Sister Mary Ward

Life Afloat: NarrowBoat, Winter 2014

Jenny Glynn

Jenny Glynn tells the remarkable story of how a painting of her family with the famous boat people’s nurse at Stoke Bruerne came into her possession

The story of how an oil painting, depicting Sister Mary Ward in her little Stoke Bruerne surgery with members of my family (the Littlemores), came to be hanging on my wall is a strange and coincidental one indeed. It came about as a result of my friend, a community nurse, being sent to attend a certain gentleman who was very ill, in his home in Banbury nearly thirty years ago. As nurse Mary Jarvis tended the needs of her patient Mr Harold Grant, her attention was drawn several times to a picture hanging on his wall. She became more and more convinced that she’d seen it before, but could not recall where. Eventually, unable to contain her curiosity, she ventured to ask for any information that might satisfy her growing certainty of being familiar with it. On being told that the subjects pictured were a canal boat family, she knew instantly who they were, remembering that she’d seen a photograph of the very same scene on the wall in my parent’s home, and that she was …