TRIBUTE TO HEROIC GREAT-GRANNY

This week, we paid tribute to the millions of servicemen who gave their lives for our freedom, but as part of our regular feature celebrating the amazing lives of ordinary people, the story of Constance Baker, a Norfolkborn seamstress who helped injured First World War soldiers, is told today by her greatgrandson Timothy Warner…

He writes: “There is a blue plaque on the school in Marham, Norfolk, where my great-granny Constance Baker, née Ketteringham, attended in 1874. Born into poverty in 1868, she left the area with her parents when she was six and moved to Kensington, London.

“My grandmother Aderline Warner, née Baker, one of Constance’s eight children, told me all about my kind and brave greatgrandmother. And this week, to mark Armistice Day, posters were put up outside

Shepherds Bush Library in Hammersmith, West London, dedicated to my great-granny, who lived in Fulham during the Great War.

“Constance left school at 10 and trained as a seamstress, creating hoop dresses for ladies, and then bustle dresses when the fashions changed in 1881.

“She met and fell in love with her future husband John Baker at the theatre where he worked in the ticket office at night to make extra money on top of his bus conductor wages.

“Through his connections with the actresses and opera singers, Constance began to make their stage clothes at far more competitive prices, and so her dressmaking fame grew. When the Great War started, mother-of-eight Constance and her husband John put on entertainment for the troops at Bishops Park in Fulham, but after one of their sons was killed, she opened up their house to wounded soldiers returning from the front.

“Much of the family’s wealth was then spent on feeding and helping the broken young men, earning her the name Mother of the Wounded, which was inscribed on her tombstone in Brompton Cemetery in Kensington when she died, aged 61, in 1929.

“After a battle with English Heritage to have her war effort recognised, a blue plaque to Constance was also erected at

Bishops Park in January earlier this year. At long last, I am proud that her heroic efforts have been properly remembered.”

If you think a member of your family should be recognised in our series of ordinary people who do extraordinary things, email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk

MOTHER OF THE WOUNDED Constance

PROUD Timothy, left, at plaque unveiling