"You may remember that you sent me, many years ago, a photocopy of the unsigned, undated piece of paper (document 19) about the establishment of the embroidery industry in Madeira, which you found in the Lambeth Archive.  My cousin Anthea has also been there recently and she has sent me photographs she took of N V Oakley's Foreword to Mary's Diary and a few pages of her transcription of the diary. I am quite certain that the piece you found is in the same handwriting.

"(Winifred) Nellie Vale Oakley, born King, was the wife of Ernest Peyton Oakley, son of Clara Phelps.  She spent many years in India with her husband, returning to England at the end of World War I. She says she visited Madeira "many years later", and it seems to be after this that she decided to investigate the role of the Phelps family in the Island. She, however, has many mistakes in her family history and so I feel we cannot take her notes as being very reliable. She also implies that the Phelpses started the embroidery industry during the cholera epidemic, whereas Elizabeth's letter (which I sent you recently) makes it clear that their involvement had already begun well before this time, and that embroidery had been a traditional occupation in a small way even before that. Bella's great contribution was in getting the work to a wider market and importing fabrics etc for the women.

"So we can see that your document 19 was written by Nellie Oakley, approximately 1930, and also that it seems it was she who donated the Diary and some other papers to the Lambeth Archive. Clara died the year after Mary so possibly she had the Diary notebooks, which found their way to her daughter-in-law, Nellie.

"You have also sent me your transcription of Mary's Diary. I know that you transcribed it yourself from the original, since you mention your difficulties with her handwriting and use of abbreviations. Did you also make use of Nellie's transcription?  (I don't think she transcribed the whole diary, as she mentions that she is using "extracts".)"