Cosgrove’s Extraordinary Women

Cosgrove & Furtho

The Cosgrove & Furtho website acknowledges the thousands of women who have lived in Cosgrove throughout history. Most of them are unrecorded or their records have been lost over hundreds of years.

It’s possible to mention only a few on the website. They include:

  • Betty Archer, who appears regularly in the Church accounts receiving money for beer and ale for meetings, and under her title “Goody” Archer also received money for washing and mending the priest’s “Surpliss”
  • Elizabeth Graham gave £166 13s 4d to build the Old School which  improved the education of Cosgrove children up to the age of 12 for many years.
  • During the Second World War Elizabeth Brown of the Barge Inn, on the canal at Cosgrove, raised funds, firstly for Northampton Hospital Fund and later for the serving men of Cosgrove.
  • Mabel Jelley was a founder member of Cosgrove Women’s Institute. During the war she belonged to the ARP and was an organiser for welfare foods and welfare produce until well into the 1960s. By 1947 Mabel was a Councillor and began a campaign for a sewerage service to replace the “Bucket and Chuckit” system. She followed this with proposals for a clean water supply for the village, which was still using wells.
  • Joan Wake helped to start Northampton Record Society and her work has preserved historical records for Cosgrove. She received the CBE in 1960.

Cosgrove’s Extraordinary Women