Sidney Middleton Liddle

Sydney Liddle

Notes typed by Jack Gainford in late 2002, from information given by his mother,

and some from a newspaper report, and other information, provided by Ann Fry of Bournemouth.

Sydney Liddle was the firstborn, 1876, of the family of James and Frances Liddle. His wife is thought to have been called Alice. They had two daughters, Winifred Rose, born 1911, and Mabel, who was born around 1913. Ann Fry is the daughter of Winifred. Ann sent us a newspaper report of the death of her Aunt Mabel, aged 87, in 2000. Mabel was born in Lancashire, but later moved with the family back to Darlington. Arithmetic based on the newspaper account shows that the Liddle family moved to Bournemouth in about 1922, when Sydney would be about 46 years old.

I am not sure whether he ever worked for a member of the Pease family, but he moved to Bournemouth to be chauffeur to a family of nouveau riche. He made an adverse comparison between them and people like the Pease family, but he had to accept what he could get.

It was a long trek from Barrow to Bournemouth, and I suppose that that was the reason I never met Sydney or his wife, nor their daughters Winnie and Mabel. Round about 1944, my father was stationed in the RAF at Tarrant Rushton, near Blandford. On his days off, he sometimes visited Winnie and/or Mabel. After the War, my parents sometimes called on them when they were staying in the area.

My mother’s story of Sydney’s death is that he had a small piece of shrapnel lodged near his heart from the first world war - probably so close that in those days they dare not operate to remove it. I think he must have been expected to do odd jobs for his employer, as well as drive, because one day he was struggling to get a tree root out of the ground, when the exertion caused the shrapnel to move, piercing his heart. His wife spoke to him when she was going out to the post office, and on her return she found him dead.