My mother, Brigit Johnson, who has died aged 99, led a full life as a Wren during the second world war and then as a vicar’s wife in Kent.
Born at Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire, a wartime maternity hospital for naval families, Brigit was the daughter of Winifred (nee Robinson), who was born in South Africa and remembered the siege of Kimberley, and Edward Child, a paymaster commander with the Royal Navy’s Baltic fleet. Brigit grew up in the Sun Hotel pub, which her father ran after leaving the navy on disability grounds, next to Chatham Dockyard, Kent.
She attended the Royal Naval school, Twickenham, but left in 1933 aged 16 to help supplement the family income as a bookkeeper for the National Scheme for Disabled Men, and then worked as the secretary for Rochester girls’ grammar school back in Kent.
When the war came along, she gave up her job to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or Wrens. She was coxswain for the commander of HMS Dolphin submarine base. A letter from a rear admiral remarked that she “plied in all weathers and at all times with never so much as a scratch on the boat or a hair out of place”. This diligence led to her being featured in a publicity film for the navy.
After the war, she married Robert Johnson, the son of the house where she had lodged while working in Rochester. He had spent the war as an artillery officer in Europe and India, but was now training to be an Anglican clergyman, and Brigit went on to make a career as a country vicar’s wife in the Rochester diocese, supplementing his stipend working as a school or farm secretary.
After my father retired, they moved to Ticehurst in East Sussex; he died in 1994. When Brigit was 94, she moved to the West Midlands to be near us. She lived a full and active life, singing in the local church and playing Scrabble.
She is survived by me, her two grand-daughters and one great-granddaughter.
