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Showing posts from June, 2012

A memoir for Alice Holroyd

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On Friday, 15 th June, our granddaughter Samantha was looking through some store boxes for documents my wife was after, when she came across and old photograph, loose, by itself. It was of Alice Holroyd, the unmarried sister of my maternal grandmother Emily Butler and therefore my great aunt and our children’s great great aunt. She was born, I think, in the Bethnal Green area of London, though the surname has a Yorkshire origin and there was still some recollection of these northern roots when I was a child. One claim was that the family had a blood link to George Stephenson, the Northumbrian engineer who made the first public railway in the world to use steam locomotives, a line inaugurated in 1825. Alice Holroyd, Auntie Alice as I knew her, spent her working life as a primary school teacher in West Ham, East London having trained at Goldsmiths College in Lewisham. She often used to visit us at 5 The Green Walk in North Chingford on the north eastern outskirts of London. This was