Popular Pinchbeck teacher Josephine Bray touched the lives of so many

Many villagers, family and friends from Pinchbeck and Spalding gathered recently at Pinchbeck Church to celebrate the long life of popular and well-loved teacher, Josephine Bray of Pinchbeck who died on December 27 after six months of ill health.

Josie was born in Pontefract in 1928, youngest child of Robert and Florence Parkinson, joining older sister Bette (later Smith).

The Family moved to Spalding in the early thirties and started the family furniture business, R.Parkinson, on Priory Road, achieving great success during the War years with a busy workshop making blackout blinds for most of Spalding.

Educated at The Parish Church Day School and then Spalding High School, she trained to be an infant teacher at Thornbridge Hall Training College in Derbyshire, teaching for nearly 50 years and loving every moment of it.

After the War, through the Young Conservatives and the Spalding Operatic Society, she met her future husband, Peter Bray whom she married in 1951. He had served in the Royal Navy on motor torpedo boats and was now working in the family builders and funeral directors business in Pinchbeck. They were married for 67 years until his death in 2019.

Their four daughters, Jennifer, Rosamund, Elizabeth and Emma all still live locally and there are nine grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren.

Her first teaching post was at Cowbit Primary School but she later taught at St Paul’s School in Spalding for many years before taking on a role as a county supply head, going into schools who needed a headmistress for a few weeks or terms. When retirement loomed she moved in a different career direction to the North Sea Camp, near Boston, teaching inmates basic literacy and numeracy, which she found very rewarding.

In the early 1960s she was elected as the first lady chair of Pinchbeck Parish Council. Her daughters remember there was an article in this paper announcing her taking on the role showing her at a cooker stirring something in a saucepan with a wooden spoon – it was still very much a man’s world then.

Apart from the joy that her large family gave her, the busiest and most fulfilling time in her later life was when husband Peter was county council chairman in 2002/03. They both loved socialising and travelling all over the county meeting people in their role as chairman and chairman’s lady.

Daughter Elizabeth Sneath said that whenever her mother went out in the town or in shops, people would come up to her and remind her of how she was their first teacher and how kind and caring she had always been to them. Many former pupils attended her funeral.

Donations in memory of her long and happy life were made to The Children’s Society charity, reflecting her great love of children and the wonderful influence she had upon so many young lives.