Lydia Wilson was born on the 15th of August 1882 at Oldham, the cotton town in the Pennine foothills — the third of the five children of Thomas Wilson, an iron moulder who was Hull-born, and his wife Clara, née Penrose Verity. Her mother died in 1890, when Lydia was eight, and the next census finds the widowed moulder at 273 Greenacres Road, Waterhead, with four children — the eldest, Frederick, a thirteen-year-old cotton piecer. In the 1890s Thomas brought the family back to his native Hull, and married again; by 1901, at 56 New King Street in Sculcoates, eighteen-year-old Lydia and her sister Annie were both shop assistants.
From that house, in April 1906, she married Samuel David Frith, a clerk, the fruiterer's son from Chapel Lane, at St Mary's church — her brother Frederick stood witness. They settled at Marfleet, at 1 Brooklyn Villa on Ceylon Street: George Henry arrived within the year, Clara — named for the mother Lydia had lost — in 1911, and Joan at the end of 1913.
Samuel, a serjeant with the Hull Commercials, was killed at Oppy Wood on the 3rd of May 1917, and for three years there was not even a grave. Lydia was thirty-four, with three children of ten, five and three. What she did next her granddaughter's page records in the family's own words: she "ran a corner shop on Ceylon Street, Marfleet which sold groceries and sweets" — the trade she had known since girlhood. The electoral rolls hold her on Ceylon Street year after year, at No. 74 from the mid-twenties, with George Henry joining the register beside her in 1931.
By 1939 she had left Marfleet for 65 Cambridge Road, Hessle — the household of her married daughter Clara, Clara's husband Louis Ounsworth, a welder, and their small daughter Kate — her occupation given as "private means": the widow's pension. The second war scattered the family again: she stayed for a time at Raikes Farm in Lancashire with Joan and the boys, and her son George wrote to her at Hessle from Basra — his airgraph of January 1943, on this page, carries the news that his wife Muriel had named their new son Harvey. She outlived George. When Lydia died, at Cottingham, on the 9th of February 1973, aged ninety, the family's notice in the Mail still named her, fifty-five years on, "dearly beloved wife of the late Samuel David".
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-03