Betty Watkinson Archive

The noted Cleethorpes botanist and historian Betty Watkinson spent decades amassing a remarkable archive of meticulously researched material on the natural world, local history and architecture.

The daughter of upholsterer Horace Cockrell and his milliner wife Faith Towle, Betty was born in Grimsby in 1916 and in the 1930s she joined the Post Office as a Sorting Clerk and Telegraphist. Her future husband Leonard Watkinson also joined the Post Office at around the same time, but when the Second World War broke out, he joined up, was captured and spent a number of years in the nightmarish prisoner of war camps like those recently dramatized on the film "The Railway Man". Having survived this terrible ordeal, he returned home and married Betty in 1945.

The couple shared a love of history and nature and together with R.W. Ambler, they published a book called "Farmers and Fishermen: The Probate Inventories of the ancient parish of Clee, South Humberside, 1536-1742". Betty is also credited with having first discovered Bulbous Meadow-grass, a nationally scarce species that is usually only found in the South and South-east of England, on the old sand dunes. This fact is recorded on the information board sited close to the Cleethorpes Light Railway (see picture left).

Leonard died in 1985, but Betty still lives locally and Friends of Cleethorpes Heritage are honoured to have been given access to her archive materials, which cover diverse subjects including species of moths, local churches, court books, local dialect, wills and inventories and census records.

Over the coming months, we look forward to bringing you extracts from Betty's archive and, in the long-term, we hope to be able to provide a permanent home for her life's work so that it can be appreciated by the many people who will want to see it.