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SENIORS CHAMPION
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| You cannot be involved in the pensioners movement without meeting or hearing about Mary Davies. Sometimes known as Supergran | |
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because of the energy she shows in everything that she is involved in or with. Known to her friends and family as "Niggy". This year she celebrated her 90th birthday in the company of friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbours. |
About 2 years ago Mary was involved in a
very serious car accident and spent some weeks in hospital.
However she bounced back but had to curtail some of her
activities. She is still Chairman and a key member of the
Anglian Pensioner team.
Mary Davies was born during the first word war and remembers, vividly, her mother lining her and her brothers and sisters against a wall in their East End home to shelter from the German Zeppelin flying overhead.
Her father was self-educated, was a poet and a musician who read Dickens and Longfellow to his children sitting around the kitchen range.
Mary remembers her wonderfully 'rich' childhood, especially the Saturday nights when her father held impromptu concerts in the parlour. Everyone, neighbours, aunts, uncles turned up and sang - ballads - beautiful and bawdy, arias from grand and light opera. Her mother was kept busy feeding the dozens of guests.
She says she did not realize that she was
poor (materially) until she went, at the age of 17, to work with
middle class people who actually owned their own houses. Growing
up in the shadow of WW1, she actively worked for Peace, meeting
her first husband at a demonstration.
Taking
part in the war effort in WW2 was a risky business. Being
blitzed in Sheffield was followed by dodging bombs with her
young family in a southeast suburb of London day and night.
[V1's and V2's]
In the 50s she moved to Suffolk and teacher training, which provided a rewarding career right through until the 60s, when she lost her husband. Undaunted she became a District Councillor and gained an Economics degree.
Back in Sheffield, educational politics became her chief interest, serving on the Sheffield Education Committee for 10 years. She married the President of the College Teachers Union, and with him travelled widely in Europe and America.
Later after his death, she returned to
East Anglia, setting up home right next to her daughter in
Norfolk where they remain. Retiring in 1975, Mary became acutely
aware of the poverty of so many pensioners.
Later she set up the Anglian Pensioner, which was one of the most popular pensioner newspapers in existence and the most professional.
She serves on the Executive of the Norfolk Older People's Forum, is a member of the SUFOA Steering Committee, and the Editorial Board of Forum to Forum, this lady is as busy as ever. She has also been nominated for a Help the Aged Living Legend award.
Mary says: I have a loving and supportive family, and wonderful colleagues and friends. I write articles and occasionally poems and I hope to complete work on three books I have planned but never seemed to have enough time for. At 90, life seems to get better all the time and I'm still learning!
I recommend that you all have a 90th birthday - if you haven't already had one?
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