Ann H G Cottingham: July 19, 1928-March 13, 2022

ANN H G COTTINGHAM (née Rodger), local historian and former Old Vic Theatre backstage girl, was born in West Acton in July 1928.

Because her grandmother was travelling at the time, her birth was announced over the tannoy at Saarbrücken station in Germany.

At the start of the Second World War, the family moved out of London to Sussex.

There, Ann helped at her father’s commercial greenhouses and watched the burning skies due to the bombing of Portsmouth and Southampton.

One of the most frightening moments in the war for Ann was when she was out in the back garden and heard an approaching plane skimming the rooftops, so low that she could clearly see the gunner in the rear cockpit.

To use her words, “We just stared at each other. Luckily, he did not fire. I think they were just intent on crossing the coast as fast as possible.”

Ann was talented and initially trained at Worthing Art School before going on to London’s Old Vic School at the same time as Richard Burton, among others.

Nights out with her theatre colleagues sounded interesting — once she attended a party held by the Kray brothers and another time, with a group of ballet dancers, she danced the Sugar Plum Dairy all through Waterloo.

A newspaper cutting from 1953, the coronation year, and a clip from old BBC footage showed Ann climbing the rigging of a stage set and painting scenery for the Old Vic’s first ever royal premiere.

She also helped take the Old Vic up to one of the first Edinburgh Festivals, where she experienced the Fifties censure of Scottish men-only pubs when going out for lunch with the rest of the backstage crew. The theatre world was the backdrop for meeting Kenneth Cottingham whom she married in 1953 and loved well beyond his death in 2013, aged 92.

Starting a family in 1954 halted Ann’s theatre career but some years later she ran a theatre department at the Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College in Kensington.

In the college’s low ceilinged but extensive basement rooms she helped students to design and create wonderful costumes, props, scenery and lighting for a wide range of very successful productions.

Ann always had a strong interest in history but turned down an offer to read the subject at Oxford to go to art college.

However, when an opportunity came to join London archaeological digs in the late Sixties she took up the challenge with enthusiasm.

There was much of Roman London to excavate in the city’s bomb sites and joining a wheelbarrow convoy laden with pickaxes and shovels through the streets from museum stores to dig sites on a quiet Sunday became a routine that puzzled many passing tourists.

The London dig experience, working with amateurs and professionals alike, sparked a flame that led to Ann becoming a founder member of the Henley Archaeological and Historical Group when the family moved to Shiplake in the early Seventies. She gave many years of hard work to the group, which kindly rewarded her by making her honorary president later in her life.

As well as presenting well-researched, historic Henley walks and tours, Ann’s meticulous work resulted in many pages of document transcripts, detailed drawings of old buildings and maps.

This work culminated in
co-authorship with Hilary Fisher on a book, Henley-on-Thames: A Pictorial History, and in 2000 the publication of her own reference book, The Hostelries of Henley, which you can still buy at Richard Way’s Bookshop in Friday Street.

In later years that brilliant mind began to deteriorate and even her avid reading of archaeology and military history magazines faltered just before Christmas when she began a very noticeable decline that ended with her slipping peacefully away in her sleep.

Ann’s family, her daughters Charlotte and Elizabeth, and five grown-up grandchildren, would like to express heartfelt thanks to the teams of wonderful carers, first from Home Instead and then Bridges Homecare, who along with district and Sue Ryder nurses helped to make Ann’s last years at home happy, peaceful, comfortable and dignified.