Nicola's mum takes centre stage

The occasion was a public meeting in Albrighton in 1969, and while the person standing up and speaking is the Wrekin MP of the day, Gerry Fowler, Nicola Jones has recognised her mother as being the lady on the platform in this photo we published in Pictures From The Archive the other day.

"That is my mum sitting by the microphone," said Nicola, who lives near Whitchurch.

"My parents lived in Shaw Lane, Albrighton. My mother was head of the lower school at Highfields School, Wolverhampton, and I think she was there because of what they were discussing – they were talking about having a secondary school in Albrighton."

Her name was Dr Eileen Jones, married to Iowerth Jones, who was known to everybody as Toma Jones. Toma died in 1988 and Eileen in 2003.

Nicola said: "My father was the Director of Nurse Education at Wolverhampton from 1962 to 1980. They had met when my mother was nursing in London. Age 23, she was known as 'Sunshine' by her patients, but working all through the Blitz completely traumatised her, and she once said to me that it was heartbreaking to see so many young men brought in after the night’s bombardment, dying on her watch.

"At the nurses home she once got up to go to the loo and returned to find a piece of shrapnel on her bed, which she said would have killed her had she still been in bed.

“My father had started his working life as a miner, at the age of 14, and so was a lifelong socialist, but he had always wanted to be a doctor, so went to night school and then on to one of the teaching hospitals, where he met my mother.

"His war years were spent in Burma, and completely disrupted his training, so he became a 'sister tutor' instead, something at which he excelled.” "

Nicola says her mother's parents were dismayed at the thought of her marrying a Welsh man.

She says her mother got her PhD for a study – which took six years – she did for Birmingham Health Authority on "Nurse Education" and was, aged 73, at the time the oldest person in the country to get one.

Our picture was taken at a meeting on October 24, 1969, when worried parents crowded into St Mary's Primary School, Albrighton, to complain about the lack of adequate secondary schools in their area. But they were told they might have to wait until 1973 for a comprehensive school.

Nearly 400 people listened intently, and sometimes angrily, as parents, teachers, county councillors, county education officials and the MP for The Wrekin, Mr Gerry Fowler, argued over better school facilities for Albrighton.