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Doris Saville, (formerly Sabel) came from a family in Lithuania and was born in the shtetl of Alshad, near Tels on 31st December 1905 and was given the Hebrew name of Pessa Dobbe. This information is given in my grandfather's diary written in Alshad a hundred years ago! Her parents were Yehoshua and Sara Saville and the story is told that on the eve of the first world war all their possessions were put on the last boat at Memel bound for England. Then war broke out and, in dire poverty, the Savilles moved from Alshad to the larger town of Siad, where they suffered the deprivation of the Russian Revolution. Thev finally left for England in 1921.

Two of their children died in infancy, leaving the parents, Doris and her older brother Morris (Moshe). They arrived at South Shields where Yehoshua's parents, brothers and sister were living, but after nine months they moved to Middlesbrough, where Yehoshua set up a hardware store in the family home in Newport Road. My father's cousin Hilda Saville (now Cukier) of Savion, Israel clearly remembers her cousin Doris as being a very attractive, fair-haired, girl who managed to learn English within three years of arriving in England.

I have come across various people in the North East who knew her through LIT meetings in Newcastle and Sunderland, where she often came as part of a singing group with the Silverston girls. One of the famous family stories is that my father Morris met a young man at one such a LIT meeting called Solly Cohen from Sunderland and said that he would make a fine brother-in-law, as he seemed to be friendly with Doris. In the end Morris married Solly's sister, my mother Rose, a year after Doris's death and thus became his brother-in-law, after all.

I have been told that Doris was involved in various romances, including our own Avromka Solomon of Middlesbrough and also with some of the finest families from Sunderland. Some were terminated because an older sister of the fiancé insisted on getting married first, and others because he felt that she could not leave her sick mother Sara who had been very ill since she had lost her two daughters in Lithuania.

The circumstances of her death at the age of 27 seemed to be clouded with some mystery though all who knew her described her as a very frail person. I had always been under the impression that she was seriously injured in a car accident and died shortly thereafter. Hers was one of the first burials in the new cemetery, which was opened in 1932.

David Saville