Ruth Mary PLAXTON [35968]

  General Notes:

Ruth Mary (Plaxton) Alexander 1906-1984. Younger daughter of JW and Mary Stone. There is a family memoir which includes this description:
'Initially both children (Cecil and Ruth) shared a governess with children from other local Wells families - including Archie Alexander, of Mellifont Abbey, Wookey although neither remembered much of those days; also Elizabeth Goudge the writer.
'Mother's accounts of her childhood revealed a loving though strict upbringing in a Country Vicarage and Cathedral City. After early years with a governess she attended Wells High School before being sent away to boarding school at St Stephen's High School, Windsor at the age of 11. This was partly staffed by Nuns from the Convent at Clewer and had a small boarding house for Clergy daughters at reduced fees. At 19, having left school she would have liked to teach music - she played the violin and had a lovely natural singing voice - but decided she wasn't good enough, so opted for a Domestic Science course instead. Gloucester Training College was her choice, but she had to wait two years as finances couldn't meet fees for her and her brother at that time. She enrolled at a Domestic Science College at Aldeburgh for a year (Clergy daughters were accepted at reduced fees) and took a job at a school in Headington just outside Oxford, looking after six girls in one of the school boarding houses. It was while in Oxford she joined the Bach Choir.' In 1931 at the age of 25 she married Archibald Alexander (1904-1966). Archie had been educated at Shrewsbury, and was currently studying at Bristol Medical School with the view of becoming a Navy surgeon, but he failed his exams and the couple moved to Devon. Outwardly wealthy, much of the Alexander fortune was tied up in Singapore and with WWII much of it was frozen/lost. Archie's father had died when he was twelve and his mother was a woman of strong opinions and rigid ideas as to vocations open to a gentleman. The result was my grandfather became something of a dilettante. There were two daughters, one still living, the other, my mother Margaret Alexander died in 1922.
Notes & Image Courtesy of J. Brown 2024

Ruth married Archibald Corbet Fleming ALEXANDER [35988] [MRIN: 13056] in 1931. (Archibald Corbet Fleming ALEXANDER [35988] was born in 1904 and died in 1966.)