Celebrating the Award
 of the MBE to 
Jean Bowdery (Parratt)

 

 

(Jean’s husband, Ted Parratt, has sent us this article,
 telling us of Jean’s activities, leading to her recent investiture as an MBE)

Jean Bowdery left Farnham Girls’ Grammar School in July 1951. Although she had wanted to become a teacher, her family’s financial state meant that she was required to bring money into the household, so she was forced to start work instead of going into higher education.

Nineteen years later, Jean attended an afternoon class for adults, Widening Horizons, and through this realized her ambition to “teach”.   It also provided the catalyst for her way of life, from the age of 35, which resulted, in 2004, in Jean being awarded the MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.  She went to Buckingham Palace, accompanied by her husband, Ted and son Mark (both ex-FGS), plus her eldest granddaughter, Lynne Edwards, daughter of Wendy (ex-FGGS), on July 16th and had a  most enjoyable day. 

Typically for Jean (who jokes that her MBE stands for a Member of Britain¹s Eccentrics), the first photograph which she took, after arriving at the Palace gates at 9.15am (for 10am), was of a man pushing a wheelie bin through the Royal entrance.

Jean¹s MBE was awarded for “Service to the Community of Farnham”, although she says that without Molly Saunders, her tutor at the Widening Horizons class in 1970,  she would not have done anything worthy of receiving such an honour.  “Molly was my mentor.  She was a former teacher-training college principal and she was 95 on August 31st,” Jean says, “it’s all thanks to her, but yes, I did enjoy the trip to the Palace, the Queen was so ordinary. I felt I just wanted to ask her to forget what she was doing and that the two of us should go off and have coffee together and chat about our grandchildren.”

11 September, 2004

 


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