WEST MALVERN

A new addition to West Malvern’s extensive literary heritage – so well chronicled by local resident Mary Constable and featured in the audio-visual display in St James’s Church – emerged recently. It turns out that a brother and sister who lived in the village in the 1920s and 1930s were grandchildren of the Victorian novelist Mrs Gaskell, perhaps best known as the author of ‘Cranford’, which was adapted some years ago into a successful TV series. Bryan Thurston Holland, who moved with his sister Florence Evelyn to Harrow Cottage, West Malvern Road, in 1920, was also an author in his own right of a novel entitled ‘A Vagrant Tune’. Both were prominent in both village and wider Malvern public affairs and highly respected in the community, as lengthy obituaries in the Gazette when he died in 1933, and on her death in 1942, make clear. As well as involvement in the local council, the Hills Conservators, the Hospital Board and the Ex-Servicemens’ Association, Mr Holland was a leader in the scouting movement locally and was known affectionately by the lads as ‘Skipper’. After her brother’s death Miss Holland, who was also a councillor and a magistrate, lived on at Harrow Cottage, where Brian Wall, one of West Malvern’s senior native residents, remembers delivering newspapers as a boy!