Thelma's Memorial Service

Thelma's Memorial Service was held at the Manchester Crematorium on 8th June 2006. We wish to thank all those who attended, and for the benefit of those who couldn't attend (and those who did but couldn't hear everything because of the poor sound system), here is a resume of the service.

Donations to:-    Hamlin Churchill Childbirth Injuries Fund
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Music 2

One of the great things about Thelma was that you never quite knew what to expect next. So it's in that context that we play our next piece of music. We don’t know, or can’t remember, exactly what music Thelma liked, so this is more an example of what she liked out of Martin’s collection. (cue music, low level) This track is from 1969, from an LP (by the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band) which somehow made an impression on Thelma, with its mixture of the whimsical and the absurd, including tracks like My Pink Half of the Drainpipe. This is Rhinocratic Oaths, which features the writing and voice of Vivian Stanshall.

To say that Thelma had a “full life” would not be an understatement.

Although she was born in South Africa, her mother, Florence, was born and brought up in London, one of a family of 13. Her father, Cecil, was born in South Africa’s Transvaal to European parents.

Cecil fought in the trenches in the First World War, until he was wounded by a bullet to the head. Whilst convalescing in England he met Florence.

After the war they married and headed for a new life in South Africa, in the fledgling “gold reef” mineworkers’ suburb of Brakpan, to the east of Johannesburg. It was here that Thelma was born, the middle sister of three. Whilst her father worked deep underground in the mines, her mother struggled to make ends meet. But despite the hardship, there was much happiness, with the sound of her mother’s singing filling the small wooden house. In the summer the sisters would sometimes go to the coast on school camping holidays.

All the girls were quite bright, worked hard and did well at school. When she left, Thelma got one of the coveted jobs as a secretary in the local State Mines gold mine.

However, after war broke out, she decided to volunteer for the Red Cross, and lied about her age to get accepted for training. Soon she was posted to a field hospital in Egypt, supporting the allied troops fighting in North Africa. She then followed the North Africa campaign through to the invasion of Italy, treating both allied troops and prisoners of war. She used to say, that’s where she learned to eat anything, and deal with anything, including scorpions running around the inside of her tent. She also recalled how particularly helpful the Italian prisoners were – she thought they were just glad to be out of the war and grateful for the treatment they got in hospital, but of course anything they could do to spend more time with the nurses must have been a bonus! Once it was safe to do so, the hospital moved to Italy itself, and supported the battle of Monte Casino and the liberation of Rome. And it was in Rome where Thelma celebrated VE Day in 1945.

After being demobbed she returned to her job at the mines, but with that wartime travel still in her mind, the small town of Brakpan seemed a very quiet place. When an aging family friend needed a nurse to accompany her on a flight to Europe, Thelma volunteered. It was also a chance to visit some of her English relatives, and see the country her mother had talked about so often. Flying to England back then was not the simple experience it is today. The only aircraft were ex-airforce transport planes with a fairly limited range. The journey took two full days, in a series of short hops with meals taken each time the plane came down for re-fuelling.

Once in England she decided she’d like to spend some time here, and work as a nurse. But despite her years as a Red Cross nurse, she was deemed unqualified, and would have to train as a British “State Registered Nurse”. The only course with immediate vacancies was “up north” at Manchester’s Crumpsall Hospital. It was here that she was introduced to what seemed like a foreign language of local dialect and place names. She recalls asking a patient if he came from Black-ly and being told “oh, you mean Blaaakeley?”. And when a patient pointed to his blood-stained bandages and said “That’s just like Manchester United”, she had to say “What’s Manchester United?” .to which he answered - “You don’t know Manchester United – where’ve you been all you life?”. Needless to say, as she travelled the world in later life, she found out just how well, Manchester United is known the world over.

In between her studies in Manchester, she made frequent visits back to her relatives in London, and while returning on the train one day, ended up talking to a man in her compartment, and discovered that they had both spent much of the war in the Middle East. His name was Bob, and he had served as a junior officer in an RAF signals regiment. At the end of the journey he asked her out and the relationship developed from there.

They got married in 1948, and set up home in a large Victorian semi-detached on Wellington Road, Fallowfield, next to a wartime allotment site.
With rationing still in force, and a taste for fresh vegetables from her South African childhood, Thelma acquired an allotment and started growing vegetables.

After qualifying as an SRN she worked at St Mary’s hospital – when it was still in the centre of Manchester opposite The Palace Theatre - and it was here that her son Martin was born in 1953. Like most mothers did at that time, she gave up work completely to look after her child, but once Martin started school she started feeling she had too much time on her hands, and had to be doing something.

This time it was an interest in politics, and she joined the local Liberal party. Always someone with plenty to say, and not afraid of hard work, it wasn’t too long before it was suggested she stand for election to Manchester City Council. Back then you could count the number of Liberal councillors on your fingers, and Old Moat Ward had a large core of Labour voters, so not an easy seat for a newcomer. Not surprisingly, she didn’t get elected at her first attempt, but that didn’t put her off. She was a tireless door-to-door canvasser, and used to joke that she could tell the time by what TV theme music could be heard from inside. From then on, she always associated Coronation Street with early evening canvassing. By the time of the next election, she had put in so many hours knocking on doors that the sitting labour councillor, much to his disbelief, came second.

Once on the council, she found herself not only in a minority political party, but very much in a minority as a woman. Amazingly, she was the first ever woman on the Waterworks committee, prompting a review of sleeping arrangements on the annual visit to the small Hawsewater Hotel, when they went to the Lake District to review Manchester’s reservoirs and treatment works. Previously, it was one of those committees more reminiscent of a gentlemen’s club – but, as you can imagine, not with Thelma around.

During her three years on the council, she got proposed and accepted as a Justice of the Peace at Manchester’s original Minshull Street Magistrates Court. So when Labour regained her seat at the next election, she transferred her energies into learning the law, and the work of a JP. Of course she never just did one thing at a time, so she was still growing vegetables on her allotment, and getting more interested in gardening in general. She also made all her own clothes, as many of her generation did, and as she always had done out of necessity back in South Africa.

Improvisation was one of her strongest points, initially from the circumstances of her childhood, and then followed by the austerity of the war years. But she was also very creative, and the clothes she created often bore scant regard to the patterns they were based on. When she joined the bench it was customary for women to wear hats, but hat-making was not something she’d any experience of. After a few tentative attempts to make her own she decided she needed help. So she joined an evening class on Millinery - the sort that most people do for recreational purposes. But not Thelma. After mastering the basics, she decided she wanted to sit for the City & Guilds qualification. And having passed that, she then went on to take the Advanced Level as well!

Back home the spare room was filling up with wooden blocks and materials, most of which had to be ordered from a specialist supplier in London. Needless to say the quality of her homemade hats improved, along with the quantity and range of styles. Her hats became legendary at the courts, as she was never without one, and appeared to have a never-ending supply. This may not be true, but the story has it that one of her male colleagues jokingly challenged her, that if he ever saw her wear the same hat twice, she’d have to buy him lunch. We don’t think she ever did!

As a walking advertisement for her own hats, it wasn’t long before she was being asked to make them for others, and wedding hats became something of a speciality. Sometimes she had little knowledge of the people they were for, but her footballing knowledge had improved sufficiently for her to know that Colin Bell was captain of Man City, when she made the family hats for his wedding.

Running parallel with the hat making was her increasing love of gardening. She’d always had an interest in wild flowers, and used to collect and press them during her schooldays in South Africa, but they hadn’t had much of a garden, nor the resources to develop it. Scorched earth would be a better description of it. After developing the small garden at Wellington Road, when the time came to think about moving, she had two priorities. A smaller house (with less housework) and a bigger garden.

The bungalow at Greenoak Drive was almost perfect – a bit too small a house for Bob’s liking - but a lot of garden, not overlooked and in a quiet location. They bought it, and the rest, as they say, is local gardening history. Like almost everything that Thelma ever did, her approach to gardening could not be described as “typical”. Not for her the simple approach of growing what might be best suited to our region. It might have started out of a desire to grow plants that reminded her of Africa, but collecting unusual plants, and getting them to grow, became a key feature of her gardening. To this end she would spend hours reading, and learning the full Latin names of those that interested her.

Not content with just growing unusual plants, Thelma also started collecting them. This is where everything comes together. After Martin had started work and left home, she had set up her millinery equipment is his old room and concentrated on commissioned work, including the more lucrative fur hat market. The money made from her hat production financed her plant hunting trips. These started in a modest way in Europe and on specialist package holidays, but even these were far from average. “Exploring the Galapagos Islands” and “Trekking from Kashmir in the Himalayas” are just two examples.

But being Thelma it wasn’t long before she was planning her own “adventure holidays” into some decidedly non-tourist destinations. One of these was a tour of the west coast of South America, and she advertised for a travelling companion (in the RHS Journal) with something along the lines of, “Slightly decrepit middle-aged lady seeks travelling companion for plant collecting adventure in South America”. It’s my understanding that the lady who accepted the challenge had little idea what she was letting herself in for! Thelma had a travel-plan which included a rough itinerary, some booked flights, and odd bits of accommodation – and nothing else. With no local travel booked, no couriers to meet them or local reps to advise them, sometimes they would arrive at a train or bus station and have to ask the locals for a recommendation on where to stay. The “highlights” included a couple of days early on, feeling terrible because of altitude sickness, and getting the train up to the lost Inca city of Machu Pichu, high in the mountains. On the way back down they spotted some great looking flowers out of the window, but the train didn’t stop anywhere along the route.

What happened next just about sums up Thelma’s approach to life. When they got back to the main station in the town where they were staying, Thelma asked if there were any other trains which went back up that line, but stopped anywhere on the way. There weren’t. “But we want to get back up there, and we did pass through one or two stations”, says Thelma, in her limited night-school Spanish. Apparently the only other train that goes up there is an occasional goods train, and it runs the next day. So next day they’re back at the station, find the train and Thelma persuades the guard to take them in the goods van at the back of the train. So they set off, two middle aged ladies, only one of whom speaks any Spanish, in the back of a goods train up a remote mountain railway in Peru. Amazingly, it gets them to the area where they want to be, with the flowers they’d seen yesterday. As they step off the train, Thelma asks the guard, “What time do you set off back?”. “Tomorrow”, he says. “Is there a hotel or anywhere to stay?”, asks Thelma, somewhat aghast. “No, but you could ask the station-master”.

And so it was that they stayed the night as the guests of the station-master in his house on the platform of a tiny station on the side of a Peruvian mountain. The following morning they duly collected their plants and hitched another ride in the guard’s van back down the mountain. Now that is an adventure holiday, in anyone’s book, and more reminiscent of travelling in the late 19th century than the late 20th century.

With trips like that, and others to every continent on the planet, it’s not surprising that Thelma’s garden had some rare and unusual specimens. Around 1983, in the era when Gardeners’ World was presented by Geoff Hamilton, Thelma started writing to the BBC saying, “It’s all very well showing us these wonderful gardens which are all in the south of the country – how about something to inspire those of us in the chillier north. And more to the point, how would you like to show mine?” Well, maybe not those exact words, but whatever she wrote (and she did write more than once) did get through to them. The BBC scheduled a recording in late summer, 1984, and for once Gardeners’ World opened with the caption “from Sale, Manchester”. Not “Sale, Cheshire”, note, because Thelma paid her rates to Manchester, and she was very proud of her adopted home city of Manchester. I think it’s fair to say that the programme was a great success, and a fitting memorial to her greatest passion.

The earliest memories that we have of Aunty Thelma is that she visited many countries and always managed to send us a post card telling us what she was doing. I always admired her adventurous spirit and how she managed to visit many places by making hats and saving her money from her little business. I remember that she had a special license that enabled her to bring exotic plants back to England from wherever she visited. She sent me a Spanish doll from Spain and I remember she visited New Zealand. Who would have thought that I would move to New Zealand from South Africa and am now living here.

Aunty Thelma made my beautiful hat out of lace for my wedding and it fit perfectly despite the fact I could not have a fitting.

I remember once when she visited us in Greytown in South Africa, she came back from a walk on a field near to our house and told me that there was a plant that takes 25 years to mature and they were growing all over this field and that people just walked all over them, she was horrified!

One of the last times Aunty Thelma visited us in South Africa she told me that she had read about a Japanese Garden on the property of a very wealthy gentleman who lived very near to us. She really wanted to visit his garden and asked me to arrange it. I phoned a couple of people who I knew belonged to a garden club and they had never heard of him. Trust Aunty Thelma to know about him and the local gardeners never having heard of him. They had to do some investigation for me but came back with his contact details. Aunty Thelma made contact with him and arranged to visit his garden. When I picked her up after the visit she told me that he was not very friendly at first but once he realized that she really knew her gardening then he opened up and warmed towards her.

Aunty Thelma, when Mom passed you came over for our get together to speak about Mom. Kevin & I really felt comforted by this. Although it was a sad occasion it was a lovely reunion for us. You took us all to lunch and we all have that lovely photograph of the whole family together, however we missed Martin, Kathy & Mom, it would have really finished the photo off if they could have been there with us.

One thing I can say is that I know life was not easy for you, Mom & Aunty Ella, when you were growing up. But despite this, all three of you became strong woman who brought up their children well and your strength has helped us forge a good life for ourselves. I hope that all three of you are together now pouring a cup of tea and having a good natter.

With all our love

Kevin, Trish, Gareth & Jeanette in New Zealand

Recording of Thelma

Rather than have music here, we’re going to listen to Thelma herself, captured on an early home-video during one of her Open Days back in 1984. She started opening her garden in the 1970s, initially to raise funds for the local Norbrook Boys Club, a charity she became involved with through her work in the Juvenile Courts. Later she started supporting the Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa, the charity to which any donations will be going. This is just a flavour of the Thelma that you will all remember, as she chatted to Martin & Kathie over a cup of tea before the crowds arrived, and it’s only fitting that she should have the last word.