Rose Wood

Also known as Rose Gibson.

Rose Wood in her twenties
Rose Wood in the early 1890s
Rose and Bruce Gibson on their wedding day on the 31st May, 1894
Rose and Bruce Gibson with their grandchildren in 1932
Marjorie and Douglas Robinson on their wedding day, 1924
Marjorie Robinson, newly wed.
Marjorie with her granddaughter, Tessa, in Salcombe, 1970s

History

From Tessa Wannell, Rose Wood's great granddaughter:

Rose Wood was born in a small hamlet called Crockenhill, near Eynsford and Swanley in north Kent, in 1861. Her father had started as a farm labourer, rented some land and started growing soft fruit for sale in London. He was hardworking and a brilliant businessman and soon bought more and more land and grew his farming business and property interests, becoming very wealthy. Rose, the second of his three children, though not a great beauty, was a very stylish dresser and able to afford the latest fashions of the time, in the best fabrics. In 1894 she married Bruce Gibson, the son of the local blacksmith and engineer and they moved into a farmhouse at East Wickham, slightly closer to London. The dresses of hers in the Hopkins collection range from the 1880s – when she was a slim twenty-year-old through to the 1930s when she was a portly matron in her seventies. Nonetheless she continued to wear fashionable and beautiful clothes throughout her life.

The items in the Hopkins Collection were acquired from Marjorie Robinson, Rose Wood's daughter.

Marjorie Gibson (born 1898) grew up at East Wickham Farm, Kent. During the First World War she worked as a nurse at Shornells Hospital, Abbey Wood as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment). She met her husband to be, Douglas Robinson at the Bexleyheath Tennis Club; he was a civil engineer and worked in his father’s firm, building sea walls and bridges, and they married in 1924. She always kept dogs, and a goat for a while. During the Second World War she drove a YMCA mobile library around the gun and balloon sites. She was a keen member and later president of the local floral arrangement society, and she died in 1991, age 92.