Conner, Lynne

Lynne Conner was born on October 1st 1928, in the Cape Verde Islands. She had an older brother, Peter. Her parents are Adela and Richard Wharton. Her mother was Spanish, from the Canary Islands and her father was English. When she was eight, she was the last of her family to move to England, to escape the Spanish Civil War. She then moved to Southampton where she was looked after by a friend of her father, who eventually became her step-mother, Barbary. When the war broke out, her father, who was a senior British intelligence officer had to go to war, so he moved her to live with another family. As the war continued she was moved around a lot. She was placed in various lodgings, until she was old enough to go to Sherborne Girls school, an elite boarding school. After her schooling she went to Switzerland and worked as a translator for the Red Cross. She worked in a number of European countries. When she was working for the Spanish Embassy in England she moved to Venezuela to live with her brother for a little while. In Venezuela, she met her future husband, Julian Conner. After a few years they got married and eventually moved to his homeland, St. Maarten. Lynne sat down in 2016 to share her memories of her war time life with her granddaughter, Elizabeth Keane.