Memories of the Phillips sisters
The Phillips girls deserve to be remembered together.
Girls...they were strong women who worked hard and lived full lives, 60 to 80 years each. It was their mother who called them the girls. And so they were, to her. In 1939, Sarah and Edgar had four daughters below the age of five, with four adults on their farm near Pershore to look after them. Edgar, youngest of 11, farmed with his brother Joss, himself married to Sarah’s big sister Lizzie. Both sisters were born in the USA to Welsh immigrants, and returned to Wales with their father when Sarah was 5 and Lizzie 20, after their mother and two infant brothers died, another sister dying soon after their return. For the girls, there were Mummy and Daddy, Auntie and Uncle. Lots of love to go round.
The Phillipses farmed through the war and rationing. They hosted Muller orphans, Canadian airmen, Italian and German prisoners of war, missionaries, the Korean ambassador. Sarah taught them letters before school. Uncle told the funniest stories, sent poems to the Queen and Churchill. Auntie kept up with her family in America. Edgar suddenly dropped dead while all the girls were in their teens. Two other, quarrelsome aunts living next to each other in Worcester provided valuable warnings about how not to treat your sister.
Four girls with long dark hair, often mistaken for their mother, or each other. Four girls with unusual names, mostly chosen to honour extended family history. But four very different girls.
Ismay, the eldest, who never could see brilliantly, and became a beloved teacher of infants in the mould of her mother, the letter writer, the storyteller, the baker, map reader, Royal family watcher, sardonic wit, who spoke her feelings more than the others, nurtured a strong faith in the face of severe pain.
Jo, the scholar, grammar school prizewinner, graduate, linguist, social worker, choral singer and early music fan, wife, and mother, the one who left home for good, forgot how to behave around dogs, and laughed at what everyone else didn’t.
Elma, the cheeky one, who sent the most humorous greetings cards and knew how to create fun, dog lover, prolific reader. Also the most practical and organised housekeeper, purveyor of common sense, who got on and did whatever needed doing, including taking over the driving, cooking, gardening and farming when Ismay and Pearl couldn’t do it any more. Ten years a farmer, twenty-five years an infants’ teacher, thirty years a carer, a lifetime’s work, completed, clearing out the accumulated hoarding of her sisters and forebears.
Pearl, the youngest, with the head for numbers and the memory for detail, church treasurer and payroll manager, good with babies and children, animals, gardening, farming, driving, photography and making home cine movies. Lover of camping, steam trains, buying toys for children, keeper of family autobiographical and historical memory, thought Newland Grange latterly too urban for her liking. Progressively disabled by multiple sclerosis for half her life, living far longer than her prognosis, she carried on by proxy what her hands would no longer do.
A legendary family friend, Margaret Cutler, who at the time knew Jo best, wrote these lines to her after a visit in the 1960s. I think she was about right, if a bit hard on Jo.
Josie is a wise girl,
Perhaps Ismay is a better.
Ismay stays to cook the cakes
and Jo just writes a letter.
Pearl is good at lifting bricks,
and Elma works so hard
at stopping water from the tanks
flowing to the yard.
Jo, she is a good girl
when all the rest will let her
think about the things above
instead of bread and butter.
After Edgar died, the Phillipses sold the farm, and all seven moved into Malvern, then afterwards to Newland Grange, the smallholding and ramshackle old farmhouse big enough for two families that Edgar bought just before he married, and rented out for the next thirty years. Uncle and Auntie died shortly after moving there. Sarah lived another twenty years, renting out the fields. To the already substantial accumulated family furniture, books, dinner sets, papers, farm equipment, and keepsakes she added collections of Worcester China seconds, soap, coffee, matches, cacti and rocks picked up on travels, and evangelistic tracts which she used to give to tramps who called at the door.
After the Phillipses joined it just before the girls were born, they grew up in the Exclusive Brethren, all leaving, when it went wrong, one after another on the same afternoon in 1969. Jo got married and had children. Sarah and the girls threw themselves into the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church, Sarah’s Californian big brother Watkin’s church, in many ways so unlike the Brethren. They led Sunday school and youth camps. They opened their house to church members and their families. They went off on adventures in Britain and abroad, often taking tents, friends, American cousins, or other family with them. They discovered TV, which Sarah insisted on calling the wireless. They gave their nephew and niece the best Christmases, best presents, best camping holidays, fun, love, memories, teas, puddings, sausage & chips, and a home from home.
When Sarah died, Ismay and Pearl were beginning to lose their mobility. Pearl was too disabled to work. Ismay and Elma soon took early retirement. Then the girls began a new adventure, no longer renting out their 37 acres but farming them for their own hay, cows, sheep, chickens, geese, quail, and orchard. They enjoyed themselves hugely, had early success, made new friends, challenged stereotypes.
But after Ismay’s death, the strain of managing the property grew too great. Aged 60, Elma and Pearl downsized to four acres surrounding a half-derelict off-grid isolated Grade II Listed cider mill. Jo and her family were horrified at the move, as Elma and Pearl began two years living in a caravan overseeing disability adaptations and renovations to the strict specification of the county conservation officer. Against all our expectations they stayed for 18 years, while Pearl gradually lost the rest of her mobility, loving living there. They took their animals with them but did not replace them when they died.Their last hen wandered in and out of the house and sat on the sofa with their last dog.
Sarah succumbed to diabetes; Ismay to rheumatoid arthritis, steroids, and sepsis; Pearl to multiple sclerosis; Jo, later in life, to myofibrillar myopathy. Elma survived cancer, heart disease, and hip replacements, but came to feel old and worn out, from years of caring without complaint. Jo continued to visit until she and Pearl, and ultimately Elma, became too disabled to manage it, and for the last few years of her life did not see her sisters. Jo’s disability became too much to manage in her own home, though she thrived socially in her last nine months which she spent in a care home. Elma was among those who advised Jo’s children against taking her into their own home in those years, for the good of their own health and sanity.
The hen died soon after Pearl. Elma sold up and moved back into Malvern. She had a great view of North Hill. She finished off clearing out furniture, tools, books, kitchen equipment, voluminous family papers. Perhaps for the first time in her life, in the first house she could call exclusively her own, she kept what she wanted, no more. She read a lot, and widely. She gave ratings to her reading. She particularly liked biographies of country folk, explorers’ travel writing, Wodehouse, Gervase Phinn, Spike Milligan, dog stories. John Le Carré was “no good.” She gave up driving and took her scooter to the shops. She went to Sunday lunch with her sister-in-law once a fortnight.
By then Elma felt tired and old, not needing personal care, but never again fully well. Doctors never diagnosed the problem. Old age, Elma concluded. She said she no longer felt like doing what she thought she would do at this stage. Close friends and family, including her great-nephew, kept her company though she did not seek it. College friends drove her to a reunion. Some old Malvern friends seemed to have forgotten her, but probably she hadn’t told them where she’d moved. She threatened to resist ever going into a care home as stubbornly as Jo did. Instead she was taken suddenly by surprise acute pancreatitis, little more than 24 hours after falling ill on Christmas Day. She was ready to go, and died peacefully in her sleep with her niece and nephew by her side.
So passed the last of the grandchildren of Jane and Joseph Phillips, the Pembrokeshire tenant farmer whose skill with animals earned him a name locally as “Phillips the Vet”, and (because of her parents’ marriage) of Joseph’s niece Eleanora, whose death in Colorado sent Elma’s grandfather Evan Watkins, builder and cabinet maker, back to his native Cardiganshire. This Phillips side of the family dwindled. The Watkinses in the USA mushroomed, even after Sarah’s brother Jim disappeared.
It was the Phillips sisters, particularly the three who remained spinsters, who kept and passed on the family records – decades of letters, papers, photographs, diaries, newspaper cuttings and other material inherited from over a dozen forebears and relating to hundreds. It was they who introduced distant cousins to their Welsh heritage when they visited. And it was they who remained in the memories of many, both family and friends, often more as a collective than individuals - girls, aunts, sisters: extraordinary women who thrived in adversity they hardly complained about. Women who lived together most of their lives and mostly got on well with each other, taking on complementary roles to function as a team. Women with diverse personalities to be celebrated together.
Click here for more blog posts.
You are welcome to use our contact form, or email us, to reply.
Last updated
