Vera Armstrong
Vera Armstrong MBE (1904–1992) was a British children's author and member of the Girl Guide movement for six decades. Personal life Mary Vera Marshall was born in Huddersfield on 22 April 1904, the second child of Catherine Elsie and William Lawrence Wright Marshall. She was baptised on 20 July 1904 in Llanfairfechan, Wales. She attended the Queen Anne Grammar School for Girls in York. She married Richard Shirley Tain, a soldier in the Royal Engineers, in Cheltenham in 1934. By 1946 her marriage had ended and she had married Brigadier Edward Francis Egerton Armstrong CBE (1890-1995). She died in Gloucestershire on 19 April 1992. Girl Guide career Armstrong was a Guide Captain in Hull by 1933, and in 1947 she became the first District Commissioner of the newly created Paddington District, where her "untiring energies" ensured that Paddington was in the "van of Girl Guiding in London". In 1948 she was working at Girl Guide Headquarters. When her husband's army role took them both to India in September 1949, she resigned her position in the UK, with the intention to take up Guiding on her arrival in India. In the 1950s she edited a Girl Guide's educational film, The Wider