over again when things were going badly. I was later to find, through doing
my family history, that she died, aged only 52, in Fishpool Workhouse in
Bolton, Lancashire
When Mum was 11, she passed a
scholarship to go to local grammar school. The school was Protestant and Mum’s
family were Catholics but her mother, aware of the advantages of education, insisted
she go. Mum remembered that she wasn’t allowed to go into the morning assembly
with the others, but apart from that, she really enjoyed school and seemed to
do well there. Unfortunately, when she was 13, her mother fell gravely ill and
as she lay dying, the priest refused her the last rites unless ‘that child
leaves that Protestant grammar school.’ Under intense pressure, and knowing
what it would mean to her mother to have the last rites, she agreed, though it
was to turn her against Catholicism. She never forgave that priest.
The then equivalent of Social Services wanted
to split the family up and foster the children separately but Mary, the elder
sister, and John, the elder brother, themselves only 19 and 18 (they were both
born in the same year, 1905) would not hear of it. Mary used to come home in
her dinner break from the mill where she worked, to give the younger
children their dinner.
When Mum left school at fourteen, she went in
't'mill' like her sisters Mary and Annie but never liked it. By sixteen, she
was working 'in service' and stayed in that line of work for most of her
working life. In 1936, she met my Dad, Ronald, and within a year they were
married. Both of them worked, on and off, in domestic service for most of my childhood and afterwards.
She always said that it was Dad who had itchy
feet but it was actually her that kept looking in ‘The Lady’
magazine for other domestic service jobs. One interview they went to was with John
Stonehouse, one time MP, who, shortly after, faked his own death by drowning
and turned up in Australia living with his secretary. Another interview was
with Victor Lowndes, the European head of the Playboy organisation. They turned
him down because he refused to consider changing the original Victorian kitchen
of his country house, Stocks.
In about 1972/73, they went to work for an up
and coming business man, Asil Nadir, who had a rather grand house on Bishop's
Avenue, otherwise known as Millionaire's Row, Hampstead, London. They had some
hilarious adventures there, including bundling Asil's mistress out of the back
door while his wife came in the front. In 1993, while on bail on fraud charges
relating to his Polly Peck organisation, he fled the country to live in Turkish
Cyprus. In 2010, he returned to the UK, the case went to trial and he is now
serving a prison sentence.
After officially retiring from domestic
service, Emily became manager of a charity shop, first of all in Bedford, then,
after they’d moved back to Lancashire, in Bolton. Even when she retired from
that, she kept busy fund-raising for various charities and organising a bingo
social club in Bolton two or three days a week. In the early 1980s, when she
was in her seventies, she and a friend entered a national competition being
held to promote the West End opening of ‘Me and My Girl’ starring Robert
Lindsay and Emma Thompson. Their portrayal of the Lambeth Walk led to them
winning the regional final and then, against stiff competition from Londoners
themselves, they won the national final!
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| Mum in later life with that smile! |
After my Dad died in 1999, Mum continued to
live alone in their flat in Horwich but in 2001, moved to Bolsover, Derbyshire
to be nearer me and my husband. She lived in sheltered accommodation, making
friends easily and participating in most of the events. I visited most
afternoons and on Sundays, she would come to us for lunch. In 2008, after a
series of stays in hospital, she moved into a care home as she needed more
daily care than I was able to provide. She died in December 2008, following a
short illness aged 97. All who came into contact with her declared her to be ‘a
lovely lady’ with a big and generous heart and, as someone said, ‘a captivating
smile.’ I’m so proud that she was my Mum.
