A wonderful name for searching online amongst millions of records: “George Gambetta Ray”. There can be only one. Like William Urquhart Dykes. A gift for the likes of me. Anyway, this is Mary Catherine’s father, who was a schoolmaster from Hythe, in the county of Kent. And his name made it so easy for me to find online that ‘Aunty Mary’, as I used to know my second Archer grandma, was age 12 at the 1911 census, and had a younger sister Ann, whom I think I remember, from my youth in Oxford in the 1950s, as practicing in Newbury, Berkshire, in ‘Radionics’ (which involved using a sample of the patient’s hair in a ‘radio-like’ machine, as likewise used by one Michael D. Pook of Nottingham, whom I had cause to visit with my mother-in-law, Nancy Garner, at my daughter Helen’s suggestion, concerning Mum’s macular degeneration). My mother, Gwen, always treated such things with ‘a certain amount of scepticism’. But they worked if you thought they worked. And many people did, no doubt.
Anyway, Aunty Mary Archer, Grandpa William’s second wife, was a schoolteacher, evidently from Penrhos College, the Methodist girls’ boarding school, (where presumably perhaps the latter two (Elizabeth and Olive) of his three daughters went to school - or was it Uncle Arthurs’ daughters Eileen and Pam (I find I’m not at all clear in recollection). Nora, Grandpa William's eldest daughter, who was born in 1908, did not, and (like her elder two brothers, Arthur and Fred) went to a local Oxford school, ‘Milham Ford’ in her case, because she was of secondary school age (12 - 14) in 1920 - 1922, just before her father became well-enough-off to afford private education, in his Uncle James’s will in (approximately) 1925.
Penrhos college was at Colwyn Bay, Wales, but moved to Chatsworth, Derbyshire during World War II, because the premises were requisitioned by the government. The school merged with a boys’ school, Rydal, in 1995 and the original site has been sold for housing development.