LAST week we asked whether anybody remembered Nellie Newman, Swindon’s 1934 Carnival Queen.

The first resounding “yes” came within 48 hours when we were contacted by her niece, and we’re pleased to report that Nellie had a long and happy life, the latter part spent on the south coast.

There was also an interesting detour into another part of the Swindon Advertiser’s archive.

Nellie’s niece, 70-year-old retired school cleaner Josephine Morris, got in touch from her home in Toothill after reading the article in last Saturday’s Adver.

Mrs Morris is the daughter of Vera, who was 89 and the last survivor of the seven Newman siblings when she died six years ago.

She has an original full length photograph of Nellie, known in the family as Nino, in her carnival queen dress and fur-trimmed blue cloak. Her family memorabilia also includes a photograph of Nellie and her six siblings, taken on the day of a family wedding in the 1950s. It was posed in front of sister Rene’s house in Wheeler Avenue.

Mrs Morris said: “My friend said to me, ‘Have you got the Adver yet?’, and told me it was all about mum’s sister.

“I got the paper and thought, ‘we’ve already done this in 1969’.”

Her recollection was spot on. Some 35 years after Nellie’s carnival triumph, an Adver reporter researching a story about the history of the Swindon event stumbled on that 1934 edition and appealed for her to get in touch.

The only personal information about her in the original article was that she lived in Albion Street and worked at the Wills cigarette factory, and had been 19 at the time of the carnival.

Following the 1969 appeal she got in touch and we learned she was married to Sid, that the couple now lived in Oxford and that they had one child, a son.

That son, Anthony Mortimer, is now 74 and lives in Weymouth, the town where his parents spent their latter years. He got in touch with us shortly after Mrs Morris, having been alerted by a cousin.

“Mum married Dad in ’36,” he said. “He then did a brave thing. He was an upholsterer with the GWR but he decided to move to Morris Motors in Cowley. They had a new house in Oxford. I was born in 1937.

“When war broke out in 1939, dad went into the Army and mum didn’t want to remain there alone so she rented the house and went back to Swindon. She lived with various sisters.”

After the war, the young family was reunited and resumed life in Oxford. Sid retired in 1977, and the move to Weymouth followed.

More information about Nellie came by email from another niece, Donna Godfrey, who said: “They were keen Swindon Town supporters and travelled to Swindon to watch the team play whenever they had a home match.”

Nellie died on New Year’s Eve, 1992, and her husband followed in 1996.

Their son said: “She was a really lovely person. She liked to go walking with a friend, she liked to go on holidays abroad with Dad and they had a good life.”