Flora Thompson - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

She was born in Juniper Hill in northeast Oxfordshire, the eldest of six children of Albert and Emma Timms, a stonemason and nursemaid respectively. Her favourite brother, Edwin, was killed near Ypres in 1916. Flora was educated at the parish school in Cottisford.

Flora worked in various post offices in southern England. The first of these was Fringford, a village about 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast of Bicester. Flora started work here in 1891, as assistant to the postmistress, Mrs. Kezia Whitton. Among other post offices where Flora worked was that at Grayshott in Hampshire and Yateley in Hampshire, and she later moved to Bournemouth. In 1903 she married John William Thompson at Twickenham Parish Church, with whom she had a daughter, Winifred Grace (1903) and two sons, Henry Basil (1909) and Peter Redmond (1918) (later lost at sea in 1941).

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