The day Fiery Fred Trueman turned into a flower delivery boy (From Craven Herald)

The day Fiery Fred Trueman turned into a flower delivery boy

8:33am Friday 23rd May 2008 in Dales Folk By John Sheard

This will have to stop. If I keep on enjoying my work this much, the editor will start demanding that I pay him for my pleasure rather than the other way round. For, once again, I have met an absolutely joyous character who indulges me in two of my great loves in life, real shops and people who make me laugh.

Only a month ago, I was writing about Silsden DIY shopkeeper Paul Waddington who overcame terrible disability to build a good business and at the same time make his customers his friends.

This week, it's a lady florist and one-time cafe owner from Gargrave who tells a tale of hard work, lots of laughter and has earned great respect in her local community. After all, it takes a character of some standing to get the late Freddie Trueman delivering flowers for her on a busy Christmas Eve.

But, like so many people who have thrown their lives into non-stop hard work, she suffered an agonising tragedy that would have sent many a mother into a paralysis of depression: her 16-year-old son Jonathan, a handsome, happy 16-year-old studying for his O-levels at Ermysted's Grammar School in Skipton, was knocked off his bike and killed when hit by a car.

It was a tragedy which brought an already tight-knit family even closer together, but it is still a remarkable woman who, after that, can come up with the following quote: "Life is a game of snakes and ladders. When you're down, you keep on throwing the dice until you get a double six. Then you start climbing back again."

Marie-Louise Chapman was born in Gargrave in 1939 and has spent the whole of her life in the village apart from a few years away at private school in Ilkley and at a florists' college in London.

She came from an ambitious, hard-working family of which there were many in the Yorkshire Dales of those days. Her father founded the Pennine Bus Company and her mother was the daughter of the headmaster at the village school - Marie can look across the road into the old schoolhouse where her mother spent her childhood.

Dad was a tough, shrewd businessman who seized any opportunity which came his way, but was a strict task-master: when he set his three daughters up in a thriving florist's business in the old Montague Burton's building at the bottom of Keighley Road in Skipton, he did not pay them a wage - an old Dales farming tradition.

"We got all our board, lodgings and clothes paid for, but we never had a pay packet," says Marie with a forgiving giggle. "We never had any cash of our own. When I wanted to buy my first ever record - by Elvis Presley, of course - we three sisters debated whether I could take a pound from the till. In the end, we decided OK - just this once.'"

She married Colin Chapman, who worked at the Midland Bank in Skipton, and his family had a similar hard-working Dales background: his forebears had won the first contract to deliver the Royal Mail in Craven and at one time owned 54 horses for their carriage rounds.

When their three children came along - sons Jonathan and Christopher and daughter Helen - Marie wanted to be at home when they got back from school in Gargrave so, again with dad's help, they opened the now famous Dalesman Cafe in the centre of the village.

This was a magnet for cyclists who, in those days, flocked to the Dales in their thousands. Accreditation by the Cyclists' Touring Club, then a major national organisation, ensured a constant flow of thirsty and hungry customers. Then Jonathan was killed...

"By this time, Helen had got a BA at university and Christopher had started a promising career in the Army," she says sadly. "The accident could have ripped the heart out of the family, but instead it brought us closer together.

"Helen opened the Poppyfields Florists on the main road in Gargrave and Christopher came out of the Army to help run the two businesses. Close ranks - that's what good families do when tragedy strikes."

They sold the cafe some years ago, but Marie still works with Helen at Poppyfields, which is as much a village social centre as a business. Over the years, they have attracted some famous customers.

The late Iain Macleod, an old Ermysted's boy who died before he could become "the best Conservative Prime Minister we never had", helped her out by sweeping the floor of the parish church when she was decorating it with flowers for a wedding. Alan Bennett, the Clapham-based world renowned playwright, is a regular customer.

So was the late Fred Trueman - not a man to be trifled with - who dropped in one Christmas Eve to see if the flowers he had ordered for his wife Veronica had been delivered yet.

"Sorry, Fred, I've not got round to it yet - and I've half a dozen more bouquets to deliver up Eshton Way," she apologised. "Don't fret, lass," replied Fred. "Give em to me and I'll drop 'em off for you."

Anyone who remembers Fearsome Fred Trueman on the cricket pitch must marvel at the image of this man delivering flowers. His former team-mates would have crucified him with barbs of sarcasm.

But Marie-Louise Chapman is the sort of Dales woman who inspires such kindness from others because she is so kind herself. Keep rolling the double sixes, Marie.