Ted and His Family

Ted was my beloved big brother. Born on 7th March, 1925, he was my parents' first surviving child. He featured large throughout my life. Always up to mischief as a child, one day in Tramore he held my head under the sea for what seemed to me like eternity, leaving me with not only a lifelong fear of water but severe claustrophobia. Sometimes he was blamed unfairly, like the time in Durrow when Helen took a chocolate biscuit and he was suspected of being the culprit. Incidents like these stuck in his memories throughout life.

Ted attended the Preston School in Abbeyleix during his teens. It was a two-teacher secondary school taking pupils to Intermediate Certificate (O-Level equivalent). I remember his imitating Mr McShane, the headmaster, as he recited lines from Shakespeare: 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on this petty pace' or 'First the infant mewling and puking in his mother's arms ...' and then there was Maths and Ted, in Mr McShane's drawl reciting: 'Though two straight lines be produced to hell and back, they will never meet.' One day Ted handed in his homework and he had left inky fingerprints on the page so he was given 100 lines to write: 'What is worth doing, is worth doing well.' Ted promised me a sixpence if I'd write the lines for him, and because he asked me to do something for him I sat there and wrote the lines.

Ted left home in 1943 to go as an apprentice engineer with Foster Gwynnes in Lincoln and there he lived till his death in May 1982. in 1946 he married Elsie and they had four children. When Mike and I came to England we saw a lot of Ted and his family. His eldest son is married to Margaret and their son Christopher is a manager with Mori Polls in London. Richard married Ruth and their son Tom is a free-lance photographer in London. Cathy and Eddie never married but they still live in Lincoln. When Ted died, I was in such a state of shock that I ignored symptoms of a serious cancer from which I very nearly didn't recover. My cousin Aileen and I went together to Ted's funeral. Sadly, it was the opening day of a big Victorian show in which Anna was taking part in her final year in primary school. I know Ted would have loved hearing about it and seeing photographs. He was so kind to Anna just as he always had been to me.

Images from Childhood.

Images from Young Adulthood

Aunt Fanny lived in Ruislip and was Uncle Charlie's twin, born in 1899.

We would also visit Aunty Fanny and meet up with Ted and Uncle Charlie when Anna was little...

Ted's own family

Shown in this picture with Ted, Elsie, Eddie and Cathy are Michael, Ted's first son, and his bride, Margaret, who later had a son called Christopher.

Pictured with me in the second image are Cathy, Eddie and Elsie and in the third, Ruth and her son, Tom. Ruth is Richard's wife, (Ted's second son).