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Saturday, January 26, 2008

A COUSIN'S MEMORIES OF SOPHIE


..."when an unsuitable cousin arrived in Aberdeen....This cousin was the famous baby that was carried in the carpet bag, the gipsy's child, already mentioned. She had grown up to be an athlete of distinction, held the British women's championship in fencing - or was it javelin throwing? - and just after the war she came to Aberdeen with a university appointment of a minor sort. Agitated letters reached my mother from Aunt Lucie and others in Ireland: "For Mercy's sake, Lily, don't let Sophie get hold of the girls." I was in my first year at Aberdeen University and very interested to see this Irish cousin, who came to tea in a stylish fur coat. She had a husband, but he happened to be in Africa....She soon made a name for herself as a pilot of considerable daring and skill, at a time when very few women flew at all. .... In a club in London in the late 1920s, I heard her discussed, her charm and vitality and her gifts, and trickling through the conversation a suggestion of warning...."
From "So Much Love, So Little Money" by Lyn Irvine (London 1957), whose mother Lilian Lloyd grew up in Mount Etna, Co Limerick; Lilian's father was Edward Lloyd. Her grandmother was Anne Locke.
In 1934, Lyn Irvine married the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman; he was part of the Bletchley Park group that broke the Enigma code in the Second World War.

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