Edith Barker II

Edith had a very happy home life in Leeds.  The family got on well together. She lived for almost fifty years in Birmingham but she never lost her Leeds accent. She had not wanted to leave the city and her family but her husband had to go where the work was. It was the Depression and the work was in Longbridge. Walter was never really well from birth but she kept him going for much longer than anyone expected him to. When he died Edith took in Lodgers (two lady school teachers) to make ends meet as she was not eligible for a pension and then in 1953 married Harold Seaman, a panel beater at the Austin, whose wife, Emily, had died in 1949.  They had known each other in Leeds and though it was not a love match – as was that with her ‘poor lad’ – he looked after her and they went round the country together and abroad on coach trips. Walter preferred to stay at home.

Harold gave up his house in Farren Road and moved in to Cliff Rock which must have been a great wrench for him because he was moving from a house he had bought into one rented by the council. It was also Walter’s house and he would have been constantly reminded of the work of a superior craftsman.

Edith had visited them in Farren Road when his dying wife was lying on the sofa and she said that she would not have been able to get that image out of her mind but it may have been that, like her mother, she did not like change. Harold had been a painter in Leeds in 1921 where he had ended up on being demobbed and tramping round the country looking for work.  Although notionally in the same trade as Walter he was very much at the basic end of panel beating whereas Walter was amongst the cream. But Harold was an estimable man in his own way.  He had served in the trenches and experienced the reality of the hero’s welcome that awaited those who returned.

Born in Godmanchester to a thatcher there was no work for him in the town so he had to set out to find it elsewhere. Emily, who became his wife, also from the town, walked to Leeds to join him. The couple had two daughters, Hilary and Joyce whose husband, Malcolm Summerlee, became head of Kirkham Grammar School Preston, a state and then independent boarding school.

Harold was very proud of what he considered the boost in the family’s status and enjoyed visiting them as he enjoyed going to the Trades Union Congresses with Sally and Albert. Kathleen Houghton was at school with Joyce and knew the family long before Harold married into her own.

Harold was not welcomed into the family – Enid did not like him and Kathleen thought he was a rough sort of man though Jack was grateful to him for looking after his mother. He was obviously different from Walter, less fastidious perhaps, when he came to visit us he used to cover his face with a newspaper after dinner and go to sleep, but he was always very good to me. When we stayed at Cliff Rock for three months in 1958 between Yaxley and Welwyn Garden City he bought some ex-army badges and organised us – and Billy Clarke – into a troupe. He used to break out into jingles from the very new commercial television adverts -‘you’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Steradent.’  When staying there I would go to Edgewood on a Sunday morning to buy the People, News of the World and the Sunday Mercury and I could keep the change. He always used to bring Edith sweets on Friday night when he came home from work.

When Albert Dunne died in 1975 and Sally negotiated a return to Leeds, Edith went to join her clearing her house and giving up the tenancy very quickly before anyone knew what was happening or had a chance to buy the house at what would have been a very favourable price.  When Sally died in 1984 she was homeless because the bungalow belonged to the union.  Enid and Ben had moved to Parr in Cornwall and Edith joined them there and spent long spells in Welwyn Garden City. There was a rift with Enid who returned to Bromsgrove leaving her mother in Cornwall – she had been allocated a flat in the town. Feeling isolated she sent out distress signals and Chris and Nic drove down one weekend, loaded a van with her stuff and brought her Milton Keynes where Nic rented her one of his flats. Had Cliff Rock Road been bought it would have proved very useful.