Brenda Creese

Brenda Creese is well-known to older Ventnor residents as someone who gave extraordinarily wide vocational service to her community, a contribution that was honoured in 1993 when Ventnor Rotary Club presented her with a citation certificate and cheque. Over the years, she helped countless local causes, including St. Alban’s Church, the Mission for Deep Sea Fishermen, the RNLI, the NSPCC, the Ventnor & District Local History Society, and the Isle of Wight Steam Railway.

Brenda lived in Sydney Terrace, adjacent to Old Shute, formed an area of very uneven and unstable grassland where building is by and large prohibitive now. The terrace gained its name from Robert Beavis who had emigrated to Australia in 1853, but returned in 1876 and sometime in the early 1880s erected the sixteen cottages that came to form the terrace which some locals referred to as Beavis Cottages. In the 1901 Census, the list of household heads, in order of 1 to 16 Sydney terrace, comprised: Eugene Beavis, Isaac Beavis, Charles MacGonnell, Richard Worth, Charles Lovegood, Henry Bannister, Ann Drudge, Daniel Creese, John Munns, William Gosling, unoccupied (11), unoccupied (12), Jessie Colenutt, Emily Bagwell, Jane Blake, Mary Drudge.

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