Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2008 | Page 29

INTERVIEW

Photo left P.28: Gloria aged 4 with sisters
Betty & Leonora and mother Louisa.
Photo top: Gloria at the age of 4 years
Photo bottom: Gloria (left) with Anthony
pictured at a family wedding.

Island Life - www.isleofwight.net

were regarded as second class citizens”.
Yet wherever they went they
overcame that obstacle of ostracism
by dint of sheer hard work.
“Looking back now,” says Gloria,
“our customers always used to think
of us as their family. Mother was
mother to everybody, we were sisters
to everybody. We were treated with a
great deal of respect. And that was
wonderful – a miracle in those days.”
It was the warmth of her mother’s heart
that won people over. “She’d always send
us to see customers in hospital, to help
translate, say, if they were foreign. So
we had a kind of reputation for being a
family that was always there – that’s where
I get my ideas for trying to help people.”
The seeds of Gloria’s idea for an
Island advice bureau were clearly
sown. They sprouted further as a result
of meeting Edward Minghella.
Gloria met Edward about three months
after they arrived on the Isle of Wight,
at a dance on Christmas Eve. “He was
an unusual man, just out of the army.
He had had no formal education, but his
command of the language was amazing.

life

He was reading Dickens when I met him.
“He had a vision about a lot of
things. He wants to know, and I think
that’s what attracted me to him. So
there was no turning back really.”
They courted for three years, Edward
coming over on the early ferry so they
could walk and talk together, before
returning to do a day’s work at the ice
cream company for which he worked.
“I told Edward if we married he’d
get my mother too! She wouldn’t
have coped alone.” They married at
St Mary’s, Ryde, in 1950. The other
girls married within the year, too.
“It wasn’ B