Joan Audrey (Peg)
Joan Audrey (Peg) was the youngest daughter of Frederick and Nell Powell. She was born in Kilburn on January 19th 1919.
Her older brother Frederick William Roy, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1936. He was 21.
Peg was very close to her sister Eileen Maud Rosa. They were inseparable as young women and after they’d married and had their own families.
Eile married Vincent Mortara and they had three boys: Peter, Roy and Paul. The Meadows and Mortara families spent many happy days together often on Hayling Island.
Later, both widowed, Peg and Eile lived next door to each other in Alton for forty years. Eile passed away in early 2013
Frederick James Walter Powell was born on 12 July 1892 in St John’s Maryleborne. His father, William Joseph Powell, was a Merchant Seaman who died aged only 34 on 13 March, 1902. Fred married Ellen Sarah Gardiner in St Cuthbert’s Church, Hampstead on 24 September 1914, six weeks after the beginning of the Great War.
Fred and Nell had three children: Frederick Roy, born 12 April 1915; Eileen Maud Rosa, born 8 July, 1917; and Joan Audrey, born 19 January 1919. Roy, who was a talented drummer, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1936. Eileen and Joan Audrey (Peg), both widowed, lived next door to each other in Alton until Eileen passed away in 2013.
Fred served in the infantry in World War 1. He and his family moved to Alton in 1930 and for 32 years he worked at the Kingdon’s, the ironmongers, in the High Street.
In 1939 Fred and Nell were living at ‘The Eagles’ on Windmill Hill in Alton with Eile and her new husband Vincent Mortara; Peg, who was 20 and already going out Edwin Henry Meadows, and Florence Gardiner, Nell’s mother.
Fred died aged 77 in 1969. A brief obituary was published in the Alton Gazette.
The Powell family moved to Alton in 1930 and Peg married Edwin Henry Meadows (Whisk) at St Lawrence Church in Alton, Hants on March 25th 1940. They enjoyed nearly 40 years of happily married life running their electrical shop in Alton; raising a family, and, in later years, traveling to the USA and the Far East to visit their children and grandchildren. Peg transformed the shop with an extensive well chosen selection of lampshades, for which people would travel from far and wide.
Whisk was killed in a train accident in Portugal in 1979. Peg continued to travel and to enjoy her growing family over the next thirty years. She kept the shop going until she retired in 1987 and she remained active locally serving as President of both The Business and Professional Women’s Association and The Inner Wheel. She became an enthusiastic iPad user playing competitive online scrabble and maintaining her own Facebook page right up to her 100th birthday.
Peg was fiercely independent and continued to live on her own next door to the old shop in Lenten Street. She passed away peacefully at home on April 29th 2019.
