Canvey Keep Fit Club 1970s

'Lily the Pink'

For those of you who do not remember ‘Lily the Pink’ please click on the video below.

Lily the Pink and the Medicinal Compound
Joan Liddiard
'Joan the pink'
Joan Liddiard

Comments about this page

  • The lady underneath the medicinal compound bottle is Elsie Veryard

    By MICHELLE DUDBRIDGE (28/07/2014)
  • Second to Michelle Dudbridge’s comment regarding Elsie Veryard, she was my mum ! We lived first in Grasmere Road think it was number 8 or 38, I was two when we moved there from Leytonstone in East London. Then we went to live at 25 Janette Avenue where my parents Elsie and Stephen resided till their deaths in 2012 and 2005 respective!y.

    Mum moved to Canvey because she had asthma and bronchitis all her life but when in London she was told that if she didn’t have a lung operation she would be dead in six months.

    Mum believed if she lived by the coast she would never need surgery. So they came to Canvey Island and she was right she never ever needed that lung operation.

    Mum was very active in various pursuits on Canvey. She went to keep fit at the war memorial every Wednesday evening and took part in a festival in Spain doing keep fit with Ilene Fowler and she helped out at jumble sales at the war memorial too.

    She joined the Distaff Club on a Monday evening and she was a dinner lady at the Catholic convent school where she was well loved by the children, except for one boy who threw a brick at her head because she couldn’t hold his hand as both were already holding the hands of other children. Mum was injured quite badly by that brick.

    Mum was a good lady, a brilliant cook, her dad was a chef in the army and a Romany and taught her all she knew of cooking. She had fond memories of life hop picking in Kent with her parents and two sisters Edith and Renie when their father took only a tarpaulin sheet to make bender tents out of hazelnut branches to sleep in for the entire hop season.

    My brother Barrie lives now in Hadleigh and is a bass guitarist for the band Against the Grain and I am a published Author and I used to be a breeder of Shepherds Delight and Craileeau Border Collies until 2020 where I’ve lived since 1980 near Boston in Lincolnshire.

    Our father Stephen worked at Fords Dagenham on night work for 40 years and he designed the bonnet of the Ford Capri.

    Mum outlived all her family and her husband being 88 when she passed away after suffering from angina, asthma, broncitus and osteoporosis when she died, by then a cherished sister in the Canvey congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, proving the old saying that the creeky gate lasts longest.

    I and my three children, Joanne, John and David miss her and my dad, Pop, very much.

    Many other people will remember mum for her generosity, kindness and gentle disposition. She also had green fingers able to transplant and reroot so many plants easily because she talked to them, she said, and she loved gardening and in her younger years, every year that she could she would participate in the Canvey carnival. Often Michelle Dudbridge and I would join her.

    I have fabulous memories of my mum, and it was brilliant to see this photograph of her and her friends at the carnival attending as Lily the Pink.

    By Wendy Veryard (23/01/2023)
  • My brother, Barrie Stephen Veryard passed away on August 1st 2023. He would have been 72 on September 23rd.

    Lots of people on Canvey knew him.

    By Wendy Veryard (30/08/2023)

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