It’s my favourite paper...Express cutting shows I saved parents in fire 81 years ago

GRANNIE Pamela Gorman has a permanent reminder of how her baby cries saved her parents from a house fire more than 80 years ago – a proud clipping from the Daily Express.

Mrs Gorman, 81, was 10 months old in January, 1938, when faulty electric wiring caused a blaze at her family’s home in the middle of the night.

Thick black smoke spread through the two-bedroom terraced house in Leytonstone, east London, causing baby Pamela to start wailing.

Her cries woke her parents Samuel and Nora Osbourne and her father snatched her from her cot and with her in his arms, ran to safety down a blazing staircase.

Former West End manicurist Mrs Gorman said: “My mother used to tell me how glad she was that I woke them up and how lucky they were to get out.

Flames

“My parents had only bought the house six months beforehand and the person that had sold it to them had put the electrics in himself.

“Of course, in those days you didn’t have to be a registered electrician and it was mostly gas lamps then, so he obviously didn’t have a clue what he was doing.

“The fire started under the staircase. I was just a baby and woke up when I smelled the smoke and started crying.

“My cries woke my parents up and when my father carried me down the stairs it was alight, it was completely on fire.

“He had to dash through flames.”

A Daily Express reporter was quickly on the scene and Pamela was photographed in her mother’s arms.

The Daily Express story, headlined: “Baby’s Cry Saves Parents”, the said: “Ten-month-old Pamela Osbourne started crying yesterday morning.

That woke her mother and father and warned them of the fire in their home in Cheneys Road, Leytonstone. All three escaped.”

When Pamela first appeared in the paper Neville Chamberlain was prime minister, George VI was on the throne and Adolf Hitler was preparing to take over Austria.

Mrs Gorman’s parents, who were loyal Daily Express readers, kept a copy of the article safe in a cupboard, bringing it out every now and then as proof of their brush with death.

After the fire was extinguished, the family home was refurbished and is still standing today.

But Mrs Gorman said the smell of smoke lingered for many years, particularly under the stairs, where the blaze started. Mrs Gorman’s father was stocktaker and accountant for one of London’s oldest and most famous pubs, Dirty Dicks, in Bishopsgate.

But when war broke out, the family relocated to Leicester to be near RAF Castle Donington, now East Midlands Airport.

Mrs Osbourne died in 1985 at 86 and Mr Osbourne, who was a RAF radio operator, died aged 56 in 1963.

Mrs Gorman, who now lives in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, went on to have four daughters and shares nine grandchildren with second husband Timothy.

Mrs Gorman said of the Daily Express article: “I feel sad and proud and pleased all in one when I look at the photo.

“It’s a lovely memento for the family to have.”