It is with great sadness that I add a footnote to the passing of stained glass craftsman David Fode. David interpreted for the project a stencil design of 1905 by British artist Margaret Lloyd. I’d assumed Ms Lloyd had married and become more difficult to locate through genealogical sources, having taken on her new husband’s surname. But two things have transpired.
An archivist at the Liverpool School of Art has been kind enough to provide Ms Lloyd’s student registration and that new information enabled a different sort of search. We can track her from birth in 1867 at Darlington, County Durham, through several family moves — her father was connected with collieries — and learned that she had previously been a student at the Hartley Institute in Southampton, a predecessor of the University of Southampton. Then a more general google search turned up a story of her tragic death at age forty-five in a railway accident, so notorious it has its own Wikipedia page!
On 17 September 1912 an express train shifted from the fast track to the slower local track but the driver was inexperienced and maintained his 60 mph speed at Ditton Junction where it should have been reduced to 15 mph. Ms Lloyd was one of fifteen fatalities and fifty others in hospital. She was forty-five years old. You can find the formal accident report here. This information makes the “Punch & Judy” window more poignant.
The “interweb” is indeed a wondrous instrument. Though it more often than not brings news we’d rather not have.
[#1576]
UPDATE [15DEC2022]: In the ongoing saga of Margaret Lloyd, this morning’s efforts disclosed that her mother, sixty-one-year-old Elizabeth Lloyd, had sat beside her on the train and sustained only minor injuries. Its doubly tragic when parents survive their children.
It’s also surprising that twelve people include Margaret in their family trees, yet none of them seem to be aware of her passing; each one gives an incorrect birth date (one year ahead or two behind) and identifies her as “death: unknown”. I’m a rookie at this but wassup?
Aigburth High School for Girls, Aigburth, Liverpool, UK / built 1909
UPDATE [15DEC2022]: Late in the day, more information on Margaret Lloyd has come to light: “Aigburth Art Mistress Killed” / “Miss Margaret Eleanor Lloyd, who was one of the passengers killed in the train disaster, was returning from her holiday to take up her work at the Aigburth-vale High School for Girls, where she has been art mistress for the past two years. As a student at the Liverpool School of Art, Miss Lloyd was a very skilful [sic] etcher and lithographer, and her work on several occasions won high awards in public competitions. She will be missed greatly by her colleagues and pupils, by whom her work was highly appreciated. / Miss Lloyd was accompanied by her mother, who was slightly injured.” [Liverpool Daily Post, 20 September 1912, p.10] The Aigburth school has been built in 1909.