Ethel Elizabeth Timms, known as Betty Timms (10 June 1886 – 3 February 1980) was an English writer. Her success with a children's story, ''The Little Grey Men of the Moor'' (1926), is said to have encouraged her older sister,

Flora Thompson Flora Jane Thompson (née Timms; 5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, ''Lark Rise to Candleford''. Early life and family Thompson ...

, author of ''

Lark Rise to Candleford ''Lark Rise to Candleford'' is a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by Flora Thompson about the countryside of north-east Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England, at the end of the 19th century. The stories were previously published se ...

'', to persevere in writing.

Life

Betty Timms was born in

Juniper Hill Juniper Hill is a hamlet in the civil parish of Cottisford in Oxfordshire, England, south of Brackley in neighbouring Northamptonshire. Juniper Hill was named after the common juniper, ''Juniperus communis'', which originally grew in the are ...

in rural Oxfordshire, the daughter of Albert Timms, a stonemason, and Emma Timms, a nursemaid. When she was four the family moved to

Cottisford Cottisford is a village and civil parish in Oxfordshire, about south of Brackley in neighbouring Northamptonshire. The parish's northern and northwestern boundaries form part of the boundary between the two counties. The parish includes the ha ...

. Timms wrote a children's story, ''The Little Grey Men of the Moor'' (1926), which book was published by

George G. Harrap and Co. George G. Harrap, Ltd (officially: George G. Harrap and Company Limited, London, Bombay) is a now defunct publisher of high quality speciality books, many of them educational, such as the memoirs of Winston Churchill, or highly illustrated with ...

as part of their popular Little Story Books series, and illustrated by Nora Fry. Around the time that Flora Thompson wrote ''Lark Rise to Candleford'', Timms wrote her own childhood memoirs, though they were not published in her lifetime. In 2012 her typewritten manuscript was published as ''More Tales from Lark Rise''. In 1928 she married Henry Eastwood, only to lose him two years later, when he died at the age of 63 years. Ethel Elizabeth "Betty" Eastwood née Timms died in Wincanton, Somerset, England, 3 February 1980.GRO UK Volume 23 Page 1750

Works

* ''The Little Grey Men of the Moor''. London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1926. Illustrated by Nora Fry. * ''More Tales from Lark Rise: The Childhood Memories of Flora Thompson's Younger Sister''. Charlbury: Wychwood Press, 2012.

References

External links

Ethel Elizabeth TIMMS
{{DEFAULTSORT:Timms, Betty 1886 births 1980 deaths English children's writers English memoirists