Joy Phillips Notes

Handwritten notes by Joy Phillips, their granddaughter.

They lived at:
15 St. Martin’s Place, Worcester (1899)
Grove Cottage, Rainbow Hill, Worcester (1902)
17 Church Road (1908)
33 Church Road (1917)

At one time they had a smallholding opposite 33 Church Road where they kept pigs and chickens and also had plum, apple and damson trees.
Grove Cottage and 17 Church Road had been demolished by 1993 when Joy and Ralph visited Worcester, but No 33 was still standing and in very good repair.  (It was a much smaller house than I expected and possibly this was why mother (Christianna) their only daughter, lived so much away from home.
St. Barnabas Church, opposite, was still there.  Granddad was verger there and also at St. Hilda’s.  Three sons, John, Arthur and Walter, were in the Scouts and John and Arthur were also in the Choir.

Ralph said he remembered a school being on the corner of Church Road but this had also been demolished by 1993.  This school couldn’t have been the one mother attended as she talked about ”skating up the canal to school during the bad winters”.  She certainly had a small pair of beige skating boots in the wardrobe at Oakwood Road, Birmingham, for many years.

When John Thomas died (23 March 1949) he was living at The Almshouses on the New Road from Malvern.  When his wife Elizabeth Mary had died in 1926 John Thomas was on the point of retirement from the Railway Co.  He later left 33 Church Road, put his furniture into store and went to live with Mr and Mrs Linwood at Frederick Road.  He paid £5 a week storage for all his furniture and £1 a week for lodgings.  When the Linwood family knew that his money was running out they offered to sell his furniture for him and pay off his debts.  This they did and he later moved into the Almshouses which were on New Road (over the River Severn Bridge towards The Cross, across the road, then slightly to the right, bear left straight away – next to the Alice Ottley School where I played lacrosse on several occasions many years later!)

Elizabeth Mary suffered a thrombosis in 1916 and it became necessary to amputate her right leg.  Her daughter came back home to look after her until she married in September of that year.  While she was unable to get around very much she crocheted the cotton inner linings for cricketer’s gloves.  She died on 12 January 1926.

Sons Arthur and Fred had been out of work for some considerable time and so my mother bought new suits for them to attend their mother’s funeral. She was buried in Astwood Bank Cemetery.

John Thomas applied for accommodation in the almshouses at St. Swithun’s Hospital, Worcester in 1932 but was not elected until 1937.  The first application was six years after Grandma’s death.  His application stated that he had been a Church Verger and a citizen of Worcester for 50 years.

John Thomas acted as Verger at the Almshouse Chapel during his residence there. He had  a neighbour who looked after him very well.  He was always pleased to see visitors.

He spent several Christmas holidays with his daughter, Chrissie, turning up on Christmas Eve quite unannounced and on one occasion bring a lady friend with him – this he was never permitted to do again.  He came several times during the war and sent everyone wild by continually ringing the bells at the side of the fireplaces for attention.

When he was ill in 1948 my mother went to look after him staying part of the time in which Arthur and Ada, her brother and sister-in-law.  She went again in 1949 when he died.