Minnie Gertrude Richmond

Minnie Gertrude Richmond was born in Hull on the 17th of May 1881, a keel master's daughter. The census taken six weeks before her birth shows the house she was born into better than any later record could: her mother at Joseph's Terrace, off Spyvee Street, entered as "keelman's wife" with no head of household present — her father Samuel was sixty miles up the waterways, master of the barge Marion at Ickles Lock, Rotherham — and her grandmother Selina, a nurse by occupation, already under the roof. The registrar's index fixes the rest: June quarter 1881, Sculcoates, mother's maiden name Oates. Her birthday itself took some establishing, because the family's own papers carried both the 17th and the 18th; the 1939 Register's digit, the 1921 census's precise "40 years 1 month", and — best of all — a newspaper would settle it on the 17th.

She grew up at 13 Spyvee Street, a scholar of nine in the 1891 census while her eldest brother, fourteen, was already entered "keel boy" on their father's barge; by 1901 the family was at 17 Pennington Street and the census wrote her father down "ship owner… employer." From that house, on the 27th of April 1905 — three weeks short of her twenty-fourth birthday — she married William Edmond Brock at St Mark's church: a machinist of twenty-four, a publican's son, and Ted to his family all his life — the name the rest of this page, and her own death notice, will call him. The register is a small portrait of both families' habits: the clerk wrote the groom "Edmond" and he signed "Edmund"; her sister Alice May stood witness; and her father, owner and master of the Reliance, was set down in one word — "Sailor."

Then fifty years of Hull addresses, each one a chapter: Steynburg Street, where Eddie was born in 1911; 46 Wynburg Street by the last autumn of the Great War; 8 Cavendish Road by 1939, with Ted a packer at Reckitt's and their eldest, Harold, a special constable of the Hull police through the city's blitz. Three children — Harold, Lillie and Eddie — and by the 1950s an old age spent with Ted at Wilton House, the old people's home on Holderness Road. There, on the 17th of May 1957, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came to visit, and the Hull and East Yorkshire Times recorded the one exchange of Minnie's words the family holds. It was her birthday — her seventy-sixth, though the paper promoted her a year — and the Queen asked her, "Are you happy here?" "Very, very happy, thank you, ma'am," she replied.

She died at Kingston General Hospital on the 9th of February 1961, aged seventy-nine. The family's notice in the Daily Mail — "dearly loved wife of Ted, loving mother of Harold, Lillie, Eddie" — gathered the in-laws and grandchildren around her name, and the cortège left 23 Stanhope Avenue for the Eastern Cemetery on the 15th. Probate was granted at York that year. Ted survived her, after fifty-five years of marriage.