Five years after I paid tribute to Doreen on reaching her 100th birthday I am sad to give you the news that Doreen died on 16 January, aged 105. She was the Trust’s oldest member, a record unlikely to be beaten!
In the piece I wrote for Outlook, I told of how I first met Doreen. It was shortly after I joined the Trust in January 2014 when she, Elaine Cooper and Liz Pruden (all now passed away) were sifting through and cataloguing old photographs in the Hepper Room. I could not believe Doreen was the age she was then; she became an inspiration to me and I am sure many others dealing with all the challenges of old age, not helped by a car crash and falls.
Doreen joined the Trust on 20 June 1990 and became a Trust Patron on 1 September 2003. She served on House Committee for 10 years from 1993 and on the Photograph Collection Group for 8 years until the group disbanded in December 2019. Her time on House Committee coincided with the Trust’s purchase of our premises on Wharf Street. This was a very busy period for House Committee (not least taking on the task of tanking the entire cellar of the property thanks to the then Committee Chairman Ted Handley). Doreen was instrumental in getting a landing installed just outside the kitchen thereby making the stairway on that side of the building considerably less steep than the stairs on the other side.
Prior to her support of the Trust, she was a leading light in the Meanwood Village Association. It was this organisation that brought Doreen to the attention of Kevin Grady when MVA became an Affiliated Society of the Trust.
Doreen’s longstanding involvement with the MVA included researching and co-authoring some of their publications documenting life in Meanwood, past and present, that were then made available to buy through the Trust bookshop.
Books were not the only interest; Doreen was an active member of Leeds Movie Makers and shooting 8mm film was one of the many skills she acquired after her retirement. This skill enabled her to be a recipient of the Trust’s Crabtree Bursary in 1989 for the production of a film about life in Leeds, later shown to Trust members. I am the proud owner of a DVD copy of this film!
From reading a history of the Wood family Doreen wrote for her children, her early life was spent in Harehills. At 5 years of age, Doreen Sheldon (as she was then) enrolled at St Luke’s School in Skinner Lane (later converted to business premises and demolished around the turn of the 21st century). At the time, this area contained some of the most deprived housing and she recalls that the children from these houses often came barefoot to school and many suffered from rickets. The Yorkshire Evening Post set up a fund ‘Boots for Bairns’ to buy footwear for these children. According to Doreen it was found that new shoes were being taken to pawn shops to exchange for money, only stopped when ‘a special tag was put into them to be recognised by pawnbrokers’. At the same time a national scheme began distributing cod liver oil in schools, usually mixed with malt extract which Doreen said ‘made it taste nice’!
Diseases spread like wildfire from child to child and Doreen herself caught scarlet fever and had a 6- week stay in hospital at a time when the NHS had yet to be established. She recalled that both her mother and sister suffered ill health that must have put an incredible strain on her father, a toy bicycle maker, facing the doctor’s bills.
She goes on to say that ‘winning a High School place caused quite a stir in the Sheldon family’. Although during the Depression when cash was tight, her parents were supportive but different members of the family argued that ‘there was no point in educating a girl because she would only get married and the education would be wasted’. Her grandmother had the last word and in September 1932 she started at Roundhay High School for Girls, a fee paying school at the time, on a scholarship.
From Harehills the family moved to Beeston and the long tram ride to school allowed Doreen to complete her homework! After leaving school in 1937, she started as an accounting machine trainee in the City Treasurer’s Rate office earning the grand sum of 25 shillings a week (£1.25). By now, the threat of war was hanging over the family and she recalls queuing for gas masks which ‘we carried away in a cardboard box with a long handle of string’ to be carried at all times in case of poison gases. During the war, Doreen was seconded to be a GPO telephonist.
After the war, Doreen became engaged to Frank Wood and they married on June 7th in 1947. Twenty-five years later and with three children, the family moved to Meanwood where Doreen lived until the family moved her to a care home in Rotherham where she spent the last few years of her life closer to her family. After Frank died, she married Frank’s brother, Eric, who had lost his wife. A happy marriage for 17 years before Eric died a few weeks away from his own 100th birthday in 2009.
This has been only a brief overview of a happy, varied and full life during which she gave over 30 years of support to Leeds Civic Trust for which we are very grateful. Her 105th birthday last August was marked by a card from the King, adding to the one she had had from the late Queen on her 100th.
Doreen’s funeral took place at Lawnswood Crematorium on 3 February. The funeral was livestreamed and is available for viewing online during February. If you would like to receive details of how to view the funeral video, please email office@leedscivictrust.org.uk.
