Charis Frankenberg

A tragedy from history Memories were stirred for Mrs Doris Bonner, of Rush Green Road when she read of the Frankenburg family, who lived at Oughtrington Hall during the period 1938-46. She started looking through family records and unearthed a tattered letter linking her own family with the Frankenburgs. Sydney Frankenburg was a company director in Salford and his wife, Charis,was an authority on childcare, writing several books on the subject and having a lifelong interest in improving the lives of women and children in inner city areas. The couple were involved in running the Greengate Hospital and Open Air School at Salford - a hospital for children suffering from Rickets.. At the outbreak of war, Charis, by then a widow, decided to move the school to her home and for the whole of the war shared Oughtrington Hall with more than 40 youngsters aged under Vve, a matron, nurses and other staff. One of her sons, Miles, won a pig at the local church fete, decided it needed a mate and bought a sow. The inevitable happened - and soon Oughtrington Hall housed a pig farm as well! Tragedy struck when Miles, a captain in the 4th P.O.W Gurkha RiWes was shot and killed in action in Burma on May 13, 1944 - the day after his 21st birthday. The Lymm Life article reminded Mrs Bonner that her uncle, Bill Roberts, used to work for the Frankenburg family. The old letter she found was from Charis Frankenburg, dated only two months after her son's death. It reads: "This is to conVrm that I have made over to William Roberts the half-share of the pigs at Oughtrington Hall that formerly belonged to my son, F. Miles Frankenburg. All the pigs now belong to William Roberts, though, for convenience, I will continue to make applications in my name for their food, petrol, etc. "It is understood that William Roberts continues as before to look after the pigs in my time as well as his own. "I have made this gift in token of my son's affection for the recipient and for his loyalty to and friendship for me." Mrs Bonner also discovered she had a photograph of Miles, in uniform, taken two months before his death. She also has an early aerial picture of Oughtrington Hall - by then Lymm Grammar School - and a picture of Joe Canney, legendary headmaster of the school, who appears to be making a speech at what could be the opening of the school's Vrst swimming pool. Mr Canney is generally credited with persuading the former Cheshire Education Authority to buy Oughtrington Hall when Charis Frankenburg put it on the market after the war. He had the vision to see that the old grammar school site - now the Scholar's Green estate, off Grammar School Road - would eventually be too small. The rest, as they say, is history. One member of the Frankenburg family is still following the story with interest. Ursula Kennedy, Miles' younger sister and the only girl of Sydney and Charis' four children, now lives in North Hampshire. She said: "I remember Bill Roberts very well. He was with us throughout the war, looking after the pigs and the garden and I think he cooked for the children and staff of the hospital as well. I had forgotten that my mother had given him half the pigs. "It is ironic that this interest in Oughtrington Hall's wartime history should surface at the same time as news of the recurrence of Rickets in today's children due to lack of exposure to sunlight. "The very reason that Greengate was an 'Open Air' hospital and school was that it was known that sunlight was important in the development of the bones of young children and the formation of vitamin D in those bones. "Those hoop like legs that we have seen on TV. recently were not new to me, there were some equally bad with us; they recovered and their legs straightened. I wonder how many of those children are still living in the Salford area now.

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