As part of our 10th anniversary celebrations, we’re featuring ten ‘People of Moor Pool’. This month we’re paying tribute to Barbara Ikin, who lived on the Moor Pool Estate for the majority of her life and who sadly died in December 2024, aged 99.
Barbara was born at 42 Margaret Grove on 2nd November 1925. She went to Station Road Infant and Junior School (now Harborne Primary) and then George Dixon Grammar School. When war broke out in 1939, Barbara was evacuated with the school to Gloucester. However, neither war nor the upheaval of evacuation phased her and she went on to achieve the required grades to go on to teacher training college, satisfying her long-held ambition to become a teacher.
Barbara’s first teaching post in 1945 was at Woodhouse Road Primary School in Quinton and she stayed there until she married in August 1949. The couple moved away from their beloved Harborne but only for a short while, living briefly in Carlisle and then in Albrighton, Shropshire, where Barbara taught at a school on the RAF base at Cosford.
They moved back to Harborne while Barbara was expecting their first child, returning to live at 24 Moor Pool Avenue in October 1950, with their daughter being born two months later. Barbara went on to have a son in 1954 and the family moved to a bigger house at 66 Margaret Grove, just a few doors up from where Barbara had grown up, in March 1955.
In 1961, after spending 10 years raising her children, Barbara returned to teaching and took up a post at Station Road Junior School. She turned down the opportunity to retire at 60 and carried on teaching for a further 5 years, clocking up an incredible total of 34 years as a teacher (30 of which were spent at Station Road Junior School), before retiring in July 1991.
She continued to live at 66 Margaret Grove and was a very active resident of the Moor Pool Estate, attending many social events at Moor Pool Hall with her close friend Joan. Following Joan’s death in 2007, she continued to look after the ‘oldies’ on the Estate, visiting and shopping for them, despite being in her 80’s herself by this time.
When Moor Pool’s community spaces came under threat of being sold for development in 2011, Barbara played a big part in the work to save them and this gave her a new lease of life. The ‘Moor Pool project’ was always very much a part of her and very close to her heart.
Following a fall, Barbara moved from her home in Margaret Grove to a care home in February 2023. She was made an Honorary Member of Moor Pool Heritage Trust in March 2024, in recognition of her unwavering support.
Barbara died peacefully in her sleep in the early hours of 14th December 2024. In the words of her son, Nick: “Harborne and the Moor Pool Estate has been a better place for your having lived most of your 99 years there and it won’t be the same without you.”
