This is to celebrate the life of Mabel Louise Shipfield, Louise to everyone who knew her, Mabel to those who dared, as she hated the name!

Early Years

Louise was born on 25th April 1932 in Tudor Cottage in Gretton. She was the youngest of Victor and Margaret Phillips’s seven children. Her father ran Phillips Hat Shop in Montpellier which later became Jilling’s and Bracey. Her mother came over from Ireland to Cheltenham before the First World War to look after her grandfather, Major General Henry Provost Babbage, and during that war served as a voluntary nurse at Naunton Park.

The family only moved out to Gretton for a short  period. In those days it was possible to come into Cheltenham from Gretton on the train and Victor would bring the older children into Rotunda School daily. As the family increased they moved to progressively larger properties. During the Second World War, they lived at Fairleigh on Shurdington Road and Louise remembered well the night the Luftwaffe bomb fell in the garden of their house, but the blast blew up the house next door killing several people. She also remembered two of the surviving orphans being taken in by her mother for the duration of that war.

Growing Up

As she grew up, the family moved to Ivy Dene on Hewlett Road and Louise attended first Rotunda School and then the Grammar School. She had a keen interest in music and learned to play the piano. Louise was also good at sport and was selected to play hockey for the west of England in 1947. The same year she was chosen to ’ballboy’ at a professional tennis exhibition match featuring Fred Perry. By 1949 she captained both the tennis and hockey teams at the Grammar School.

Entering Nursing

In 1951, she left Cheltenham to train as a nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. There she met and trained with Margaret and Shirley, who became lifelong friends meeting yearly until her recent illness. Margaret and Shirley send their best wishes but are too frail to come to the funeral.

After the first period of training, Louise did a midwifery course in 1956 that was partly based in Torquay. The recent television series ‘Call the Midwife’ brought back to her memories of riding up and down the hilly slopes of the town on her bike visiting expectant mothers. Louise loved life at Bart’s and was proud to be awarded the ‘pink’ of the year in 1959 and became a Theatre Sister there. She worked under pioneering neurosurgeon John Connelly on the first operations to separate Siamese twins in the 1960s.

She also captained the Bart’s ladies tennis team and bemoaned the fact that unlike the other hospital teams competing in tournaments, Matron didn’t arrange for them to be coached. However Louise did forgive her when Matron got them tickets for Wimbledon to compensate.

Returning to Cheltenham

Louise’s family were not blessed with good health and at times there was pressure on her to come back and help. Consequently she came back to live in Cheltenham in 1962. Louise soon joined the East Gloucestershire Tennis Club where she met and later married John Shipfield, a local Insurance Surveyor and moved to Old Bath Road.

John was a divorcee and at that time only St Andrew’s Church in Montpellier would marry divorcees and throughout the rest of her life she attended and maintained strong  links with St Andrew’s.

Sadly, Louise was unable to have children and so she continued nursing first as sister in Cheltenham Children’s Hospital and later at a doctor’s practice until 1977.

Caring for family was important to Louise and she spent a lot of her spare time looking after in turn her mother, three of her sisters and a mentally ill brother, as well as John’s mother in Malvern.  Her husband John died in 1995, but his final years were dogged by ill health and Louise was there to look after him throughout.

Tony remembers vividly when his mother Nena had a life changing stroke in 1977,  Louise would make time to visit her regularly.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. Louise was a very positive person with keen and varied interests which she somehow managed to maintain throughout. These interests included squash (played at County level ), art ( she was a member of Cheltenham Art Club and a prolific painter) and keeping dogs, Irish red setters which she loved to walk up Leckhampton Hill or Birdlip Woods. She loved her dogs and she loved talking to the dog walkers she met.

Though Louise couldn’t have children, she loved seeing her nieces and nephews. Tony always lived nearby and Sue and Chris came to stay with her during school holidays when they were young. As they grew up and had children of their own and in Tony’s case grandchildren, Louise kept track of all their lives and offered support wherever she could.

The Latter Years

Her husband John died in 1995 and by 1997 all her brothers and sisters were dead. So ever positive,  Louise then took the opportunity to travel.  She enrolled on a number of History of Art organised tours to Italy, France, Germany and across the UK.

She also continued with her painting, predominantly portraits, many of which we are bringing to the Queens Hotel later.

Louise was the great, great grand-daughter of Charles Babbage – inventor of the calculating machine. She used her time to research his achievements and visited and contributed to an exhibition at the Science Museum where the machine is displayed. 

In 2014 she developed Myocenia gravis which hospitalised her for several weeks and caused her to give up looking after dogs. From then she was happy to live quite quietly at home reading and watching old films until the early hours. Tony was able to help keep her supplied with shopping and keep an eye on her. She still had many visitors from friends, family and even old patients from the Childrens Hospital. She continued to paint and painted her own Christmas Cards and knitted bobble hats and gloves for the carol singers at St Andrews.

She celebrated her 90th birthday in 2022 with a luncheon for friends and family at the Queens Hotel which she enjoyed enormously and so following the service we will be returning there for some refreshments .

Louise suffered a stroke on 31st January which hospitalised her for weeks and left her unable to speak. She died peacefully in Sandfield Nursing Home, three days after Tony, Sue, Chris and Anita were able to visit her together.

Louise

Louise was a truly memorable person with flaws and fancies aplenty.

She was really kind and caring, whilst also being infuriatingly pedantic over small things. She couldn’t cope when her cleaner moved articles in order to clean the house.

She was an inveterate hoarder and catalogue shopper so that her house was almost impossible to walk through by the time she died.

She was renowned in the family for telling long stories that intertwined across various subjects, without pausing for breath or providing the opportunity to be interrupted.

Yet she knew everybody’s name and their children’s and their birthdays and took an interest in all their lives. And when things weren’t going well for you, Louise would help wherever  she could.

She was tough, resilient and true. One of a dying breed and we will all miss her.’

A message from the Pate's Development Office:

Our thanks to Louise's nephew Tony who has very kindly donated to the School Archives several copies of PGSG magazines from the 1950s, PGSG school photos (including a whole school photo), Louise's Oxford School Certificates from 1949 and 1950 and her school report from Autumn 1950.