| Notes |
- Winifred's birth was registered by her mother, A.M. Wood of 48 Claremont Road, Highgate on 14th Feb 1896. Claremont Road is a short walk south-east of Highgate Underground Station.
It was believed in the family for a long time that Winifred and Gwendoline Wood had been orphaned as very small children when their parents were killed in China, possibly during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. This story is now known to be incorrect. Both her parents died in unfortunate circumstances. More information can be found in their records.
They were taken into the care of an Uncle Rupert and Aunt Flo, about whom little is known, although they were probably her father's brother Russell Wood and his wife Margaretta Florence. The couple had money, evidently (amongst other domestic servants they employed a footman) but were not willing to bring the girls up themselves other than during the school holidays. In later life, Winifred would tell hilarious tales of Uncle Rupert's fastidious behaviour and obsessive punctuality.
By the time of the 1901 Census, both girls, aged about 8 and 5, were at a small boarding school at 7 Pemberton Gardens, Islington, close to Upper Holloway Station and just south-east of Highgate Cemetery in a middle class neighbourhood (Booth Poverty Map 1899). The head of the household was Julia Digby (51) and there were two other governesses, Ellen White (52) and Florence Nicholls (20). The other pupils present in the school on the night of the census (31.3.01) were Lorna Charlewood (14), Gertrude Court (14) and Nest Jones (10). There were two servants, Lily Parmentor (21) and Mary Passfield (18).
At some stage after this, Winifred attended St Margaret's Convent School and Orphanage in Moat Road, East Grinstead, Sussex. She would have been a pupil there until the age of 15 or 16. She and her sister Gwendoline were listed as students at the time of the 1911 Census. Around 1912, already ‘exquisitely musical’, she was sent abroad to study the piano. In a letter to David Ash dated June 2003, Joyce Palmer, Winifred's eldest daughter, wrote that she ‘was a gifted musician, good enough for Uncle Rupert to send her to a music academy in Switzerland before the '14-'18 War. She had a wonderful time! Besides playing the piano for 8 hours a day, she and the other students went on long walks in the mountains. Certainly she remembered seeing the rose-pink reflection of sunrise on the snow up in the the mountains’. She returned to England soon after the declaration of war in 1914, catching the last boat from France before hostilities began. She would tell the tale of falling asleep on a coil of rope, unaware of the pouring rain. The incident may have contributed to the very bad rheumatism from which suffered all her life. On arrival in England, she had to talk a taxi driver into driving her to her uncle and aunt's home in London in spite of the fact she had no money.
Little is known of Winifred's activities during the war apart from the fact that she used her musical gifts to entertain the troops and worked as a nurse.
She first encountered her husband-to-be at the age of 13 when he taught her in Sunday School at St Jude's Church, Mildmay Park in Islington. He was nine years older than her, but that did not prevent her from falling in love with him. The war took Walter to France, then Pakistan and India, and they were then reunited through a chance encounter in Highgate in the early 1920s. Winifred must have been courted by her future husband whilst living with Uncle Rupert and Aunt Flo. She would tell tales of sitting on Walter's knee in a wicker chair on one side of the fireplace while her Aunt snoozed in a similar chair on the other side. The wickerwork proved useful (from Aunt Flo's point of view) as it creaked when it moved! The couple also enjoyed ‘walking out’ on Hampstead Heath, where much of their courting took place, but had to be chaperoned by one of the household servants.
In 1921, Winifred was working as a governess for a family called Riddell who lived in a house in Stormont Road, Highgate, London, a 25-minute walk from her accommodation above a shop at 319 Archway Rd (the A1), right opposite Highgate Tube station.
Winifred married Walter in Hampstead in 1926 and devoted herself to supporting his ministry, first as a curate and thereafter as a parish priest, in London and Essex. At the time of her marriage, she gave her address as 45 Denning Road, Hampstead/Islington.
The Revd & Mrs Topping retired from parish life shortly after Walter's 80th birthday and went to live with their eldest daughter and her family at the enormous rectory in Weston-under-Penyard in Herefordshire where their son-in-law was the Rector. Two years later, they moved again into a flat in Mabledon, a large, converted house near Tonbridge.
Walter suffered a stroke in 1972. He was moved to a hospital near Loose in Kent, where Jean Ash, his youngest daughter, and her family lived and Winifred moved in with the Ashes to be near him. He died when the Ash family, with Winifred, moved from 87 Boughton Lane, Loose, to St Augustine's Vicarage in Bromley on the south-eastern edge of London in December 1973. In Bromley, Winifred briefly occupied the ground floor room which would later become the vicar's study.
In 1974, Winifred moved into sheltered accommodation in a home run by the Abbeyfield Society in Beckenham, retaining close contact with the Ashes. A couple of years later it became clear that she needed more intensive care and she moved again, to a home for the elderly called Fallowfield in Chislehurst. Her final home before her death in the Spring of 1979 was Merrivale, a care home in Bromley.
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1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Census
