The Hadwen Family of Lancashire

Marion Picthall (1927-2003)

Marion would not take a share in the farm work and took to studying in the hope of escaping it. She used to argue with her father William who also had differences with her brother Gordon, a fact which helped formed the bond between them. Marion thought she only got to London University because of the war and because Gordon joined the RNVR which freed the money set aside for him to train as a vet in Edinburgh. She did not like to go back to Bowesfield in the summer vacation but was unable to get a job in London that would have allowed her to stay there. She very much did not want to teach, which would have been another way to fund a university education, and would have given it up rather than follow a teaching career. Marion went to London when V-1’s were falling which worried Lily very much. Her two sisters both agreed that Marion took on Lily’s entertaining standards, laying huge teas on large ranges of china which they both loved. These teas dwindled slowly to nothing as age claimed her but in her pomp the ordinary family tea, especially on Sunday, was sumptuous. Marion hated parties and disliked joining in the visits the farming families paid to each other on Sundays.

Marion cycled from Bowesfield to Dalton station when she was at Ulverston Victoria School. She remembered the hill from Newton to Dalton station as very steep. The family moved to Bowesfield in 1934. She remembers attending the 1935 Silver Jubilee celebrations in Dalton whilst a sister went to the ones in Newton. She felt cut off in Newton and would go to the cinema in Dalton. Sometimes Margaret would go too. They stayed with Ada Jones in Dalton. Ada was the sister of Daniel Crellin’s second wife, Laura Jones. Ada was a very close friend of Lilly Crellin.

Marion skipped a year either at Dalton primary school or Ulverston Victoria School which is why she went to Bedford College in London University at 17. She arrived just as the college returned from its wartime billet at Girton College, Cambridge. Food parcels from Bowesfield were important when she was a student in London and added significantly to rations. Marion was not worried by V-1’s but the warden of her hostel was. The hostel housed 20 girls all from outside London and with no family in London. She would like to have read History of Art, but as that was not possible so she read history instead. She was only interested in constitutional history, and did not do well. She would like to have been an art dealer – she had seen her father William trading cattle and liked that. She met Ronald Mead when she had been in London 3 days. One of the hostel girls persuaded her to go to a dance which she did reluctantly. Ronald took her home when her colleague got taken home by someone else.

Her family finances were a tide of red ink all through her marriage and became especially precarious in the first years after her marriage broke down. At this time she worked as a teacher to support her three sons, even though she had detested the idea of doing so when young. Nonetheless she stuck at it until first cancer made it impossible and then her ex-husband’s (Ronald Mead) success in Hong Kong made it unnecessary.