Death of Scattery Island native in England

BRIDGET Moran, who died recently in Ludlow in England, aged 95, had a life emblematic of the experiences of tens of thousands of Irish immigrants to England.
She lived for her first 25 years on the family smallholding on Scattery Island in the Shannon Estuary. Her maiden name was Brennan, a family long settled in West Clare as farmers, fishers and river pilots. She was the eldest of 13 children, and on Scattery combined unpaid housekeeping and childminding with farming and fishing.
Like many young Clare women, she was recruited into a British factory in Birmingham at the outbreak of Second World War. Bridget arrived in Birmingham with one pound in her purse – a pound more, she used to recollect, than most other Irish immigrants possessed.
While Birmingham in the Blitz was a dangerous place for her, it was also an adventure. There were cinemas, shops, pubs and dance halls. In 1943 she married Michael Moran, a Dubliner. Homesick, they returned to Ireland after the war. Mass unemployment forced him to emigrate again and she reared her three children single-handedly until the family was reunited in Smethwick, near Birmingham, in 1959.
Widowed while still a mother with young children, she was committed to a life of poverty and hard work. At one time, she held down three jobs simultaneously. She had an emigrant’s belief in the value of education and made huge sacrifices to see her children educated.
She worked as a cleaner into her 80s and bitterly resented retirement. She was tough, stoical and austere and she never abandoned the Catholic faith that she had learned as a child from the Sisters of Mercy in Kilrush.
In her last days, she recited the prayers she had been taught as a young girl. Throughout her life, she possessed virtually nothing.
She never owned a house or a car; her few sticks of furniture were worth coppers and the contents of her wardrobe never cost more than a few pounds. But her legacy to her adopted country is rich, she gave it 70 years of hard work, and her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are nurses, craftsmen, business people, scientists, television researchers, university professors, teachers and writers. 
Her husband died in 1965 and her immediate survivors are her children Maria, Martin and Michael. Her funeral mass was celebrated in St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church Ludlow and she is buried in the same grave as her husband in Smethwick.