A Barnardo’s boy’s story
to lose his young wife, then trying to support seven children alone. This was a long time before a welfare system, as we now know it, was established in the UK
By John Denyer
In February 1935, following the death of his father, three-year-old Richard and four sisters were taken into temporary shelter, the Dr Barnardo’s ‘Ever Open Door’, known as Welby in Plymouth.
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INTERVIEWED Richard Avery with the intent to hear and write about his memories of active service in the Korean War. However, I discovered that the story of the first 17 years of his life was so challenging, so difficult, that with his kind permission, I have tried to describe it here. I suspect many people of a younger generation would find it hard to image how difficult life could be in the mid 1930s in Cornwall, and across the UK, especially for orphans or those who for whatever reason were reliant on charitable organisations. Richard Avery, who lives in Ashleigh Way, was born in Mevagissey in January 1932, the youngest of seven children. He had a start to life that would be hard to comprehend for many of us when, in 1934, his mother Irene died of cancer aged just 35. If that wasn’t tragic enough, the following year his father Richard Henry died aged 46 from ‘exhaustion and ulcerative colitis’, leaving all seven children orphaned.
The eldest two siblings, Henry (20) and Eva (18) were already working so didn’t go into the care system. Life was always tough as a 'Barnardo's boy or girl’ but even more so during the global depression of the 1930s and in the run up to and during the Second World War. Over the next decade, Richard lived in multiple children's homes from Plymouth to Norfolk, including a military school and one period with a foster family. Initially, all contact with his eldest siblings and the extended family was lost and not regained for many months or years.
One can only imagine how hard it would have been for Richard’s father, first
Image: Richard with his mother Irene 28 | Probus News Magazine | Issue 251
Image: Richard aged four years, with his sisters Kathleen, Rene, Ethel, and Mary and eldest Sister Eva, who was 19 and visiting.
