I thought I would dedicate this post to some of the women in my life whom I have loved and who have helped make me the woman I am.
Firstly, there is my Mum, a remarkable woman in so many ways and a woman of whom I have often said, ‘If I could be half as good a Mother as her I will have done a good job.’ Her very special talent, however, was as an inspirational Teacher of the Deaf. She used to teach deaf babies how to speak and in 1949 was in The Daily Mirror as she worked with the little ones and their mothers. Mum continued this work until she retired, teaching generations of children in London, Doncaster and Cornwall, the very young and older, how to lip read and how to communicate. We were all inordinately proud of her. Click on the cuttings taken from the family scrapbook to read more detail.
As well as being an inspiring teacher, Mum was also a creative gardener, a fabulous cook, crocheted and made beautiful patchwork.
Her Mother, my Granny, is the one from whom I inherit some Spanish genes and the one who taught me (and probably Mum) to crochet and to knit, with great patience. She died when I was only 10 but had sewn the seeds of love for creating with yarn. I inherited some colourful Granny squares that she had made and passed these on to one of my daughters who has used them and added to them to make a crochet blanket for Grand Baby B. The blanket will have been made by her Mum and her Great Great Granny! Isn’t that something?!
Some of my readers know about my Great Great Granny on my Father’s side of the family, Mary Wiseman née Turnbull whom I never met. She was a Suffragette who was imprisoned in Holloway for breaking windows in the cause of universal suffrage. She was force fed and we have in the family the Holloway brooch (below) which was presented to each of those prisoners by Emmeline Pankhurst in honour of what they had done. The following recording was made by a friend at the workshop we did last Tuesday. It is one of the songs from Natalie McGrath’s play ‘Oxygen’ about the March of the Suffragists from Land’s End to London in 1913.
