Collection FRE - FREDERIKSEN, MILDRED

Mildred Florence Frederiksen (1889–1966) was a collector of information on horological curiosities, and a regular reader and occasional letter writer to Horological Journal.

She was born Mildred Florence Faulkner in January 1889 to William Henry Faulkner and Emily Ebsworth Faulkner (née Honeybone), both schoolteachers. She was named Mildred Florence from the name on a gravestone in the churchyard of St. Mary-le-More, Wallingford, next to which her mother lived and had been brought up. Though Emily knew nothing about the person buried there, the name had taken her fancy as a child. At the time of Mildred’s birth, the family lived in the district of Benhilton near Sutton, Surrey, to the south of London.

In July 1934, aged 45, Mildred married Laurits (sometimes Laurids) Christian Frederiksen, a Danish-born tailor living in Bayswater, London, who had naturalized a couple of months earlier. Soon afterwards, until at least the outbreak of the Second World War, the couple lived in a flat in Powis Square, Notting Hill.

In 1935 and 1936, Mildred achieved modest fame to readers of some British newspapers owing to her appearance in advertisements for McDougall’s self-raising flour, in which, as “Mrs. Frederiksen”, she offered recipes and described the pastry-making that formed part of her domestic life at Powis Square.

By 1955, the couple had moved to Greenfield Place, Weston-super-Mare. That year, she started to create what was to become a series of scrapbooks entitled “Clock Miscellany,” a project that would continue until her death. It is possible that this was prompted by her finding that she was descended from the clockmaker Richard Honeybone of Fairford, Gloucestershire – she tracked down numerous clocks made by him and gave an address on the subject to family and friends in May 1955.
Mildred’s horological interests certainly became very broad, as her scrapbooks demonstrate. In a letter to the Horological Journal in May 1959, she noted, “I collect interesting items about clocks and clockmakers, and in fact anything bearing on the subject.” Her friends would send her horology-related postcards, pictures, and articles. Postcards sent by friends on holiday showing floral clocks around the world became a particular collecting theme.

Mildred Florence Frederiksen died at the age of 77 in December 1966, at a hospital in Wells, Somerset. Her husband died eight years later, in March 1975, at an old people’s home in Weston-super-Mare.