Sisters in a smart welcome for arriving friends
Who are those smartly dressed young girls standing at Baschurch railway station in the 1920s?
Well, one of them is Mary Roberts, and the other is her older sister Nancy. And how do we know? That's simple – Mary rang in to tell us.
Mary, who is now 95-year-old Mrs Mary Owen and lives in Shrewsbury, gave us a call after we used this photo in Pictures From The Past .
"I was sitting reading it and thought that it was a lovely picture and then thought 'goodness me!'" said Mrs Owen, who back then lived in the nearby village of Prescott.
"That's my sister Nancy Roberts with me, who was two years older than me. My dad would have taken us to meet a train from Wolverhampton because our friends were coming to visit us."
Mary is the smaller of the two girls standing by the poster at the far left of the platform.
Although she cannot specifically remember the picture being taken, she said: "We always used to have to stand there. I was only five or six and that's where my dad put us to stand. It sounds silly, but if we stood there they could see us as the train came in from Wolverhampton.
"My friend Betty Price was from Wolverhampton and her parents were friends with my parents. It's a long story. We used to live next door to one another in Wrexham. They moved to Wolverhampton and we moved to Prescott when I was five. That's why they were coming on the train – to see our house."
She thinks her father is the man who is not in uniform and is standing on the right hand side with his hand in his pocket.
"He worked on the railway. He was an engineer. I think he was with the GWR in those days."
The two sisters are smartly dressed in matching clothes, as they always were when they were out in public.
"We were always dressed the same. We wore white socks up to our knees – that's how we were always dressed. When we were at home playing, it would be different, but when we were outside we were always dressed properly."
The picture came originally from Mrs Pirkko Nelson of Shrewsbury and the estimated date is between 1926 and 1928, which ties in well with Mary's recollections.
