Miss Agnes Barnard and Miss Charlotte Mary Nash Woodham
were spinsters living at Snettisham Park, an aunt and a niece. They were related to several well to do Norfolk families and owned land in East Winch, though how much and how they came to possess it isn’t clear.
It included the land that is now the school play ground which had belonged to the Curl family 70 years earlier and the house in Gayton Road where the Valentines live, (Carrstone House).
The play ground was transferred to the Vicar, Reverend Herbert Whalley, in 1913 for the school extension and Miss Woodham visited the finished school in 1914 in the company of Miss Childs, but neither she nor the elderly Miss Barnard came to the opening of the extended school.
The only other scrap of information that we have is that in 1904 the East Winch post master thanked them for their gift of game, which they seem to have sent him every December.
Miss Barnard died in 1918 and Miss Woodham age 78 died in 1947.
She was a kindly but private woman who invited the children of Snettisham up to the hall on 14th February (her birthday) to pick aconites and snowdrops, and to receive a halfpenny and an orange. The children are reported to have sung a ditty perhaps not in her hearing as follows:
"Good Mother Valentine, God bless the baker,
You'll be the giver, I'll be the taker.
My boots are very dirty, my shoes are very thin,
But I've got a pocket to put a penny in”
"There is also a rumour that Miss Barnard had a moustache and goatee beard, but a gentleman in Snettisham, whose mother was house keeper at Snettisham Hall till 1936, is certain that rumour is malicious.
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