A reconciliation & a promise
A picture of a mother with a child. How many families have such a photo? There must be countless millions very like this. Yet there are two stories directly associated with this particular picture that transform it into a treasured family heirloom.
This is a picture of my maternal grandmother Freda Bishop, née Helm (b1904), with her daughter Margaret, my mother. It was taken in September 1929, when Margaret was two months old.
Freda was one of 10 children of Thomas Helm (1862-1925) and Sarah Margaret Pickthall (1869-1950), who lived on the island of Walney, near Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, at number 17 Northscale. By 1928, Sarah was a widow, and many of her children had already left home. One of the children was a daughter Elizabeth (b1902) who had married a Barrow Town footballer. Sadly
