Margaret Walmsley was my mother, and Leo Walmsley's second wife. Born in 1907, she was the daughter of Statira Bell and Edward Little.
When my mother and father split up shortly after I was born, I lived with my mother in various places, as she ran schools in the south of England. She left England to work in Manor House School in Kitale, Kenya in the early 1950s, but eventually came to the States and lived with my family from 1976 until she died in 1989.
I inherited many of my mother's writings (letters, diaries, illustrated lesson plans, even a novel), sketches, watercolours, carvings, and clothing she'd knitted. Margaret was an accomplished teacher, a devoted mother and grandmother, an avid diarist, and a surprisingly good artist and carver. She had a passion for knowledge about the world, and for sharing it with the children she taught, and looked after as a nanny or grandmother.
The artifacts she left me are priceless, of course, but what I'm sure about is her passion for exploring the world not just in her travels but in her teaching, both in the schools she taught in, as well as in her family, including her grandchildren. I've been told that I have an insatiable curiosity, which not only infected my own teaching, but also my books and articles on education (I titled one of my books "Children Exploring their World," and like my mother tried always to use primary sources in my teaching. And there's no doubt that curiosity drives my abstract photography.
To explore my mother's art and aspects of her life, click on links to the left.
