Mildred Margaret Bone

Brief biography

The following is just a synopsis. The site author can be contacted for more detailed information.

Mildred Margaret Bone was the sixth and last child of Thomas Henry Bone and Annie (1) Woodhurst, and was born in 1912. Her birth certificate [Birth Index: Pancras 1b 220, 1912 (March)] states that she was born on January 7th 1912 at her parents' address 68, Grafton Road, St. Pancras. The informant was her father, then occupied as a railway gateman.

She was known among her relatives by the name Margaret, apparently never using her first name Mildred.

She would have been less than four years old when her father died in October 1915. Around 1917 she was taken by her mother Annie (1), together with her brothers Thomas Richard and Harold Edward (1), to live in Leicester, for reasons unknown. Thereafter she had virtually no contact at all with her older sisters Maud Ethel and Doris Olive. In fact Maud Ethel, who had already married in 1916, claimed in later life to have seen her sister "only about three or four times" in her whole life.

A relative has reported that Mildred used to take week-long holidays about twice a year with her aunt Blanche (1), and has kindly supplied to the site author a photograph showing Mildred during one such visit within the period 1933-39.

Mildred never married and lived under the same roof as her mother - and her mother's subsequent husbands - until her mother's death in 1957. It is known that she harboured various resentments and that she had demanded to know of family members who her father had been, and what secrets were being kept from her (the implication being that Annie (1) had kept the past largely hidden from her). She was remembered by various relatives as having been rather simple, poor and not physically strong.

When Annie (1) died, Mildred was then living at 32, Wyatt Close in Leicester. By the Autumn of 1984 she was living in a council bungalow at 36, Bale Lane, but by August 1986 she had moved to Dale House, a home for the elderly. By the beginning of 1999 she was in a nursing home called Abbey House. In the first week of that year, with her 87th birthday due on January 7th, she was found to have collapsed from a massive stroke and was taken to the Leicester Royal Infirmary, where she lingered on for some two weeks until dying on January 23rd. None of her remaining local relations had visited her in the hospital and she died unattended by any of them. Her funeral was arranged by the staff of Abbey House and took place on February 3rd.

So, Mildred was the last of Thomas Henry Bone's six children to have been born, and was the last of them to die.