Personality Profile: Nora North
Many of us know the smiley face in the Discovery Centre at the Cathedral, but few of us know much about Nora North, the person behind that welcoming smile.
Nora, born and bred in Portsmouth, remembers first coming into what is now the Discovery Centre as a young girl when it was the parish school, long before St John’s and then St Edmund’s were built in Arundel Street. ‘So I seem to have ended up where I started’.
Nora, whose mother came from Portsmouth and whose father - a stoker in the Royal Navy - came from Farnborough, is the middle of five surviving children (‘Mum had nine of us in all’).
During the war Nora was evacuated to Basingstoke – ‘It was only a village then’, but far enough away to avoid enemy action.
After the war, Nora went to work at Leethams in Farlington for 24 years before joining the DRA (MoD) where she worked for a further 21 years.
It is for the past 18 years that Nora has worked on a voluntary basis in the repository (latterly called the Discovery Centre): ‘Bishop Crispian is the fifth Bishop I have known since being confirmed by Bishop King’.
In Nora’s own words, ‘I’m a real Pompey girl. It’s in my blood. I love this town and the people in it’.