A retired accounts clerk, she was a skilled seamstress who made sure her daughter was never held back by illness
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When Lynn Shouls, 57, a retired solicitor from Kent, was a baby, her lung collapsed. Her mother, Eileen Bryan, noticed straight away. “If it wasn’t for her, I might not be here at all,” Lynn says. “She was very quick about it. It must have been terrifying.”
Eileen grew up in Peterborough, in an ordinary family. She married a bank manager, Patrick, whom she met on holiday in Torquay, in 1951. “It was a very happy marriage,” says Lynn. “They’d go about everywhere hand in hand.” The couple had two children, Lynn and her sister, and Eileen worked part-time as an accounts clerk after she had children, which was relatively unusual at the time. “She knew her own mind,” says Lynn. “Most women stopped work completely when they married and she didn’t want to do that. She was quite determined and strong and was never going to be persuaded otherwise.”