Winifred Foley Obituary (General)

by admin , Forest of Dean, Monday, August 24, 2009, 03:29 (5645 days ago) @ Localbird

April 11, 2009
Winifred Foley: writer
Timesonline
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6073720.ece

It was not until she was in her sixties that Winifred Foley wrote her first book. A Child in the Forest, about her childhood in the Forest of Dean, went on to sell more than 500,000 copies, inspired radio and television adaptations, and became an important document for social historians.

Winifred was born in 1914 into a poor mining family from Brierly, near Cinderford, Gloucestershire. Food and money were scarce, but the community spirit was strong and everyone would pull together to offer tea or a crust of bread to those in need. The men worked gruelling shifts, and the women scrimped to make ends meet.

Foley's father, Charlie Mason, was a leader in the miners' strike in 1926. As a consequence he could not find employment for many years afterwards, and her family experienced great hardship. To feed the family Foley's mother, Margaret, would steal fruit from neighbouring farms, or the children would pick acorns to eat, which would make their stomachs ache.

Aged 14 Foley left for London to begin in domestic service. She was resentful but it was the only future for the girls of the Forest of Dean. In London she moved between houses. Her first job was in North London with a family who wanted "a strong, young fool -- one who could be housemaid from six to one . . . then parlour maid for waiting at the table, then nanny for the children's afternoon outings, then washerwoman in the evening". For this she earned six-and-eightpence a week, the equivalent of about £10 today.

She resigned after a few months, homesick and worn out, to return to the Forest of Dean. Afterwards she moved between jobs, observing other people's lives from the perspective of the maid, the waitress and the general skivvy. In the 1930s she met her husband-to-be, Syd Foley, a woodman, at a political rally in London opposing Mosley's Fascist Black Shirt movement. After they married and had four children, the young family moved to an isolated cottage in Huntley, Gloucestershire.

Foley had always told her children stories about her past, but it was not until she learnt of an appeal for unpublished personal histories in the 1970s that she was cajoled into putting her own recollections on paper. She filled several notebooks with her memories, which were carefully edited by her husband before she sent them to the BBC. Her story caught the interest of John Burnett, a social historian, and Pamela Howe, a talks producer at the BBC in Bristol. Howe sought Foley out, and in 1973 her story was serialised and broadcast on Woman's Hour.

A year later A Child in the Forest, the first book of what would become the "Forest Trilogy", was published through the BBC. A sequel, No Pipe Dreams for Father, and the concluding title in the trilogy, Back to the Forest, followed. Her time spent living and working for an elderly woman inspired the acclaimed television drama Abide with Me (1976), written by Julian Mitchell, with whom she remained in contact for many years afterwards.

Foley's husband and children were delighted by her success, but her work caused tensions elsewhere. The honesty of her descriptions, which included stories of fleas in the bed and poor sanitation, shamed some parts of her family. But Foley believed it was important that the rest of the world knew this side of the story as well, especially at a time when she felt people were becoming more materialistic and oblivious to the realities of the lives of others.

In public Foley was modest about her achievements but her books did enable her to retire and to buy a house -- she was the first person in her family to do so.

In 2001 a documentary on her life, Winifred Foley - A Child from the Forest, was broadcast on ITV. Her life story has been quoted in numerous texts studying the social history of the period she grew up in. In her eighties, Foley changed direction to write a series of romantic novels. In 2009 A Child in the Forest was reprinted as Full Hearts and Empty Bellies to celebrate the title's 30th anniversary, but Foley died just before its release. After her death, the Daily Mail published a serialised version of the book.

She is survived by three sons and one daughter. Her husband, Syd, died in 1998.

Winifred Foley, writer, was born on July 25, 1914, and died on March 21, 2009, aged 94