Effie MASTERMAN was born on 29 June 1907, the eldest child of Henry MASTERMAN and his wife Mary Elizabeth, née CASEY. According to the record of her baptism (on 21 July 1907) in the Primitive Methodist Church Register, her father was a plater, (he worked in a shipyard on the River Tyne) and the family lived at 20 Canterbury Street, Byker. Since most babies were born at home in those days, Effie was probably born at that address.

Canterbury Street, Byker, is a turning off Welbeck Road a few streets down from the top (Byker Village) end. Another daughter, Frances Annie (who later became Anne) was born there on 21 May 1911. By April 1913, when the present writer’s mother Elizabeth MASTERMAN was born, the family was living at 50 Copeland Terrace, Shieldfield, Newcastle, where Effie’s mother was the proprietor of a general shop. In the 1912 Directory of Newcastle, the proprietor of the shop at that address was “E. LINDSEY”, so the move to Shieldfield must have taken place only shortly before our mother’s birth. Our mother’s autobiography describes how the family came to leave the shop because of a fire, and from the trade directory we can establish that it must have occurred between 1918 and 1920.

Assuming that Effie started school at the age of five, the first school she attended must have been in the Shieldfield area. She was a small, thin, dark child, with long hair, who in appearance took after her father’s side of the family.

Two more children were born to Henry and Mary Elizabeth MASTERMAN – Henry Masterman in 1917 and Michael Bell Masterman in 1921. Upon leaving school, probably in 1921 at the age of 14, Effie started work in an office as a book-keeper or clerk. She was 26 before she married, so must have spent more than ten years earning her keep while living at home.

On 15 August 1933 she married Henry DODDS, (born 27 September 1906), whom she had met at the Methodist Church. Theirs was an ideal marriage – both were booklovers and churchgoers, quiet and self-contained at home, friendly to all they met and affectionate to the family. The children of the family – Effie’s family, as it turned out – were important to them. They, who would have made excellent and loving parents, had no children of their own. They became second parents to the Emmetts, the children of Effie’s younger sister Elizabeth - of whom the present writer is one - and influenced the lives of all of us.

The newly-married Mr. and Mrs. Dodds lived first in Wallsend, then moved to 771 Welbeck Road, where they lived until about 1953, when they bought an attractive Edwardian terraced house at 18 Beech Grove, Forest Hall, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. Harry worked at Donkins in Old Shields Road, in the Accounts Department, rising to become its head.

When war came, Effie was a firewatcher: she would be posted to a high building to watch where bombs fell and report any smoke or flames. After the war, as European travel became possible, she and Harry went on coach trips, to Austria, Switzerland, Germany and France, and Harry acquired a little car. Both Effie and Harry continued as practising Methodists and believers. Harry died on 18 June 1981, and Effie on 11 April 1996. His death was very sudden and unexpected; she was nearly 90 years old. She died convinced that she would be re-united with Harry in the afterlife.

Effie was a great reader throughout her life, enjoying all kinds of literature – biographies, travel, novels, poetry and humour. She frequented second-hand bookshops and stalls, searching for curiosities of literature, which she would bring to us to read and discuss with her. She introduced me to “Bachelors’ Buttons” which remains to this day one of my favourite books. She made many novelties for children with clothes pegs, dusters, match boxes etc.. She loved nature rambles and long walks in the country, and was extremely knowledgeable about botany. She was, according to our mother’s autobiography, a story-teller from her childhood, and made a dolls’ house with cut-out figures to illustrate the various tales she told.

She was “Aunty Effie” to many more children than her own family. Her eldest niece, Elizabeth, remembers how when Aunty Effie visited her and her younger sister Sylvia at their evacuation home in rural Durham during the war, the local children would follow Effie about to hear the stories she told. I remember her stories of “The Tar Baby” and “Epaminondas” (and wondering about that name inspired me to find out who and what Epaminondas was. Many years later, reading “The Lays of Ancient Rome”, I recognised and remembered her quoting, “Oh, who will hold the bridge with me ….”

Effie loved jokes and puns – all from “Aunty Effie’s Bumper Fun Book” as my sister Sylvia would say. Her famous “coconut mat” (a layer of melted chocolate topped with a mixture of desiccated coconut and condensed milk, then sprinkled with chopped glacé cherries and baked in the oven) was a feature of many a family get-together. She would sit making little goblets out of the gold and silver paper wrappings from sweets for whichever of the children she had near her. She brought us comics and sweets at every visit, and strawberries and cherries in season, none of which our parents could have afforded for us. Effie loved children and was loved by them.

Effie could recite poems, she could sing many songs and hymns, she could quote from the plays of Shaw and Shakespeare, and she loved music (orchestral, grand opera, operettas and parlour songs) and dancing. She had been involved in her youth with Church productions of musical dramas, and through her knowledge of these things, she introduced her nephews and nieces to a world that they would otherwise perhaps never have entered.

To sum her up, I would say that she was a loving woman. She loved her family and her friends, despite all their faults and failings, and she cared about them and for them. She loved this country too, and its beautiful landscape: in old age, she would often say how glad she was that she and Harry had known the countryside at its best, in the nineteen-thirties, when they went out exploring on their long walks together. She tried hard to make her nephews and nieces love the country too – whenever she could she would take us off to Jesmond Dene, Paddy Freeman’s, the seaside, and further afield to the Yorkshire Dales. When I went to London for the first time, I went with Aunty Effie. Effie was born in the reign of Edward the Seventh, and was a loyal subject under four Kings and our present Queen. She was a home-maker in every sense, in that she created comfortable surroundings for herself and Harry, into which all were welcomed, and at the same time was without effort or vanity the centre of the extended family.

Effie was a heavy smoker all her life, but enjoyed good health. She remained slim and active into old age, dressed smartly but never used make-up. She wore her hair long, in an old-fashioned bun at the back of her neck for most of her life, but the style suited her to perfection. In extreme old age she neglected her appearance and her clothes.

Of course she had faults. Some people might have said she was “old maidish”, or prudish: I myself believe that her reticence on all sexual, gynaecological and even medical matters was nothing but the natural modesty of a girl brought up in the first quarter of the twentieth century. She was a child of her time in every way: she was reactionary in her political views and narrow-minded in her attitude towards (for example) foreigners. She felt sorry for them simply because they were foreigners, but when she met people from abroad, she had no difficulty in liking them, and caring for them as she cared for her own family. She hated criminals but if anyone she knew had committed a crime, she would have had no difficulty in understanding, accepting and forgiving him or her. She disliked vulgarity and coarseness too, but she would have forgiven any member of her family who was vulgar or coarse. She was essentially small minded, in the sense that everything was personal with her.

The larger troubles of the world such as war, famine, cruelty, crime and disease came into her life - she lived through two world wars, read the newspapers, listened to the “wireless” and later watched television. These things did not pass her by: she passed them by. I remember at the time of the trial of the Moors murderers, when the country rang from end to end with the horrible account of the activities of Brady and Hindley, and when our mother was eagerly absorbing as many details as she could find, Aunty Effie “didn’t see that it did any good to know about them”. Her mind, her heart and her time were fully occupied in loving and caring for her own family – and that family included everyone she knew. She was perhaps too ready to believe that “everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds” – in England, in her family. That doctrine incidentally would have come into vogue when she was in her early teens, but she would probably have put it in a more acceptable form as “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world”.

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