ABSTRACT
While at nautical school, John met his future wife on a Friends Hall ramble in Epping Forest. Pat had also won a scholarship to grammar school but her father’s unemployment had obliged her to leave after three years to become a shorthand typist, the family otherwise dependent on her mother’s dressmaking and help from an aunt from whom Pat had her first job. Her father’s failed business capers had taught Pat unwelcome lessons in capitalism, making her receptive to the socialist ideas debated at Friends Hall.
