TCF News Spring 2022

Spring 2022 - TCF Newsletter | www.tcf.org.uk 7 Mary Hartley, TCF’s librarian, remembers Barry Bridges, who died last year on 3 December. Barry Bridges was a member of TCF for many years, and made some very important contributions to our charity. I’ve dug into our archives, and into our memories, and this is a very brief account of Barry’s association with TCF. Barry found TCF after his 17 year old daughter Lynda, his only child, died in February 1988. He became an active member of our charity and would almost always attend National Gatherings and AGMs. At the gatherings Catharine Pointer, who always took the library with her to these events, enlisted Barry’s help and he was a familiar sight sitting behind the books and also helping out in the shop. He was willing to help with anything in fact and Irene Baldock remembers him sitting late one night putting candles into cellophane bags and tying them with ribbons, ready for the next day’s candle lighting service. Apparently he said it was one of the strangest things he’d been asked to do but he still got on with it. My own first memory of Barry was in 2005 at my first gathering where he was my table host, looking after a table full of shell shocked, newly bereaved people. In August 1994, at the International Gathering, Barry, together with Rita Henshaw, hosted a meeting for twelve parents whose only child, or all their children, had died. That group became the ‘Childless Parents’. As Philip Clarke writes, in his 1999 history of TCF, parents with no surviving children face the “double grief - not only of losing their child or children but, if they have no grandchildren, the loss of their family’s continuing existence”, so this group was an extremely valuable extension of TCF’s supportive care. Rita and Barry, as co-founders, wanted the group to remain part of TCF but to have its own newsletter and some private meetings. They produced the first newsletter in December 1994 and started to organise meetings in various parts of the country, Bath, Leeds, Harrow, Shiplake on Thames to name a few. They were well attended, the group grew rapidly and it still provides vital support today. Barry was also a very good friend to the library, and several of our books have Lynda’s photo inside their front covers. In the early 2000s the library’s future was very uncertain and it was threatened with closure and Barry was one of the little group of us who met in Chatham to talk about that and see what we could do to save it. In the event the library was saved and is thriving today. So Barry Bridges is part of our history, In Memoriam remembering Barry Bridges