Barbara Hoskins 1931-2024

Our life member Barbara Hoskins was one of the founders of the society and lived in Island Bay for more than 80 of her 94 years.  She was born Barbara Anton and, with her sister Marian, raised by Parents Sid and Sybil (née Nimmo) in Derwent St. 

Barbara was a teacher, and taught at both St Madeleine Sophie (the first name of the Catholic School in the Bay) and Island Bay school. She was a gifted communicator and story-teller and wrote some wonderful stories for Southern Bays including ‘Shopping in Island Bay in the 1940s’; ‘Island Bay and the 'Spanish Influenza' epidemic’; ‘Memories of the Masonic Hall’; ‘Sing for the Gold and Purple’ – her memories of being a pupil at St Madeleine Sophie; and ‘Building a house in Island Bay in the early 1950s’. Her autobiographical work ‘The Life and Times of Me!’ was published for her family in 2016. 

Barbara knew the value not only of memories but of memorabilia. She kept a small box of her father, Sid Anton’s World War l diary and photographs. Once she found someone able to decipher and transcribe the diary and sufficiently response to her formidable powers of persuasion these became another publication full of detail, from her Dad’s voyage to Europe, on a ship stricken with the 1918 Influenza virus, to the reality if a brief war which for Sid Anton consisted as much of cleaning horse brasses as actual battle. 

She was also a generous donor to the collections of the Turnbull Library where family autograph books, photos, her teaching materials such as timetables, notes, weekly plans, lesson assignment sheets, and other documents and ephemera can be seen by family and researchers. Like her father, who wrote the names of the people he photographed in World War l on the backs of the images, Barbara is a lesson to us all: you can’t take it with you but you can leave it behind in a form others can use!