Wyn Dodds

Winifred Louisa Dodds

 

Wyn Dodds started working for us in January 1964 in Stores, but her connection with the Company went back much further, as her husband Paddy had joined us on his ‘demob’ in 1947.

 

Paddy had been born in Donegal in 1915 and, like many of his generation, emigrated to the UK at the age of 18 to find work.  He lodged at a Mrs. Murphy’s in Wood Green, and she had a daughter Winifred.

 

Wyn and Paddy married just after the outbreak of WWII on 30th September 1939, and their first son Kenneth was born in 1941.  However Paddy had by then volunteered to join the Army, where he served with the Chindits in Burma, fighting a guerrilla action behind enemy lines, and did not see his wife or newborn son for the next five years.

 

Paddy joined us immediately on leaving the Army, and ran the paint shop at Edmonton.  Wyn and he moved with us out to Suffolk in 1968, where Wyn became the Stores Supervisor.  Regrettably their youngest son Martin was tragically killed shortly after the move while riding a motor bike with sidecar.

 

Wyn retired at the age of 61 in 1980 after 15 year service, partly because of a car accident where she had received a bad leg injury, and Paddy retired later the same year.  He died in 2000.

 

Wyn was to suffer another huge blow when her daughter Pauline died from cancer in 2002 at the age of 47.  Pauline had been working for the Red Cross in Geneva, visiting many of the world’s worst disaster areas, and had been awarded the MBE.

 

Wyn moved to Saffron Walden, and in 2003 into Royston.  She died on 21st November 2010 at the age of 91.