Person:Florence Thornber (1)

Florence was born around the time of the battle of the Somme, with her father, a Sargent, missing and feared dead. An abundance of beautiful childhood photographs exist, of Florence and her sister and two brothers.

Throughout her childhood, her father was involved in running the family cotton mill, Park Shed in Burnley.

Florence and her sister were educated at St. Monica's Convent at Skipton-in-Craven, a Catholic boarding school, and Florence would have liked to have gone to university to do a degree in maths, but this school did not consider maths to be a suitable subject for young ladies and did not teach it at the required higher level. Instead, she trained as a school teacher at Sedgley Park College, Manchester (between 1934 & 1936). She worked as a teacher in Burnley, until WW2 provided the opportunity to work as a transmissions and sound engineer with the BBC. She revelled in this technical and fascinating work, and, equally, enjoyed the man-size salary that went with it!

In February 1952, she set off to Australia -- as an emigrant, BUT met her future husband aboard ship! Consequently, she was back in England within the year. She did some teaching while in Australia.

Florence was a bookworm whose second home was the library! She would be there twice a week with the rigid leather bag she always used for books. She particularly loved biographies, autobiographies, history and historical novels. All this meant she was very knowledgeable!

She was also a highly skilled needlewoman, even embracing unusual crafts like spinning and collage. And she loved gardening too and chose to have a sizable garden, growing flowers from seed each spring.

Her Sayings

• "It's walting over" - meaning it is leaning over
• Florence "teemed" her vegetables, meaning she drained them through a colander
• "There's no such word as 'can't' "
• "What one fool can do, another can!"
• When speaking of the past, things happened "before the war", "during the war" or "after the war"

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Personal Knowledge [User HWMT].
2. ↑ Cert: birth Thornber 1916 Florence.
3.   Cert: death Hagerty 1991 Florence.
4. ↑ Baptism cert: Thornber, 1916 Florence.