South Yorkshire Times, July 22nd, 1944
Miss N. Hempson For Spain
Wombwell Main Director’s Daughter
Miss Norah Hempson, second daughter of Mr. R. G. Hempson, managing director of Wombwell Main Collieries, and Mrs. Hempson, of Raw Green, Cawthorne, has been appointed to an important secretarial post at the British Consulate General in Seville, Spain, and will travel there by plane shortly. She is 22 and is engaged to Captain Lester Nash M.C., R.A., who was decorated some two years ago for gallantry in the Burma campaign. He is still in the Indian theatre of war.
Miss Hempson is going back to the country of her birth. She was born in Malaga and by a curious chance in the same house as the officer to whom she is engaged. Mr. Hempson succeeding Captain Nash’s father in a shipping post. From Malaga, Mr. Hempson took over the managership of a large branch of the same firm at Seville, where Miss Norah Hempson attended a French school.
In 1930 she moved to an English school at Barcelona and was later sent to England, attending a private school in Norfolk, and afterwards Ipswich High School. Later she had a year or two at Sheffield High School. Then from 1938 to 1939 she had a year in Paris, obtaining a diploma in languages. With a commercial career in mind, she took a secretarial course at Queen’s College, London, and while there entered a Board of Trade examination and won the bronze medal for the year in Spanish. Her first post was on the commercial staff at Wombwell Main Colliery where she spent eighteen months before accepting a post as secretary to the manager of the of the Cambridge Flax Co. at Newmarket, since taken over by the Ministry of Supply. In this way she obtained the Civil Service contact.
It is by virtue of her fluency in languages that she has obtained her new post. Miss Hempson’s sister, Judith, is married to Major Peter Roberts, son and heir of Sir Samuel Roberts Bart., Chairman of the Wombwell Main Company Ltd., and several other industrial enterprises.