Anthea Frances (Tiffa)
Anthea Frances Beardmore, always known as Tiffa, was born in 1944, the younger daughter of George Cedric Beardmore and his wife Jean, known to the family as Jinnie. Her sister Victoria Helen, Vicky, had been born five years earlier, and the family was then living in Harrow. George was making his name as a writer, and when he published Going into the Country, a thinly disguised account of the family’s own life, he dedicated it to three young cousins and to his two daughters, with Tiffa appearing as “the Landlady’s Baby”.
In the late 1950s the family moved to Bushey Heath, where George was writing for the comics Eagle and Girl, and in about 1961 they moved again, to Four Marks in Hampshire. The family were close to Mary and Margaret Kennerley at Bognor Regis, and a photograph from about 1956 shows Tiffa with her mother and Uncle William Kennerley on the beach there. The portrait painter June Mendoza made a pastel study of her at the age of ten.
France was part of her childhood too. Her great-aunt Marguerite, Arnold Bennett’s widow, lived at the Château de Lolière at Nègrepelisse, near Montauban, and Tiffa remembers visiting “Tante Marguerite” there as a child. In her early teens she became good friends with Gilbert and Bernard Lombrail, the sons of Étienne and Yvonne Lombrail of Bordeaux. The brothers came to stay with the Beardmores in England, and Tiffa stayed with the family in Bordeaux and went on holiday with them to Soulac-sur-Mer.
It was a train journey that brought her into the Meadows family. Roger Meadows travelled every day to Gregg’s School in Eastleigh, and on the train he met “a bright and beautiful seventeen-year-old girl” and decided she would be ideal for his elder brother. Jeff joined the train at the next chance to see for himself and, in his words, “Roger was right. Tiffa was irresistible.”
Tiffa and Jeff married on 16 March 1966 at St Lawrence Church in Alton. At the end of that month her grandfather Leslie Wolfenden, known as Panky, died, and Tiffa remembers that a woman in a cloth coat, whom nobody knew, stood at the back at his funeral. She turned out to be Florence Winifred Chambers, whom Panky had appointed to administer his will.
Their first home was a cottage in need of renovation. When the seller came back offering twice what they had paid, they sold it and bought three cottages at Upper Farringdon instead, where their son Tom and daughter Georgia were born. In 1971 the BBC sent Jeff to New York, and the family settled at Chappaqua, spending their weekends building a cabin with their own hands on twenty acres of woodland at Woodstock.
In 1984 the family came home to Hampshire when Jeff took charge of Sony Broadcast in Basingstoke. They later moved to Orpenham Farm near Newbury, bought at auction after Tiffa’s instruction to Jeff: “Don’t come home without it!” When Quantel won its ninth Queen’s Award, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came to Newbury, and Tiffa and Jeff met the Queen.
After Jeff retired in 1998 they moved to Poltoge at Port Navas, on a creek of the Helford River in Cornwall. In 2012 Tiffa and Jeff were given the Ron Badger Special Award Cup for their services to the Port Navas Regatta, which Jeff had chaired for many years. In 2023 they left Cornwall for West Sussex to be closer to family.
The Beardmore side of her family is told on the sister site, beardmorehistory.com, created on behalf of Tiffa and her sister Vicky, together with their cousin Richard.
