Eye - 22 February 2013
From centenarians to bombings
Sidcot centenarian celebrates
Nancy Woodhead, a former Sidcot School pupil whose father died on the Titanic, recently celebrated her 100th birthday.
Nancy was born eight months after her father, Frank Maybery, died on 15 April 1912 when the Titanic sank. He was on the Titanic to tie up business interests in Moose Jaw, Canada, where he and his wife Ella had once emigrated. They had returned to England when Frank, aged thirty-six, bought a second class ticket for the so-called ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner. Ninety per cent of men in second class died due to a lack of lifeboats.
After Frank’s death, Ella moved to Winscombe so Nancy and Ruth could attend Sidcot School. Nancy said: ‘My mother rarely talked about the Titanic, and its aftermath, when families had to fight for compensation. She told Ruth and I that she had had a premonition on the night of the sinking. She dreamt she was drowning and was holding the two girls up to be saved. When she woke she thought she saw Frank at the foot of her bed.’
After leaving Sidcot at eighteen Nancy became a physiotherapist. During the second world war she worked in London hospitals and met Stanley Pimley when he was home on leave from the army. They married in 1947 and had two children. After Stanley’s sudden death in 1956, Nancy returned to Winscombe and her daughter Alison attended the school.
Her daughter, Alison Clayton, of Weston-super-Mare, said: ‘Looking back I realise how lucky I was to go to Sidcot. I owe my career to a very charismatic art teacher.’ She added: ‘I was delighted when I visited Sidcot and found two school year photographs – one with my mother as a pupil and the other of me when I was there in the 1960s.’
Nancy married Irwin Woodhead when she was sixty-three. They were both longstanding members of Sidcot Meeting. Irwin died in 2003. She now lives at Quaker-run Sewell House in Winscombe and had two parties to celebrate her birthday and said: ‘I was overwhelmed to see so many people including my ninety-five year old cousin Douglas and one-year-old great-granddaughter, Kitty Nancy Baxter. It was wonderful.’
Bombed Bedminster
Barney Smith, clerk of Bedminster Meeting in Bristol, got in touch with Eye when a peculiarly apt password made an appearance:
‘I completed the update to the Book of Meetings 2013 online. To do this I was given the password “bombedminster”, which works rather well given local history.
‘Bedminster had a Minster church, St John the Baptist, dating back before 1003, serving its large parish across the river Avon from Bristol.
‘[It] was burnt down by Royalist forces in 1645 and was rebuilt in 1663. It was then demolished and rebuilt in 1854 serving Bedminster which, by then, was a rapidly growing urban area with coal mining and then tobacco factories dominating the economy… Then in 1940 St Johns was burnt out by incendiary bombs and never rebuilt. The churchyard is now a small public park.’
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