Winifred Agnes Holloway (Holly)

Winifred Holloway
Winifred Holloway (Pat Shaw’s Mother)

Winifred Agnes Holloway (Holly) was born in Plymouth on 11th March, 1888, daughter to Eliza and Frederick Holloway. She died on 14th August, 1930 at her home in Hampstead.

We know that the family lived in Birmingham and Bristol at different times but not much is known about Winifred’s early musical education. When she was 19 and living in London she gave her debut concert performance.

Douglas Kennedy, who was director of the English Folk Dance Society after Cecil Sharp, said that Winifred Holloway was a talented singing pupil of his father and a contemporary of himself and his sister, Helen. Winifred probably met Cecil Sharp, the founding father of the folklore revival in England, when Helen was a pupil at Chelsea P.T. College where Sharp was training some of the students in folk dancing.

Pat said that his mother had been a pupil of the Irish baritone singer, Harry Plunket Greene who became a lifelong friend.

Winifred sang at concerts as Winifred Holloway and later as Holly Shaw. She was an accomplished singer with a style particularly suited to folk music and played the harpsichord, piano and clavichord.

Her last concert was at the Grotrian Hall, London on 7th December, 1928.

Henry Shuldham-Shaw

Henry Shaw
Henry Shaw (Pat’s Father)

Henry Shuldham-Shaw was originally Shuldham Henry Shaw but he later reversed his Christian names and added the hyphen. He was born in 1859 at Castletown, near Celbridge, Dublin. He died on 5th July 1944 when a bomb hit his home in Hampstead.

In the 1880’s he became a tea planter in Moheema, Assam and returned to London with his wife, Kate, in 1912. In 1915 Kate died of angina and later that year Henry became an ambulance driver in Caen.

On 22nd March, 1917 Henry (58) and Winifred (29) were married in Chelsea. Patrick Noel Shuldham was born on 24th December that year at The Old Vicarage, Stratford-upon-Avon.

The family later returned to London, probably because of Winifred’s expanding involvement with folk music and Cecil Sharp.

Winifred died on 14th August, 1930 at her home in Hampstead.

Henry married Mademoiselle Yvonne de Coppet from Switzerland in January, 1932 and their son, Christopher, surviving half brother to Pat, was born in 1933.