Dad's Dad, Aunts and Uncles

About the Collins family. Our family.

Starting I think with my father Lawrence Jerome Collins who was born into a family of 9 in about, I'm not very sure but I think it was about 1897.

Now, my father had 9 siblings, 4 boys and 5 girls.

Of the boys...

One died when he was quite young, a schoolboy, that was Frank. The other 3 were Peter, Lawrence and Raymond. My uncle Raymond died sometime in the 1920's of tuberculosis. That just left then, of course, Peter and my father Lawrence.

My Uncle Peter married Maria Manning and they had 2 girls, Ann and Josie. Both my Father and his Brother served in the first world war. Uncle Peter taking ammunition to the front at Ypres. My Dad served with the Serbs against the Austrians and Bulgars.

Of the girls...

Margaret was named after her mother, I'll go back into that later, she died in childbirth or shortly afterwards of some fever or other. Something connected with childbirth, I'm really not sure.

The baby was my cousin Rita who was the pride of her brother at an early age and I'll go onto that later. May who was the next girl married a man she met while working at a local hospital which was being used a a convalescence home. She was a schoolteacher. People volunteered during the 1st World War to help out these retiring servicemen who needed attention. He was a chartered electrical engineer called Fred Ray who eventually rose to be a director of the South Eastern Electricity Board.

The other girl, Teresa, was unlucky in that she had her eye knocked out while working half time at 12 years of age in a cotton mill. She married a man called George Taylor and lived in very poor circumstances and died quite young.

After that there were Edith and Susan. Edith was a clever lady, and my favourite Auntie. A manageress of a shoe shop, she married late in life to a family friend after the friend's wife died prematurely.

Susan was the other sister and she lived with Edith in their Mother's old house and they brought up between them Margaret's daughter. The baby was also named Margaret but was always known as Rita. Rita was a particularly beautiful girl, convent grammar school educated who did not marry until her 40s.