Norah Elliott (b.1903)

Norah Elliott

• Born 2nd Sept 1903.
• Father, an insurance agent and later a coal miner, was drowned in 1913. Family then forced into the workhouse.
• Adopted by Mr. and Mrs. EIIiott in 1916.
• Mother died in a lunatic asylum in 1938.
• 3rd child of 9 (4 of whom died in infancy or childhood).
• Educated at various schools, including Albert Street School; by scholarship at High Pavement School, later transferred to Mundella Secondary School (1916-22); Reading Teacher Training College (to 1926); Sunday School.
• Unmarried.
• Lived in Annesley Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire; Bentley, Yorkshire; New Annesley; Ruddington, Nottinghamshire (from 1916); Maltby (from 1926). Living in Bramley in 1951, Australia during World War II and Bradmore, Nottinghamshire, in 1984.
• School teacher.
• Crippled with arthritis at an early age; interested in physical sports.
• An intimate personal and family history containing full details of ancestry and comments on housing; death and funerals; dress; nightmares; life in the workhouse; adoption; schooling and college life; profiles of friends and colleagues; Methodism; work as a teacher; the General Strike; visits to France and Australia; treatment for arthritis.
• The text includes extracts from her grandfather’s notebook, detailing wages as a miner, and poems written by herself.

2:242 ELLIOTT, Norah, “Untitled” drafts of autobiography, MS, unpaginated. BruneI University Library. John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall (eds) The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography 1790-1945, 3 vols. (Brighton: Harvester, 1984, 1987, 1989)