Yahoo Finance Margaret Harding obituary
My mother, Margaret Harding, who has died aged 88, was a radiographer who in later life became much involved in the study of the history and archaeology of Faversham in Kent.
Margaret was born in London to Gladys (nee Symonds), an office worker and housewife, and her husband, Tom Wood, a sales rep for Watneys brewery. After attending Holy Trinity convent school in West Wickham, Kent, she went to secretarial college and worked initially as an almoner’s clerk at Bromley hospital in south-east London, although she soon began training there as a radiographer.
While at a local Youth Fellowship gathering, Margaret met Alan Harding, and they married in 1956. They moved to Cambridgeshire, where Alan studied mathematics at Cambridge University and Margaret worked at Wisbech hospital. Later they moved back to London so Alan could become a statistician at the National Coal Board, while Margaret concentrated on bringing up their five children. Although she did not work outside the home for some years, she never stopped studying: geology, Latin, ancient Greek, medieval history, medieval English – there were always books strewn across the kitchen table.
Eventually Margaret returned to radiography, working back at Bromley hospital and then at Greenwich hospital. She ended her career in 1985 as a senior radiographer at the Queen Elizabeth Military hospital in Woolwich, where for some time many of her patients were service people flown in from the Falklands war.
Once retired, she spent a number of years travelling around the world with Alan, living in Santiago in Chile and Washington DC in the US. She always made friends along the way, in the most unlikely of places and ways.
When Margaret and Alan eventually returned to live in the UK, she divided her time between London and Faversham, where she became involved in the Faversham Historians group, chaired by the historian Arthur Percival, whose extensive library Margaret went on to curate after his death.
She completed a master’s degree in medieval and early modern studies at the University of Kent in 2013 and became a member of the Faversham Society archaeological research group, using her knowledge of skeletal structure to help identify bone finds. In 2020 she was involved in an extensive study of an early Saxon bone dump in Faversham.
Margaret was a lively, curious and irreverent woman, always fully engaged and outward looking, and offering a beautiful example of lifelong learning in action.
Alan died in 2019. She is survived by her five children, 13 grandchildren, a great-granddaughter, and her sister and brother.
