A Liverpool Exemplar - June Huband

June Huband pictured in 1974

 

There was actually no such person as Helen Forrester, June Huband took the pen name Helen Forrester, becoming a very successful author writing about her early years in Liverpool as well as several works of fiction. June Huband was born in Hoylake, Cheshire on the 6th of June 1919, the eldest child of Allan Huband and Lavinia Baker, less than six months after the end of the First World War and moved as a young child with her family to the south of England where they lived comfortably until her father went bankrupt in 1930. Her parents' upbringing and her father’s long war service had not prepared them well for parenthood or peacetime in the hedonistic 1920s. They had six more children who were born in the Midlands and lived well beyond their means mainly in charming towns and villages in the south of England. When her father was made bankrupt during the Great Depression, the family was thrown into desperate poverty.

Evicted from their comfortable home and with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in, they took the train to Liverpool where they hoped to rebuild their lives. While Helen's father searched unsuccessfully for work, the family were forced to live together in a bug-infested single room. Having been taken out of school at 11 to look after her brothers and sisters, Helen spent her days pushing her baby brother around the city in an old pram. For the next few years the family was forced to rely on meagre handouts from the parish, and the kindness of strangers. A chance meeting with an old man in Sefton Park inspired her to continue her education as he told her everything she needed to get on in life could be found in her local library. He also told her the Palm House made a wonderful place of refuge on a cold winter's day and she spent many years reading in there. At the age of 14 Helen rebelled against her life of drudgery and her parents agreed to allow her to attend evening classes to make up for her missed years of education.

Helen continued to live with her family through her teenage years and worked in Liverpool until the end of the World War II. Living in the slum areas of Liverpool and Bootle, she worked for a charitable organization as an office girl and later became a social worker, developing an intimate knowledge of, and great empathy for, the poor but fascinating inhabitants of the inner city. Helen worked long hours and was still expected to do much of the housework while her mother kept most of her wages. This would provide the background for novels such as 'Liverpool Daisy', 'A Cuppa Tea and an Aspirin' and 'Three Women of Liverpool'. Eventually she got a better job at a petroleum installation on the Liverpool waterfront, a very dangerous place to be during a war. She survived the heavy bombing of Liverpool but lost two fiancés during the war. Her first love, a seaman called Harry O'Dwyer, died in 1940 when his ship went down. She then became engaged to Edward Parry, but he was killed in action in France. Helen recounted this period in her life in the novels 'Liverpool Miss', 'By The Waters of Liverpool' and Lime Street at Two'.

After the war, she began a career in the packaging industry and volunteered at a society that organised social events for students from foreign countries. At one such occasion in 1950, Helen met a shy, young Indian doctoral student, Avadh Bhatia who was completing his PhD at the University of Liverpool. They fell in love with Helen embracing Avadh's world with enthusiasm and they left Liverpool to get married in Rajasthan, India and they lived for two years in Gujarat, India. She was fascinated by every aspect of life in India and expected to spend the rest of her life there. Her husband's academic career however drew them away from India, first to Edinburgh, Scotland, then to Ottawa and finally Edmonton, Canada where they settled in 1955. Edmonton was booming and the University of Alberta was growing rapidly due to the discovery of oil in the region in the late 1940s. Helen's son, Robert was born a month after they arrived in Edmonton and Avadh became the director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Alberta where he was a pioneer in electronic transport theory and the study of diffraction of light by ultrasonic waves. Unfortunately he died in 1984 and The Physics Building at the University of Alberta is named after him.

Helen began to write seriously in Ottawa and her keen observation of Indian life provided the basis for two more novels, 'Thursday's Child', published in 1959 and 'The Moneylenders of Shahpur' which was published later. Despite the demands of motherhood and supporting a busy but physically frail husband, Helen persevered with her writing and 'The Latchkey Kid', set in Alberta, was published in 1971. It was in 1974 that her harrowing but uplifting autobiographical work 'Twopence To Cross The Mersey' was published to critical acclaim and when it was reissued in 1979 it became a bestseller and established Helen as a major writer. Together, with the three additional volumes of her memoirs, it was recognized as a highly innovative form of autobiography using Helen's clear recollection and re-creation of direct dialogue which she confirmed with her siblings. It was later turned into a successful musical by Rob Fennah, Helen Jones and Alan Fennah and.continues to attract widespread interest and has also been made into a stage play. 

Helen resided in Edmonton for the rest of her life except for 1963-64 and 1979-80 when her husband spent sabbatical years at the University of Liverpool and Oxford University. However Helen travelled frequently to the United Kingdom and maintained an active correspondence with her brothers, sisters and friends, as well as her agent, publishers, booksellers and numerous fans of her writing. She carried on to write into her eighties producing eleven bestselling novels, and a romance novel in addition to her memoirs.

The University of Liverpool awarded Helen Forrester an honourary doctorate in 1988 followed by the University of Alberta in 1993.

 

Helen died on the 24th of November 2011 in Edmonton, Alberta aged 92. On the 21st of February 2020 a Blue Plaque was unveiled by actors Mark Moraghan and Sian Reeves in her honour at 5 Warren Road, Hoylake, her maternal grandmother's home. They were at the time performing in the stage version of 'By The Waters of Liverpool' and her son Robert Bhatia attended the unveiling. Helen had previously said, "For the first six months of my life I lived at Grandma’s house in Hoylake with my mother; my father was overseas fighting in Russia. In subsequent years, until the age of 11, I spent all my school holidays there. They were the happiest days of my childhood."

see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/02/a-liverpool-exemplar-robertson-gladstone.html