Helen Layfield Bradley MBE

Helen Bradley was born on the 20th of November 1900 at number 58, High Street, Lees, near Oldham, Lancashire. She was interested in art all her life, but it was not until she was in her sixties and her grandchildren
were asking what life was like when she was a child that she started painting the scenes she remembered of
her own Edwardian childhood.
A series of books illustrated with these naive paintings topped the bestseller lists in the early 1970s. She died
on 1 9 July 1979 shortly before she was due to be honoured with an MBE.
Much of her work can be seen in Gallery Oldham, a state-of-the-art art gallery complex found in Oldham which
serves the local and wider communities.
Signed with fly insignia, further signed and dated and inscribed verso:-
‘On a warm spring day Grandpa took Mother, George and l, also the dogs, Cyp and Bamey, the Aunts and
Miss Carter (who wore pink) on the train to Lakeside and from there he would row us to a farm on the opposite
shore. The farmer was a friend of his, and whilst they talked we ate our picnic lunch and afterwards gathered bunches of wild daffodils to take back to Grandma …and the year was 1906.”-