ABD                        In memory of my darling first wife

Jeanne Vernon Bamford, as she was born in Clown in Derbyshire, was my beloved first wife.  I did not put the 'e' at the end of 'Clown' as that part of the word only arrived in about 1938, and Jeanne was born on the 4th of March 1925.  I have never discovered the reason for the name change of the village, although it is my  guess that 'Clowns' were joked about by the other local pits, and the villagers persuaded the Council to amend the name.  (incidentally, a 'clown' is a very old word for a countryman).

Jeanne was the second child of a pit labourer and she started near the bottom of the social scale.  But she told me on one occasion, that she decided as a child she didn't want to grow up and marry a local lad who would also be working in the pit.  Jeanne had higher ideas for herself, and I am honoured that she chose me as her husband.  Perhaps it was the white socks that i always wore in those days.  Jeanne's fellow nurses always joked about my white socks.

I never pursued Jeanne for the reasons why she got mixed up with the Catholic Church, but I have made a shrewd guess.  Marjorie, her elder sister, had an accident playing in a local pit rail yard when she was a teenager.  A serious blow on her head led to epilepsy and hospitalisation.  Marjorie ended up in a disabled home in Sheffield run by the Order of St Vincent de Paul.  Remember, in those days epilepsy was a much more serious disease than it is today when it can be well-controlled by medication.  I imagine that was where she found the Catholic Church.

Jeanne moved to London during the war and worked in a Catholic children's nursery in Mill Hill.  It was there that she took various examinations and gained a nursing diploma.  She would have liked to have become an SRN, but a very serious bout of tonsillitis left her with a serious heart defect, and part of the requirement to become an SRN was a medical examination that she would certainly have failed.  It was later deduced that with the tonsillitis, she must also have had rheumatic fever, as the 'lesser' disease does not damage the heart whereas the other one almost always does.

Jeanne had a strong personality and persuaded other members of her family to reluctantly  become involved with The Church.  To this day, some of them are very much "lapsed Catholics", as they can't accept the teachings that turned Jeanne to religion  Jeanne spent hours with an uncle of mine trying to console him after he lost his wife to lung cancer.  But she failed and that uncle eventually hanged himself on the Isle of Wight

Jeanne was continually in touch with her family in Carlton in Lindrick in Nottinghamshire,  and often helped her mother, father, and younger brother with any difficulties.  I made regular trips up and down from Hampton to Carlton by motor-cycle and sidecar long before the M1 was built.

When I met Jeanne at a Catholic Nursing Home in Notting Hill (St Vincent's), she had a mitral stenosis that seriously affected her stamina.  I was working there as an electrician rewiring the nurse's home.  Jeanne was a staff nurse and Sheila, her younger sister, was a nursing assistant.  From where I got the information, I don't know, but Jeanne's prognosis was that she wouldn't live beyond the age of fifty.  But I fell in love with the girl and that was too far into the future to concern me then.  Jeanne and I had a loving marriage with plenty of sex to damp down my carnal drives.  We had the occasional row, but it never lasted long.  Jeanne passed away two months short of 68, and I was at her bedside when she finally passed away on Friday the eighth of January  1993 in the cottage hospital at Hampton.

Jeanne had her first heart operation in September 1960 and it was a success.  They had to break her ribs to gain access to the heart to carry out the 'valvotomy'.  This consisted of stretching the mitral valve where it had become narrowed due to the disease.  A surgeon by the name of Mullard carried out the procedure.  (It crossed my mind that Mullard was the name of a company that made thermionic radio valves before and after the war.  Here was a Mr Mullard working on a different sort of valve.  The broken ribs were wired to hold them together while the bones knitted and the wires were left in place because they caused no problem.  But as a joke I used to run a metal detector over Jeanne's  chest to get a "so you are still in one piece" response from her.

Jeanne lived her life to the full and produced three daughters who have all been children I am proud of.  However, Jeanne's heart problem meant that she made regular visits to Harefield Hospital where there was, at that time, one of the few cardiac-specialist-units in the country.  One such visit flagged up that Jeanne's tricuspid  valve was in trouble.  She was duly admitted and operated on by Sir Magdi Yacoub.  Sir Magdi was then probably the leading heart surgeon in Europe, but he failed to pull the three cusps into position to improve the operation of the valve.  Jeanne was duly discharged needing continuous oxygen.  My darling wife ended up at the cottage hospital at Hampton, which was the nearest place to our home,  I had her back home for a while over Christmas and then returned her to the hospital in the New Year.  While at home I had a lot of oxygen bottles stored in my shed so that i could change a bottle when it became low.

Jeanne and I got married on the 31st March 1951 at St Theodore's of Canterbury church in Hampton.  I those days all services were in Latin and I regularly teased her about the service being in a foreign language.  Her reply was always "I don't mind, your signed the register in English, so now you can look after me."  And I did try to do just that.

I had to admire Jeanne's honesty.  It was so extreme that one might have thought her a fool had that been the only facet of her character under discussion.  But Jeanne was no fool as I will relate below.  On one occasion she went to Bentalls in Kingston, and when she got home she realised that she had been given ten shillings too much change.  I had great difficulty in persuading her not to go back the ten mile return journey to repay the ten shillings.
"Ten shillings is nothing to Bentalls, and you'll probably get the girl in trouble".
Reluctantly Jeanne agreed.  But another incident showed her other side.  In the local sub-post office she got some money at the counter.  As she walked away she realised that she had been given too much change.  She returned to the counter and the clerk snapped at her:
"We don't correct mistakes once you have left the counter."
 "Thank you, you have given me a pound too much."
And she turned on her heel and walked out of the shop.

It is said that the greatest compliment a man can give to a deceased wife, is to marry again.  I did just this to another lovely woman who has a totally different personality to Jeanne.  Beryl Krause, as she was when I met her here in Nottingham, had a hard life in her first marriage.  A husband who was much more interested in the pub and outside girlfriends than in his family, gave Beryl twelve children but always kept her short of money despite earning large amounts of it as a steeple-jack.

I have no secrets from Beryl, and as far as I know she has none from me.