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Birth name
Owen
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Place of Birth
Holyhead, Wales
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Place of Death
Wrexham
Mum was born in Holyhead in 1928. Her parents – as listed above are Robert and Mary Owen. She had one other sibling, Clifford who was four years her junior. However, Mum was very close to her cousin Betty who was of similar age. They remained friends over the years and would visit each other as often as possible. Mum moved to live in Wrexham in 1942 and had to come to terms with speaking English more than Welsh – which was her first language. She said that she worked in the hospital during the war and carried on after her marriage to Dad on 27/10/1945. However, we can’t find any records to tell us what she worked as. She told us that she was a nurse, but she didn’t actually get her nursing qualifications until she was in her forties.
When Dad returned from Greece in 1947, they didn’t waste much time in starting a family. In fact the records that Rob has show that he was released from the army on 1st January 1948 and I was born on 6th October 1948 – she had me exactly nine months later! So Mum had me when she was twenty and a further three children – Robert, Geoffrey and Patricia before I was four years of age. She had a gap for a couple of years and then had Denise. Then a further gap before she had Cathy. Several months after Cathy was born, Mum was taken into hospital for major surgery. She had a fallopian tube and ovary removed due to cysts. She was told that it was unlikely she would have any more children. Mum wasn’t too upset since she already had six. However, the doctors got that one wrong big style. Mum took after her grandparents for sure. Four years after Cathy was born Mum gave birth to TWINS Andrew and Jane which took her up to eight children. Just two years later she gave birth to a baby girl who was a still birth. She had another baby one year later. Kim was baby number ten.
We all still lived in a three bedroomed house and mum was just thirty seven. Then her eldest daughter – me – told her that she was pregnant. So she became a grandmother at the ripe old age of 38. Mum had her last child David three years later when she was forty. At that time I was also pregnant with my second child Tony and so we used to go to the Maternity Clinic together.
After mum had given birth to her eleventh child she decided she wanted to do something with her life. In between some of her pregnancies she took part-time jobs as a school cleaner, a petrol pump attendant and a door-to-door saleswoman. Now she wanted to train to be a nurse. Between us all (in particular with Denise’s help) we looked after the kids, the cooking, cleaning and washing. I was living next door but one to her and I had three kids myself by the time I was twenty. My younger brothers and sisters and my children were all brought up together.
Mum enrolled in the nurses training college, along with my sister Pat, and my sisters-in-law Genny and Lorraine. Mum qualified and worked as a nurse in the Wrexham hospital, later as a Factory Nurse on the Industrial Estate and finally as a Matron in an Old People’s Home (23 years nursing). She retired when she was sixty three.
Mum had always had bowel problems and throughout their lives both my mum and her mother lived on Beecham’s Pills and various other laxatives. But when she retired Mum started having very serious bowel problems indeed. Mum died of cancer on the first of August 1994. Just the word cancer sent shivers down my spine. It happened to other people not your own family, and not to my beloved mum.
I was once asked to give a talk at a gathering of women workers at the Vauxhall Motors car factory in Ellesmere Port. The talk was supposed to inspire women about what they could do with their lives. The organisers asked me to give a fifteen minute talk about my life and to identify anyone with whom I had gained some inspiration. My mother was my inspiration – giving birth to so many children (she also kept her figure pretty trim and had no stretch marks at all), holding down various jobs in between her pregnancies and then carving out a career for herself which she held for twenty three years, is pretty inspirational in my book.
World Events in 1928 during the year that my Mother was born
- USA – The cartoon star Mickey Mouse appears on November 18th in Steamboat Willie, an animated 1928 short film produced by Walt Disney.
- UK – Lady Chatterley’s Lover is banned for being too explicit in England and the US
- UK – The House at Pooh Corner by Author A. A. Milne is published in England
- USA – Aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to successfully pilot an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean
- UK – Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin in 1928 and changed the world of modern medicines by introducing the age of antibiotics and his discovery of penicillin has, and still, saves millions of people.
- France – Home Pregnancy Test first introduced which tests for the presence of hCG which doubles every 48 hrs during early pregnancy and is checked using a urine sample . Introduced by Selmar Aschheim and Bernard Zondek
- USA – Bubble Gum: first called Double Bubble USA by Walter E Diemer
- USA – A major hurricane strikes West Palm Beach in Florida causing the loss of over 500 lives
- France – Ten world famous feminist leaders stormed the gates of the French presidential palace
- Netherlands – The Summer Olympics are held for the first time in the country in Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Switzerland – The Olympic Winter Games are held for the first time in the country in St. Moritz, Switzerland
- Puerto Rico – 300,000 Face Famine after severe hurricane destroys crops in Puerto Rico