Profile Angela Mead Angela Cooper’s parents Harold and Alice (nee Waldock) lived at no. 14 Rose Lane and they already had a seven year old daughter Pauline when Angela was born in Royston Hospital. Harold worked all his life at the Atlas Asbestos Cement Company (Eternit) and mother did cleaning for Mary Elbourn and Gladys Harrup. Father was born in Melbourn and her mother in Meldreth so there were always lots of cousins and aunts around during her growing up. Her grandparents at one time kept The Dumb Flea public house in Chiswick End. Angela went to the Primary School in Mortlock Street where Tom Smith was the headmaster and then on to Melbourn Village College where her favourite classes were cooking, and also sewing under the tutorship of Daphne Hagger. She was a very keen Brownie and the pack met in the hall which stood where the school carpark is now located, Diana Boote was the Brown Owl. She attended the Sunday School at the URC in Orchard Road and even taught there for a while. When she left school she went to work at Farmers Fertilizers in Royston doing secretarial work for John Keatley and his father, travelling in by bus. By then she had already been going out with Roger Mead for a couple of years – they met in 1964 at Melbourn Feast when she was only 14. Angela asked Douglas Gatward (who was married to her cousin Rosemary) to take her on the dodgem cars but he told his young apprentice to take her instead. Douglas worked at Gates of Baldock mending tractors. Roger had been born in Royston, but his mother was at Meldreth Primary School with Angela’s mother so the families were already well known to each other. Roger was three years older than Angela and as soon as she was 17 he taught her to drive, in a little mini. When they had got engaged and had fixed the wedding date for September 1970, it was decided that they should build a bungalow in the garden of no. 14. The couple started work on their new home in the January, with Mervin Thurley doing the brickwork
and Charles Brooks doing the carpentry – Angela and Roger did the labouring. And the house was ready for them to move into when they returned from their honeymoon in Blackpool. Louise was born in 1975 and Angela left work at Farmers Fertilizers and became a full time mother, two years later Sarah was born. The two girls now live next door to each other in Armingford Crescent, with five children between them. When Louise was seven and started Brownies, Angela went to help out and eventually became Tawny Owl and then Brown Owl – she did a total service of 23 years! For every 10 years of service the Guiding Association give a service award called the ‘Get Knotted Badge’ and Angela is the proud possessor of two of them - she retired from the Brownies in December 2006. She remembers saying to a young Brownie once ‘Don’t you ever stop talking’ to which the small girl replied ‘Yes, when I am asleep!’ On another occasion she showed them the photograph of herself as a Brownie and one child asked why the photograph was in Black and White. Another Brownie quickly said ‘That’s because it was in the olden days!’ Nothing like children to bring you down to earth with a bang. Brownies are considered to be too young to camp under canvas but Angela led the Brownie packs on several Pack holidays to a ‘pack house’ at Norton Bury near Letchworth. The Brownies always ran the tombola stall at the URC Bazaar and took part in the village fetes and the Remembrance Day Parades. One activity which was very popular was the Penny Hike. This was quite new to me but Angela explained that they set off from the church gates and at each corner they tossed a coin – heads for right, tails for left – and thus they would zigzag all over the village. She tried to teach them cooking and sewing, on one occasion icing a Christmas cake they got into such a state that it took Angela hours to clean up the sticky mess. After Angela’s father retired from the Atlas he developed a very severe back problem which could not be treated at Addenbrookes so he was eventually moved to a special spinal unit in Sheffield. This was extremely hard on the family as they could only visit at weekends and they trailed backwards and forwards regularly until he died in melbournmagazine
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