Bet was born on 16th April 1917, the youngest of the three children. Her brother Peter was the oldest, born on 30th October 1913, and her sister Heather on 1st June 1915, so they were twenty months apart.
In January, 1929, when Bet was 11 (and three quarters!) the family went on a cruise on the maiden voyage of the "Duchess of Richmond" to Freetown via Monte Carlo, calling in at twelve different ports.
Bet wrote a record of this trip in a notebook, and later that year there were more excursions that she also recorded. Thus began her habit, and that Christmas, 1929, she was given a Girl Guide's pocket Diary. This was followed annually by another pocket diary, that she kept right up to her marriage at 19 on 24th September 1936 - following which, she and her new husband spent the next 28 years in Northern Rhodesia, for he worked for that Government.
The following year, 1937, Bet started to keep an A5 Page-a-Day diary, a habit that continued right up to her death in April 2004.
The 75 Diaries have been scanned but not yet transcribed. Those she used as a "crib" for her letters home - one copy to her parents, one to his, and she kept a copy. These sometimes ran to twenty pages; and roughly one a week. Say 10 pages for say 28 years at 50 weeks a year = say 14,000 pages. Don't hold your breath !
Back in England after her husband retired in 1964, Bet was busy in the Girl Guide Movement, and was also busy at home. But by the 1970s - and on into the 1980s - she started travelling again, and her Page-a-Day wasn't enough, so for those trips she kept special Journals - that are here.
But by 1990 - when she was 73, and her husband 83 - their overseas travels were over.
