Monday 21 December 2009

December, 1910


Born in December 1910, my mother recently celebrated her 99th birthday and entered her 100th year. Here she is, very faint, when she was a few months old.

A random selection from Longman's Chronicle of the 20th Century gives a flavour of 1910:

*Girl Guides, a youth movement which encourages girls to be obedient, clean-living and resourceful, is formed by Sir Robert Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes

*Socialists are shot and sabred in Berlin during a suffrage demonstration

*Kissing is banned on French railways because of delays caused to trains thereby

*Diaghilev's Ballets Russes open their Paris season with première of Stravinsky's The Firebird

*Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker set up a tool company in Baltimore

*A London doctor claims that if lunacy increases at the current rate, the insane will outnumber the sane 40 years hence

*In Leipzig British officers Lt. Trench and Capt. Brandon are found guilty of espionage.

1910 was a busy year for the Ferryman:

*Edward VII died and was succeeded by his second son, George V

*Dr Crippen was hanged

*No amount of nursing could save Florence Nightingale

*The last surviving Pre-Raphaelite Brother, William Holman Hunt, died

*Charles Rolls, pioneer aviator, crashed fatally in Bournemouth, severing the Rolls-Royce partnership

*Reports of the death Mark Twain were no longer exaggerated.

My mother came from Colne, in Lancashire. The Burgh of Colne motto is, very aptly, 'We long endure'. She has been variously a teacher of home economics, a hotelière, a fashion retailer and a private caterer. She had to resign from her first post, in the West Riding, when she married. Married women were not then allowed in the teaching profession.

Several quotes have passed into family legend.

*When asked how she is: "A little better, thank you." Than what? We're never told.

*When tackling a bowl of raspberries, having emptied at least a quarter-pint of double cream into the dish:
"Do you eat much cream, dear?"
"No, I don't, really."
"Neither do I."

*Of her two marriages: "I never had any luck with my husbands."

Here she is with her great-grand-daughter, AKA the Blue Kitten. Almost 100 years separate them. When the Blue Kitten reaches a similar age, I wonder what her children will find remarkable about 2008, the year she was born?

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