She was Kathleen Mary Robinson, a Lancashire girl, and the family called her Robbie. She trained at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, in Manchester, from 1929, and registered as a nurse in March 1933. One Saturday evening she came off duty and decided, rather than spend the rest of the night in the nurses' home, to go with a colleague to a café nearby for a cup of tea. They were still in uniform, with raincoats over the top, and Robbie put on a pink hat.

They were sitting quietly when a group of rugby players came in, cheerful and a little the worse for wear, having won that afternoon and, it is believed, earned a bonus for it. Before long one of them pointed across the room at her and announced to everyone present: I'm going to marry that girl in the pink hat. Her own description of him, given to her daughters years afterwards, was a fair-haired twit.

The lads would not take no for an answer and insisted the two women join them, then stood them supper. Robbie's eye, for the record, was on the tall dark handsome one. He walked her friend back to the hospital. Robbie was left with you know who.

She was not remotely interested and had no intention of seeing him again. He would not give up. She told her daughters that he took to loitering outside the hospital, waiting for her and asking her to come out with him, until eventually she relented. The rest is four daughters and fifty-three years.

Source: Wendy Jenkins, Emlyn and Kathleen's third daughter, in writing, 2026. This account corrects an earlier version on this site, which had them introduced at an afternoon tea arranged by Emlyn's sister Gwenny and placed Kathleen's training at Hope Hospital, Salford.

A contemporary newspaper report tells it differently, and rather more decorously for the press: that Kathleen was the nurse who treated him in hospital after he was injured in a match, and that this was how the two of them met. Given her own account of a café, a pink hat and a fair-haired twit, that looks like the version tidied up for print. What the newspaper settles beyond doubt is the date: they married on 7 August 1934, at St Paul's Church, Eccles, Lancashire. Gwenny stood as a bridesmaid, alongside a Miss Edith Suttaby, not yet otherwise identified.

Source: newspaper marriage announcement, "Footballer Married: To Nurse Who Attended Him in Hospital," 7 August 1934, Cardiff

One small corroboration, from the other side of the world. Two years after the wedding, a Sydney reporter watching him keep the Ashes at the Sydney Cricket Ground reached for the same head of hair and called it an auburn thatch, shining out like a beacon on a dark and stormy night. Robbie got there first, and more briefly.

Her own record

Kathleen is easy to lose behind the rugby, and the state register is the corrective. She appears in the Register of Nurses for 1937 in her own right, under number 67913: Jenkins, Kathleen Mary, née Robinson, trained at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, Manchester, from 1929 to 1932, registered by examination on 10 March 1933 in London. The address given is 40 Orme Avenue, Lancaster Road, Pendleton, Salford.

The dates settle the chronology of the pink hat. She was at Davyhulme from 1929, more than a year before Emlyn came north to Salford in December 1930, so the café was near her hospital and the girl in the pink hat was a nurse in the middle of her training when a rugby player pointed at her across a room. She qualified in March 1933 and married him sixteen months later, and the 1937 volume still carries her, under her married name with Robinson kept in brackets.

Park Hospital has a later claim on the national memory. On 5 July 1948 it became the first hospital of the National Health Service, opened by Aneurin Bevan, a miner's son from Tredegar. Kathleen had done her training in its wards sixteen years before that.

Source: General Nursing Council, Register of Nurses for 1937, General Part, page 1314, in the Archive.

She did not give up the profession when she married. The national register taken at the outbreak of war, five years after the wedding, records her as a staff midwife at a hospital: qualified now, and in post, with a four-year-old daughter at home and her husband about to go into uniform. The same page shows a Charles O. Roberts sharing the household, a physical training instructor and art teacher, almost certainly the Bob Roberts of the pink hat story, by then Emlyn's brother in law.

Source: 1939 Register, The National Archives R39, Salford registration district, in the Archive. See also Ubique.

Emlyn and Kathleen had four daughters, in order of age Pat, Wynne, Wendy, and Barbara, and, in time, grandchildren who grew up hearing these stories second-hand, piece by piece, and are only now, in 2026, putting them all together in one place at last. Kathleen died in 1987, six years before Emlyn.