The Excellent Adventures of Mary Bellfield

It was my Great Aunt Mary  who taught me basic needlework skills and showed me how to use a sewing machine.  My mother would take us round to her house after school to be measured up in her attic work room for our next-size-up school uniform or a new best dress, which would generally be ready to wear by tea-time.  I can still smell that attic room – lint and chalk dust and machine oil and dusty boxes of buttons and thread.  And see the brown-paper patterns bulldog-clipped and hung on nails in the wall, and the bundles of dress parts tied up with a spare piece of fabric waiting to be assembled.   I owe her much. 

Mary (far right) on Southport Prom

In many ways a very ordinary woman, Mary Bellfield was not the stereotypical wife and mother of her generation.  The youngest of seven children, she was born in 1906 in east Leeds to Enoch and Mary Bellfield.  Her mother died when she was very young, and she and the younger of her siblings were brought up by their older sister Louise on whom they doted.

Giant's Causeway

Mary and her sister Lily (my grandmother) got jobs in the tailoring trade – a major employer in Leeds in the early Twentieth Century - and there Mary stayed all her working life, except during the war when she was sewing sand-bags!  She worked for a lot of employers, mostly as a machinist, occasionally as forewoman, and had a lot of tales to tell from those factory floors. 

Mary in Venice 1950s

Mary never married.  She had plenty of opportunities and a fair few admirers, but not having a husband and children gave her  extraordinary opportunities and Mary had a greater love: Wanderlust.  She paid her weekly subs to the Workers’ Travel Association, and so saved for trips and holidays.  But not for her the average working people’s holidays to the seaside.  

Lily and Mary (2nd and 3rd left) with travelling companions in the USSR 1960s

As a young woman, Mary went on frequent hiking holidays in the Yorkshire Dales with her WTA pals, staying at farmhouses, but then she got more adventurous.  Decades before foreign travel was commonplace, she started travelling abroad.  

She went on two Mediterranean cruises during the 1930s, again with the WTA who commandeered whole cruise ships.  During the 1950s and 60s she persuaded her sister (my grandmother) to join her on many trips to Paris, Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany, Finland, the USSR.  Sometimes they dragged along my grandfather, Jack, but he was a bit of a homeboy, so mostly it was just the two of them.  (I guess some men would have objected to their wives travelling to foreign parts without them, but my grandfather was a different kind of man.)   As the WTA  started to wind up, Mary discovered SAGA, and off she was again.  When she couldn’t travel abroad, she visited towns and cities in the UK, and right up to the end, we were planning trips to London, and to Paris – her favourite place. 

My grandmother, Lily, by the Berlin Wall 1960s

Sadly, that last trip never happened.  Arthritis had finally got the best of her wandering ways by the end of the 1970s, and tragically, in 1989, soon after knee replacements had given her back her freedom back she became ill and died.

In Italy

In old age Mary was cantankerous and contrary.  She had lost all her sisters and brothers, her beloved niece (my mother) and her best friend (and foe), my grandfather, and she was lonely and sad.  She made friends easily, and lost them just as easily. But she was also full of love and humour and had an open heart.   Along with my sister, I was her carer in her last few years.  It was hard work and tedious, but I look back on those couple of years with a deal of fondness because it was then that I really got to know her, got to listen to her stories.  It was only after her death though, with the help of photographs and memorabilia that I slowly pieced together the excellent adventures of an extraordinary woman.

At home with the family L to R: Anne (my mother), Jack, Mary, Lily.  Early 1960s

Note: It's really difficult to find any literature or information on the internet on the now-defunct Workers Travel Association, but it was formed by Trade Unions and the Co-operative Movement in the 1920s.  If anyone has any more information I'd love to hear it.