Charles Redvers White Ladysmith Pope

Charles Redvers White Ladysmith Pope, known as Pat, born in 1900 at the height of the Boer War, though not a robust child, showed considerable scholastic ability by winning a scholarship to Nelson College. This was a great event and in due course, his mother Jane, received a long list of clothing requirements, mostly in half dozens: socks, singlets, trousers etc. "Stuff and nonsense, he'll take what he needs!" Jane declared throwing the list aside. And so he did, but some time later his mother received an account from the school, for the remainder of the requirements they had purchased for the boy "so that he would feel on a par with the other lads." Charles chose the Post & Telegraphic Service for a career and mounted the rungs of the promotion ladder with enthusiasm. It was while he was serving at Hawera that he met and later married Miss Maida Dorothy Ward, on 14 August 1926. They raised a family of four children: Marie Dorothy (1928), Noel Frank (1931), Darryl Ward (1937) and Diane Jane (1939). As in any Government Service, change of location was frequent, so it was with high hopes of relief from the ever-present bronchitis that Charles accepted the post of Post Master at Tauranga. Alas he suffered from acute bronchitis and asthma all his life and he died at Tauranga at the early age of 47 years old, in 1947. Maida, after nineteen years of widowhood, remarried and lived in Invercargill for five years. She returned to Tauranga after being widowed once more and died in 2005, aged a very impressive 100 years old. Source: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Pope-2080