Margaret Rose Howell

Margaret was born on a very cold snowy November day. Her mother Lou was busying herself blackening the hearth when the birth-pains started and she had to send for the midwife.

It was a difficult birth and an ambulance had to be called to take Louise to the hospital. Unfortunately those who were there have now passed on, but I gather Margaret was a breech-birth, and that after the birth Louise was very unwell, developing septicaemia, and needed hospital care.

The blame for the infection was put on the midwife not having sterilised her gloves before the delivery by the hospital trust (which the family did not accept), but I have no medical records to look at, and have no way of being sure that Margaret was born at home or whether the ambulance took her mother to hospital for the difficult birth and that she was born in the Royal Hospital. If that was the case she could well have contracted sepsis at the hospital during the delivery. I was told, after her death, her husband tried to sue the hospital, but failed, which would support the later conjecture.
All I do know is that a very sick Lou put baby Margaret in Elizabeth's arms and asked her to take care of 'me babbie'. Which she did. She was close to her sister-in-law and described her as a lovely girl.

Primary School

Margaret attended All Saints Primary Schools in All Saints Road, Wolverhampton WV2 1EL.

The Church of England church of All Saints was designed by London architects T. Taylor Smith & G. F. Roper in 1876, in the early gothic style, to replace the earlier Mission Church and School. The 88 feet long by 25 feet wide by 54 feet high nave of the present building was built in 1877-79 by Highams of Wolverhampton and was consecrated on All Saints' Day 1st November 1879 (and became a parish church in its own right in July 1881).

Margaret attended the Church of England School that was situated to the west of All Saints' Church. It was a typical Victorian-style CofE School, opened by Lord Barnard in 1894.

It closed in the 1990s with its remaining pupils being transferred to Grove Primary School. The school has been restored/modernised and extended by 'The All Saints Action Network' and re-opened in October 2008 as 'The Workspace', a state of the art community facility offering a wide range of facilities. This preserves the shell of the building that Margaret would have known, and serves today's local inhabitants very well.

Margaret recounted that on the first day of school she was sat next to a boy by the class teacher. This pretrified her! Her mother had warned her to 'keep away from boys - they are all nasty, rude and dirty'. Perhaps fearing that Margaret might develop a liking for lads and land up 'getting into trouble' (as getting pregnant was called in those days) if she befriended boys, Elizabeth had laid on the warnings too thickly for sensitive Margaret. The five year old burst into tears and ran out of the classroom - and all of the way home. Elizabeth had to take Margaret back and explain things to the teacher on the afternoon. Margaret always felt very sorry for the lad she had been sat next to - he was a lovely chap as she remembered and she recalled he turned bright red and avoided her after that..

At the age of 11 Margaret started secondary School. She attended St. Peter's School in Wolverhampton. The school she attended opened on 25th August 1902. It was situated on the eastern side of St Peter's Square with the girls downstairs and the boys upstairs. In 1932 the infants school was closed and in 1934 another wing was added giving a hall, science, woodwork and metalwork rooms.

She did not like school. It seemed to be full of rules, which, if you broke, landed you with demerits that culminated in detention. She recounted how she left her pen in a classroom at the end of a session, and realising her mistake when she arrived in the next class was asking a friend if she could borrow a pencil when she was spotted by the teacher. She got a demerit for talking in class. She explained to the teacher that she had been asking to borrow a pencil as she needed to return to the previous room to collect the forgotten pen. So she was given another demerit for forgetfulness and told to go and fetch it. She returned to the previous classroom and knocked on the door - then got another demerit for disturbing the lesson in the previous classroom. So, forgetting the pen earned her a detention.... it seems that school was a source of anxiety to Margaret from that moment on.

December 1944

(Age 14)

Left school

Margaret began work as a shoe shop sales assistant at Freeman, Hardy and Willis in Dudley Street, Wolverhampton when she left school. She had hoped to become a secretary, but that meant staying on at school (which was costly) and in any case, her English language skills were not good enough. She may well have been dyslexic - she always struggled with reading and writing. Her parents encouraged her into taking a respectable sales job.

The shoe shop work place was very strictly run. Assistants had to be polite and well dressed - and as you can see plentiful! There was no 'self service' in those days! Customers had to be 'served' - shoes of their size and preference brought to them to be 'fitted' by a well trained shop assistant. Stock numbers, ordering, banking and cashier work was performed by the office staff and supervisors - fitting by assistants. Margaret was a junior assistant.

Margaret was not keen on her job. She found the atmosphere oppressive and moved to a job at Woolworths across the street, where the general ethos was less formal. She remained in that job until she married and was expecting her first child.

February 23rd 1952

(Age 21)

Marriage

Margaret married Alojzy Josef Kus (age 26) - a polish soldier who had been demobilised in Willenhall to work at Ductile Steels Ltd after the war.

Initially they lived with Margaret's parents in 215, Parkfield Road.

18th December 1954

(Age 24)

23rd March 1958

(Age 27)

19th July 1976

(Age 45)

Her husband died of a heart attack at the age 51. This was a terrible shock.

Margaret had a part time job at the British Queen public house, but it was not going to provide her with a sufficient income. She was too young to get a widow's pension. She therefore got a full time job working in the stock room of Boots the Chemist in Queen Street Wolverhampton. This included contributing towards her pension. She worked there until she retired in 1990.

1978

(Age 47)

6th February 1980

(Age 49)

25th August 1993

(Age 62)

November (?) 1998

(Age 68)

11th December 2014

(Age 84)

11th January 2018

(Age 87)