The medal round her neck was a women’s war work medal
Interviewer
You very kindly brought in a photo which has 2 women in it and I wondered if you could describe for me the photo and who is in it.
Barbara
The exhibition enlightened me quite a bit about their uniforms and what they must have been doing. The younger lady was my great aunt, Aunty Bella, she was born in 1900, she was my grandma’s second sister. She was called Isabella Jane and she married in 1921 or 22 to Joe Connelly and had three children one of whom worked in the shipyards. My great great aunt, who was called Mary Ann, was Bella’s mother’s sister, the youngest of that family and I didn’t realise the medal round her neck was a women’s war work medal. She’d married in 1903, a miner called Archibold Wilson. He was killed in 1916. So, I think by the time they were both working in the shipyard it must have been around that date.
Bella would be 16 in 1916. Mary Ann was born in 1882 so she’s quite a bit older. In 1901, she’s living with one of her other sisters in Wallsend aged 19 I think it says on the Census. But by 1918 she remarried and by 1920 she’d emigrated to Canada and lived the rest of her life there.
John Robson was listed as being an engineer and I think they became quite prosperous in Canada, so they probably did the right thing. I can remember my mother saying, “Oh they went and explored the wilds of Canada and lived in log cabins and things like that.” In those days it was quite adventurous. I do remember when she came back in 1954 there was a report in the Wallsend News, you know, ‘Wallsend Woman Returns’ type of thing. Because it was quite unusual in those days to travel abroad.
Isabella, babysat for me, they were very close, never moved. Grandma lived in the family house just down from where Wallsend metro station is now and I was born in Davis Street even nearer the shipyards, and Bella lived in Winifred Gardens that ran parallel to those streets. So, they were very close and there was a time when me grandma went to America. My (great) aunt married a GI, American GI and was married in St Columbus Church here in Wallsend and went off as a 19 year old GI bride to America.
My grandma worked then collecting as we used to call it, HP really. There was what you used to call Parishes money, Parishes in Byker, tokens. People bought them and grandma had the job of going round collecting their instalments. So, when she went to America, when I was 5 in 1953, to stay with Isabel, my grandma’s second daughter was called Isabel, and my mam did the collecting for her to keep the job going and Aunty Bella looked after me.
On all sides in my family, they are either miners or shipyards. That must have been why their dad came here in the first place. When he married Isabella Jane Nicholson their marriage is recorded Frederick Wilson and Isabella Jane Nicholson. So, he came to work in the shipyards and he was holder-up in the shipyards as they called it.
You held the panels for the riveters, me grandad was a riveter in the shipyards. Harry, the one who was killed in the war, he was a riveter in the shipyards, or rivet-catcher because he would only be young then. The older brother Willie joined the navy so in 1911 on the Census he’s in Southampton on a ship. The very youngest was killed in the second world war in a submarine and John the other one, he worked in the shipyards all his life.