Edward and Dorothy Cadbury were indeed very special (Letters, 10 October). Having no children themselves, they cared for others as though they were their own. My father, Ralph Barlow, lost his father when he was 14, and Edward and Dorothy watched his development devotedly, helping him through university and providing a home for him and my mother when they got married.
When my father joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in 1940 they kept a guardian’s watchful eye on my mother while my father was officer in charge in the Middle East, based in Cairo and Alexandria. Throughout the winter of 1940-41, rather than letting my mother live alone, they kindly arranged for her to move to another Cadbury home in the Lickey Hills, where I was born in the January. They also ensured my parents’ home in Bournville was cared for at this time, by arranging with them for a family of Polish refugees to move there.
I can just recall this loving couple after the war, who were as super grandparents to my brother and me. As Dame Elizabeth Cadbury wrote of them, “I did not know of any other two people so devoted to each other as Edward Cadbury and his wife, so thoroughly in harmony in every intention both in life and work.” How lucky my family were to have known them.
Antony Barlow
Wallington, London
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