Dear Miss Eddy

I recently mentioned my old Latin teacher, Miss Eddy… old because she was old, she even taught my aunty at the same school nearly thirty years previously. She was a sweet old thing and rather hopeless, no doubt a brilliant Latin scholar but not very good as a teacher… but I don’t remember any trouble in her classes because no doubt we all liked her.

With my interest in unusual names, I got to wondering about her… and wondering turned into some family tree research and I think she may have been Mary Cordelia Eddy, born on the 11th of June in 1898 in March, Cambridgeshire. Of course I may be wrong, certainly our teacher could well have been in her sixties when she was teaching us… but I would rather like our Miss Eddy to be Mary Cordelia! Mary Cordelia died in 1975 aged seventy-seven; her parents were John Miller Eddy, born in Kingsbridge, Devon, and Minnie who was born in Ashford, Hertfordshire.

John and Minnie née Strickland were married in Royston, Hertfordshire in 1897. Minnie had been born in 1874, so she was just twenty-three years old… John was born in 1857… nearly twenty years older than his wife.  Minnie’s was from quite a large family of farm labourers; her parents Annie and Charles, had several children, Minnie, Lilian, Bertie and Eugene, Hugh, William, Percy and Victor and the curiously named Oben.

John Eddy had been brought up by his grandmother Agnes, and had trained as a chemist, moving from place to place, including Shepton Mallet and London before arriving in Royston and meeting Minnie. Agnes seems to have been a widow bringing up at least three grandchildren before 1850, Henry, Caroline and Joanna… later she was taking care of John in the 1860’s. Who knows what had happened to Agnes’s husband and then her sons… they lived near the sea so it is tempting to think they may have been sailors who met with an accident out on the water… But John was brought up as an only child, he married late and he had but one child himself, Mary Cordelia.

Another dear old stick taught us Maths, she was also my first form teacher at secondary school, Miss Gurry who I think was Hilda Maude, born 1909 in London and died in Cambridge at the grand age of eighty-seven. She had three sisters, Evelyn,  Lillian and Winifred and her father Charles was a teacher; he had married their mother, Alberta Jane Nettleship,  in 1903. What a wonderful name her mother had! Alberta’s brothers and sisters were all quite conventionally named, Mary, George, Henry, Alice and William, Edith and Robert.

I have no way of knowing, but I guess that both Mary Cordelia Eddy and Hilda Maude Gurry were unmarried because of the number of men killed during the first world war… there were so many spinsters of a similar age who I remember as a child. They may not have had children of their own, but they must have taught and impressed hundreds if not thousands of young women in their years of service to the school.