CONTENTS
Massapeag
Upbringing
Birthday presents
Holidays
2 Meet the ancestors
Parents
Grandparents
Great-grandparents
Earlier family history
3 Schooling - the happiest days?
Primary school - Hampton
Primary school - Sunbury
Secondary school
4 Childhood leisure - the really happiest days
Toys
Books
The river
The meadow
Farming
Pets
Holidays
Sunbury Park
The wireless
Cubs
Scouts
Air Training Corps
Harvest camp
Pen pals
Hobbies
5 What I did in the war
The blitz
Flying bombs
The German prisoners
Food
D Day and after
VE Day
VJ Day
6 Earning a living
Lloyds Bank
Royal Air Force
Vickers
Davy
7 Girlfriends
Childhood sweethearts
Adolescence
Grown-up affairs
8 Spare time activities - before marriage
Skating
Sport
Music
Dancing
The cinema
Holidays
9 Marriage
How we met
The wedding
Housekeeping
Children
Parenthood
Caroline and Philip
Julian and Julie
10 Homes and gardens
Ravenscourt Road
Dorville Crescent
Ulverston
Sunbury
Virginia Water
Lyne
Old Sodbury
Portishead
11 Spare time activities - after marriage
Radio and television
The cinema
Sport
The Round Table
The theatre
Evening classes
12 Retirement - the third age
Part-time work
Teaching
Writing
U3A
Investment club
Pension scheme
Full retirement
My earliest memory is doing a jigsaw puzzle. It must
have been my second birthday or the following
Christmas. (I was born on 31 August 1929 in a nursing
home in Hampton, Middlesex.)
MASSAPEAG
We lived in a house which my father built in the years
before their marriage (1 December 1928) on the Creek
Estate, Sunbury-on-Thames. This was typical “plotlands”
development of the time. I have always had profound
admiration for what he did.
We moved in 1935 or 1936 to a house on the other side
of the road, because it had a river frontage. My parents
spent the rest of their lives at that house, called
Massapeag, a North-American Indian name meaning fishing
village. It was so named to copy a house my mother
visited in the 1920’s in the USA, which was 16
miles from New London on the river Thame (we were 16
miles from London on the river Thames, or rather a
backwater called the Creek).
The house was actually a bungalow, on stilts, to protect
against flooding and had started its existence as two
first-world-war army huts. The garden was lengthened
soon after we moved in when the Creek at the end of
the garden was straightened.
The previous owner had been a bit of a joker and there
were several secret doors in the house; a wall cupboard
with revolving shelves, a bookcase in the dining room
with false book backs which was a secret door into the
larder, and a hidden box set in the floor beside the
living-room fire which was opened by using a foot-pedal
- useful as a frightener in the middle of a ghost story!
UPBRINGING
I was a timid, nervous child. I think I had a fairly
strict upbringing, although others will say I was spoilt.
I do remember being kept at the table because I did not
eat up my dinner, but after some time I was let off.
My sister, who was 5 years younger, was much more
outgoing - my mother called her the Surrey Comet (our
local paper) because she picked up all the gossip.
I do not remember either of my parents as being
physically affectionate to me or my sister- no hugs and
kisses, but equally no slaps or hidings.
I have a recollection of the Christmas presents from the
Saunders grandparents one year being packed in a
tea-chest and they were all things which my grandmother
had bought in the previous Harrods sale.
Grandpa Claxton used to take me up to the park (Hyde
Park, near where they lived) and I was envious of the
children with tricycles. He said he would get me one
“when my ship comes in” and I literally
believed that - I could picture this sailing ship at sea!
On wet days he took me to the museums and we would
attend a slide or film show - he always fell asleep
and would start to snore, so I would have to nudge him.
BIRTHDAY PRESENTS
When I was about four or five my birthday present was a
choice between two pedal cars and I chose a simple
racing car, coloured red. Why didn’t I pick what
I now remember as easily the better choice - a lovely
model Austin Seven, complete with windscreen, horn and
imitation lights?
There was another birthday present I remember - a
scooter. I set off round the path on my first use, fell
and put my tooth through my lip. It was the day of the
coronation of King George VI and we were going to see
the procession. I put a stop to that. The scooter was
never seen again by me!
HOLIDAYS
I don’t remember pre-school friends apart from the
other children living down the road, who were all a few
years older, so I was a bit left out. But I remember two
girl cousins (one from each side of the family) who were
only months younger and lived within 10 miles. The
families exchanged visits from time to time and we had
a seaside holiday with one of them.
There was another holiday on the Isle of Wight when I
was two, which my parents always looked back on with
great pleasure. I was the only child there and was
certainly spoilt, at least by one newly-wed couple who
enjoyed taking me out.
My father was also a bit of a joker (like the rest of his
family on the male side). On that holiday he and another
man dressed up as women and went down to the local pub,
not something treated as innocently these days. Family
parties were always a time for pranks and jokes.
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MY PARENTS
My mother went to the USA for 18 months before they were married. She was a lady’s maid in London and the people she worked for asked her to go with them. She lived in New York and Washington. They wanted her to stay and wanted to take on my father as chauffeur, but it didn’t happen. So I was nearly an American! My father was a librarian and worked in the General Library at the Natural History museum in South Kensington all his working life. He retired at 60 after 45 years working in the same office and was made an MBE just before then. But in fact he continued to work part-time for another 20 years and was involved in the production of an index of books and articles on botany, for which he did most of the research. He was lucky enough to be just too young for the first world war and just too old for the second. He was born in 1901 and spent his childhood in South Kensington, London. He had one older sister. He used to entertain our children with stories of the wicked things he and his friends did as children, such as tying dustbin lids to door knockers then ringing the bell and running away, or pea-shooting at the blinds on the basement windows to make the maids scream ! He was a choirboy and there were more stories of the choir’s annual day out - the vicar seems to have been very patient. My mother was born in 1903 and also lived in South Kensington. Her home was a mews flat and she remembered when there were stables below (smells and flies !) During her childhood the change took place from horses to cars, when the stables became garages. She also remembered straw being put down in the road outside a house where someone was ill, to reduce the noise of the horses hooves (these were big houses in Queens Gate). She was the second oldest of five children, three girls and two boys. My father had his first stroke when he was 80 and was never the same again (he was already pretty deaf). After another stroke some years later he had to go into a nursing home in Sunbury and died in the following year, in February 1991, aged 90. The family were present at his bedside when he died and it was quite dramatic - he was unconscious and his breathing became increasingly slow and deep. There was a final very deep breath, in and out, and then no more. My mother became increasingly frail, was unable to look after herself and so we put her in a nursing home near my sister in Romford. She died soon after that, in December 1991, aged 88, from pneumonia in a local hospital, unfortunately with none of her family beside her. They were both cremated. After mother’s death, my sister and I arranged for a seat to be erected in their memory in a public park beside the river in Sunbury. They were good, hard-working, honest people and they did their best for my sister and me. GRANDPARENTS
Both my grandfathers were in the first world war. George Henry Claxton was in the Royal Flying Corps in England. Frank Saunders was a soldier in the trenches in France and was gassed, but recovered. George was born in 1878 in Clapham, London , the oldest of four brothers and two sisters. One sister died in 1893 aged 8, but all the other five lived to a good age and I remember them all. The four boys set up in Fulham as builders, taking different trades. My grandfather was the electrician. One brother became quite rich. Two others continued in business and so did their sons, although one went bankrupt. Grandpa Claxton was a great sportsman in his youth, being captain of both a cricket and a football team. He also swam in the Serpentine, on Christmas day, too! He was a good singer and was invited as a boy to join St. Paul’s cathedral choir, but didn’t. His voice broke from soprano to tenor without the usual messy bit in between. My Claxton grandparents finished up as caretakers of a large house in South Ken. which was split up into flats and businesses. They lived in the basement and I remember seeing the legs and feet of people walking past in the windows at the top of the rooms but at ground level outside. The rooms extended under the pavement. I also remember helping to clean some of the business rooms. My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Rhoda Lee and she was born in Brompton, London in 1870 (they were married in Hammersmith, London in 1898). She was a neat, tiny lady and a marvellous cook. When I worked in a bank in Piccadilly, London I went to her for lunch - I paid her sixpence a day ! My colleagues at the bank always asked what I had eaten and wanted to come, too ! My father always had lunch there, as the museum was within walking distance. My maternal grandmother was Eliza Ann Andrews, born in 1879 in Kensington. They were married in 1900 and she died in 1946, at our house - she is buried in Sunbury churchyard). My Saunders grandfather was born in 1879 in London. He started work as a bootboy in a big house. He subsequently did various jobs in service, including being a butler. He was also at one time a milkman with a horse and milkfloat, with the milk in a churn, dished out with a metal dipper. He was said to have watered down the milk! After my grandmother died he became a civil servant, working in the social security office in Richmond, Surrey, but still living in a mews flat. One of the things I remember about those flats was that the stairs led up from the front door and at the front on the first-floor landing there was a door opening out with a fixed gate inside. Outside was a clothes line going across the street on a pulley. I am not quite sure when he died but I think I was at least 20, so it must have been around 1950. He was cremated and his ashes were interred in my grandmother’s grave - I remember my distraught Aunt Florence crying “It’s so small!”, meaning the container (she always was highly volatile). There was a family row after the funeral, at our house. I still don’t know what it was about, but my Uncle Reg never spoke to or met any of the members of his family again. I did ring him at the time of my parents golden wedding anniversary but he would not come and unfortunately he was run over on his bicycle shortly afterwards, so I never met him again, much to my regret because he caused great fun whenever he visited us. GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
I do not remember any of them, but know that my Claxton ggf was also George and was born in 1847 at Watton, Norfolk. The 1861 census shows him as an agricultural labourer living at home. He was a gas fitter when he married Susan Brown in Hammersmith in 1876, so he had presumably moved to London by then. She was born in Lewisham in 1855. He died in 1897 but she lived until 1933 (and married again in 1926). The 1911 census, which became available in 2009, shows Susan Claxton living with her future husband, William Reith, though they told the census taker that they had been married for two years. She used the name Maud and her two sons still living at home were shown as stepsons of William. The 1901 census shows William married to Constance, who must have died (or left) before 1911. We think Susan had difficulty in surviving after George Claxton died in 1897, she being then aged 40 and with five children still at home. There was no widow's pension in those days. William also had two children at home, so there was great advantage to both families from getting together. Why did they not marry until 1926? Possibly because Constance was still alive till then or, perhaps more likely, they only considered it later, when they realised that there was a need ensure property rights for Susan if William died first. Susan incidently used the names Susan Maud on the marriage certificate. Anyhow, she was a survivor! The Lee ggf was Richard. He was born at Temple Cowley, Oxford in 1844 and he married Eliza Louisa Griffin in 1867, who was born in Sidmouth, Devon in 1845. He died in 1914 and she in 1921 and they are both buried in Brompton cemetery. My Saunders ggf, Henry, was born in Berkshire in 1841 but by 1851 was in London. He worked with horses all his life. He was married to Maria Sears, born in 1854 at Chevening, Kent. The parents of grandmother Eliza were William Andrews and Lucy Ann Ellis, both of whom were born in 1856 in Kensington.They were married in 1873 in Notting Hill. He also worked with horses. EARLIER FAMILY HISTORY
A cousin of mine on the Claxton side and her husband are great geneologists and have traced the Claxton family further back. Ggf George was the son of Edmund or Edward Claxton, a shoemaker born in 1802 at Scarning, Norfolk,who married Susan Ainger (born 1808 at Carbrooke, Norfolk) in 1829 at Carbrooke. They had 10 children and George was the 9th. Edmund died at Carbrooke in 1885 and Susan possibly at Norwich also in 1885. Edmund was the son of John Claxton, born 1761 at Scarning, who married Ellen Bone (also born in Scarning, in 1760) at Scarning in 1784. Edmund was the youngest of 9. John was the son of another John who married Margaret Snelling in 1760. I do not know when or where either of them were born or died. Beyond then I have had help from Kenny Austin, who is a member of the Claxton family and has traced our line back to Robert Claxton, born around 1850. They all lived in Norfolk. Further back is not certain - there are records of possible ancestors back to 1272 (Roger Claxton, lord of Claxton in the Bishopric of Durham). There was a Hammond Claxton who was mayor of Norwich in 1485 but his line, including some more Johns, is traced only to the death of another Hammond in 1671, so there is a gap of nearly 100 years. I have done some work on the Saunders side and have got back to William, father of ggf Henry, born 1814 in Hampshire but moved to London. He was a groom. John, the father of ggm Maria Sears, an agricultural labourer, was born in 1816 in Chiddingstone, Kent. On the Andrews side, I have reached James, born at Wycombe, Bucks, in 1813. He was a carrier. Another John, the grandfather of Lucy Ann Ellis, a hairdresser, was born in 1791 at St. Pancras, London. So far I have recorded some 25 surnames among my ancestors and I have to remember that they are all as important to me as Claxton.
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PRIMARY SCHOOL - HAMPTON
My mother was reluctant to send me to school, I think because she thought the local school was full of ruffians. It wasn’t but it was next to the toughest street in Sunbury. Anyway, the school board man came round and I had to go. She took me to the primary school in the next town, Hampton. This necessitated a 1/2 mile walk followed by a bus ride. She took me in the morning, collected me at lunchtime and brought me back and then fetched me again in the afternoon. All that when my sister was a baby! Clearly it couldn’t go on and so she sent me with a packed lunch. That didn’t work either, because one day I had a small shepherds pie which I threw away and the teacher found it. What a pest I was ! Next came lunch at a local cafe and I enjoyed that. Finally she arranged for me to go home to another boy’s house nearby. The first one was unsuccessful, but a second arrangement lasted. I remember both boys and their mothers. The second one gave us a halfpenny each to spend at the local shop. This produced a sweet of some kind, such as a liquorice dip called a sherbert dab, or a toy such as a propeller on a twisted metal rod which flew. Also it would buy seven small marbles or one large one. My first year teacher was an elderly, motherly woman. I remember nothing about the school day. I think I cried when I was left by my mother the first morning and I cried again on the first day of the second year, because I did not expect to have a different teacher (yes, I was a cry-baby). After a couple of years I moved to the junior school across the road. I suppose I was there only for a year, perhaps less. My main memory is of playground games, which were seasonal. Marbles were played for a period, then whip and tops, and so on. For marbles I had a board with slots in it; players had to roll a marble through a slot to win another marble, otherwise they lost their marble (is that where the expression comes from, I wonder ?) Tops were lethal. They were shaped like a mushroom and if you hit them right they would fly through the air. I broke a school window doing it. Another thing we did in the winter, when it was icy (which must have been more common then) was to make a slide across the playground. You ran towards it (like for a long-jump) and slid along it for a considerable distance, learning how to keep your balance. I suppose it wore out our shoes ! PRIMARY SCHOOL - SUNBURY (NURSERY ROAD)
Eventually my mother must have relented and I went instead to the primary school in Sunbury. It was still about 1 1/2 miles from home, but by this time I was able to use my cycle and make my own way. My teacher was Miss Macintyre and her form of punishment was a slap on the inner forearm - it stung ! I was pretty bright at school and always near the top. My “rival” for top place, Evan Jones, became my best childhood friend and I still see him at school re-unions (secondary school, where we both went). I have no recollection of what subjects we were taught, except that there were no foreign languages or science subjects. I remember that an old pupil who became wealthy donated a radio-gram to the school and we marched in and out to a record of a march, which I can sing but cannot name. There was only the one, although on reflection there must have been a B side ! The war interrupted our schooling. In 1939 those of us who lived near went to the house of a teacher - Mrs. Langridge and she taught us. This included my sister, who had by now just started, Evan and his younger brother and a few others I cannot remember. She was an excellent teacher (her class was the second from the top and I would have been in it anyway). Also she had a lovely big house beside the river near Sunbury church. It was knocked down after the war (and after she had died) to make more public space by the river and it so happens that the seat commemorating my parents is here her garden was. I progressed a lot that year. The next year, which was my scholarship (11 plus) year things went back to normal and we returned to the school. However there was no examination ( I think it was the only year there wasn’t one) and our success or failure was based on our school work. I passed second in the class of about 30. By this time, school dinners had started. I cannot remember what we had but it was war-time so it must have been difficult. Also in those days there was school milk at the morning break, government policy I believe. We had glass bottles containing 1/3 of a pint. I hated it! We were paired off in the top class, top boy with top girl, and so on. I sat next to Daphne Taylor. There was one occasion when our teacher (a man by this time) gave us a mathematical problem. As he set it out on the board I did it in my head and told Daphne the answer. Then we had to write it out (by the way, we had slates,but they were modern ones - white boards). Then Mr. Garner (nicknamed Scabby) worked it out on the blackboard and asked who had the right answer. Foolishly, I put my hand up and he asked to see my work. Of course, I forgot I had come to a different, wrong, written answer and was accused of cheating and given a thorough telling off. I responded by fainting ! It didn’t occur to me to bring Daphne to my defence. There was a boy in my class called Seagrove, who lived in the tough street nearby. On one occasion he was on the mat in the headmasters‘s room and he punched “Gaffer” Hakes on the nose. He was expelled. I got on all right with him and the others. This was the time when I first fell in love ! There were two girls in my class that I fancied - Daphne Turner, who I remember as a blond, dreamy-eyed girl, and Myrtle Thurloe, who was a lively, flighty brunette. Five boys passed the 11 plus. Probably the same number of girls. Four of us went to Hampton Grammar School for boys and one to Ashford County (my sister subsequently went there, it being mixed). SECONDARY SCHOOL
I remember the first day well. There was an annual intake of about 120, divided into four forms (not classes any more - part of the new language to learn). The four of us from Sunbury were split up over the four forms (1A,1B,1C and 1D) - that was how they arranged things. I was in 1A. In addition we had to be allocated to “houses”. The house captains had the choice and had been forewarned of likely lads from a sporting point of view. I was not one of these, so I was chosen near the end. My house was called Blackmore. The others were Garrick, Pope and Walpole, all names of past l ocal literary figures. The school had a long history, being founded in 1556. At the time I was there it was a State grammar school, although my father had to pay a small fee each term (it was means-tested). Subsequently it managed to become a public school, as it has now been for most of its life. Incidently my son Julian also went there. When I started in 1941 it was into the third building, which had only opened the previous year. It was in typical 1930’s style and they were very proud of it and anxious to preserve it, so we had to change into “house shoes” (plimsoles) immediately on arrival. Once I spilt some ink on the floor and had to pay the caretaker to remove the stain. The school hours were unusual because we went in on Saturday mornings, so that we had two sports afternoons a week, Wednesday and Saturday. We started at 9am and had a long midday break in the first form, because we had a separate third sitting for lunch. Home time was 4.20pm (except for those given 30 minutes detention, called clink). The working day was divided into seven periods of 40 minutes each, two after assembly, then a 20 minute break (we queued up for buns - and milk if you wanted it), then another two before lunch, with three in the afternoon. Sometimes you had double periods. Games was always a double period in the later afternoon, one day a week. Others were eg. for chemistry, to allow time for experiments. We had a form room and a form master but the system as for teachers to stay in their rooms and the boys to move around, so it was chaos when the bell rang at the end of a period. Homework was set, one hour a day in the first form, one and a half hours in the second and third and two hours in the fourth and fifth. Holidays were three weeks at Christmas and Easter, seven weeks in the summer and a few days at each half-term. Curriculum In the first and second forms you did Latin as well as French. From the third year onwards you could choose to drop Latin in favour of German or Spanish. I chose Spanish. Otherwise, it was English, Maths, Geography, History, Physics and Chemistry. Also there were Art and Woodwork as sort of secondary subjects. This was building up to the age 16 examinations, which were then called matric (short for matriculation) or general (short for general school certificate). By the time of taking the exams, English had been split into Language and Literature and Chemistry was only taken instead of a second language, if that was below par. In other words we only did a maximum of eight subjects. At the end of our second year a new idea was introduced - the quick form. The best 25% of our year were put into a form to sit the general a year early, ie after another two years instead of three (for all subsequent years this was done after the first year instead of the second, making the task a bit easier). I was just outside the cut-off point. My friend Evan was just in, but decided not to do it as being too tough (I tried to recover my ego by saying I would have done the same, but I didn’t mean it !). As a result the D form was split up over the other three and Evan came back into 3A with me. Generally though, a form stuck together over the first five years. I remember the names in my form well. Some were good friends. Blackpool During the suumer before the fourth year, when the V2 bombs started (we already had the flying bombs), my parents arranged for my sister and I to go to Blackpool, where my Uncle had been evacuated in his job and he, my Aunt and two cousins were living. We spent nine months there - how they managed in a three-bedroomed house I do not know, because there was another lady staying, too. I attended Blackpool Grammar School. They did not do Spanish, so I went in to the class which did not do a second language. They were the dunces and a tough lot! I became interested in collecting engine numbers and we used to travel to Crewe on Saturdays on a platform ticket! Another thing one boy and I did was to go to Blackpool station every morning on the way to school and help a man load his van with parcels - they were all laid out in street delivery order.(We didn’t get paid for it). My older cousin was the same age as I and had lots of friends, so this was the time when I dicovered girls and first went out with one. I also joined the ATC - Air Training Corps, where among other things I discovered smoking - very cheap cigarettes called Woodbines. My Aunt and Uncle must have known, by the smell on my clothes, but they never said anything. When I returned to Hampton during the last term before the summer holidays, it was decided that I was too far behind in Spanish to sit the exam the following year, so I did chemistry. Teachers With the war on, all the young teachers (I suppose I should call them masters) were away on other business. Many retired men were brought back and we had some women, too, which I think did not happen before the war. We had one elderly man teaching us physics. He was almost totally deaf and we perfected the art of ventriloquism. The problem was not laughing ! Poor old Ackie Akroyd knew someone had said something when we all exploded with mirth, but he didn’t have the ability to find out who. Another poor old chap could not control us at all and we just used to do what we liked. I am afraid we had no mercy. Other teachers were tyrants. I recall one boy who was already standing on his chair then being smacked round the head and knocked off it. That could not happen today. In my first year I had a mouth-organ, which one master (he was in charge of dinners) confiscated. At the end of the day I went to his room to ask for it back and he nearly exploded at my cheek ! (I never did get it back). However many were good teachers and one did not think of misbehaving in their lessons. Some were also great characters. We had an art teacher who was easily persuaded into telling us stories of his adventures round the world as a seaman. School sports Sport was a big thing. We played soccer in the winter term, athletics in the spring and cricket in the summer. There were form teams (which was about as far as I got), house teams and of course school teams,including “under 14”, “under 15” and first, second and third elevens. Athletics included running various distances, including cross-country, jumping high and long, javelin and discus throwing. There was a school sports day for athletics, at which the houses competed. One could win “colours” at athletics, which involved achieving standards of speed or distance for one’s year. Colours were won for football and cricket by being selected for a team (house colours and school colours). Houses got points for achievement at sport, to decide which was top in each category each year. Swimming was another period, once a week in the “summer” months at Hampton open-air pool. If you could dive in and swim a length you got your “button”, which meant that the button on your school cap could be yellow instead of black, which was the basic colour of the rest of the cap. (They came yellow and you had to ink it in black if you adn’t got your “button”.) Since those days the school has taken up rugby and, in particular, rowing, where they have beaten the top English and American teams and had a number of Olympic representatives. I was keen on sport but not very good. I played for my form, once represented my house in the school mile (I came last out of eight) and was possibly going to be picked as school third-eleven wicket-keeper when I left; this was before I took up bowling. Neighbouring schools There were in fact three schools in a row, all built at the same time. One was a girls’ public school, Lady Eleanor Hollies (hence our name for the girls - Hollies dollies) and the other a boys secondary school (they were the council cats and we the grammar dogs - according to us!). There was some fraternising with the girls, although talking over the fence was strictly illegal. There was also some aggravation with the boys, but not much. I never experienced it. Travelling to school Many of us cycled. I lived four miles away. I passed Evan’s house after one mile and picked him up there. Over the years his house became the meeting place for a number of boys and we travelled as a flotilla. Going home we did separately. It was a grind if wet, wearing a cape, especially if it was windy too. Later on I became skilful at following buses and hanging on the back of lorries. Looking back, I can see how dangerous it was. Of course in those days there wasn’t much traffic. School reports There were the usual term reports on which the teacher of each subject commented, together with the form master and the headmaster. One time the headmaster’s wife caught us cycling to school three abreast (the rule was no more than two abreast). My report that term carried the headmaster’s comment, #8220;Good, apart from riding three abreast”! In addition we had fortnightly report cards, on which our rating was shown on each subject, VG (very good), G, M (moderate), P (poor) and VP. The practice was to colour-code the ratings. These had to be taken home as well as the term report. The ratings also carried points, from plus 2 to minus 2, which counted towards house points. Examinations At the end of the fifth form I sat the general school certificate in eight subjects and got the highest mark (distinction ) in four and the second highest (credit) in the other four. It was probably better than expected and the joint best in the year, so I finally distinguished myself. However, I had already decided to leave and start work (only about 25% stayed into the sixth form in those days). I have always regretted not staying on and going to university. My parents allowed me to choose and no-one tried to persuade me otherwise but I only have myself to blame. My result also gave me matriculation and I got a certificate for that.
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TOYS
Jigsaws
I had a number of jigsaws and eventually they were
all mixed up in the same box, so the first job was
to sort them out. As I became good at doing them I
didn’t sort them first but did them all together.
I remember that the first one I had was a picture of
some people in a car, racing a steam train pulling
passenger coaches. Another was of ducks and children
in wellington boots in wet weather. A third was a
room in a Georgian or Jacobean house.
Later on we had a jigsaw which was a map of the world,
with slots into which had to be fitted the names of
the capital cities of each country.
Meccano
My meccano set was inherited from a relative. It was a
bit rusty in parts but was a large set from which I
could make (following the instruction book) various
working cranes , for example.
Soldiers
I had a number of sets of lead toy soldiers and a fort,
of which the base was in the form of a box into which
would fit the battlements and drawbrudge. There was
also a fort gun which fired wooden bullets propelled
by caps.
During the war, when new toy soldiers were unobtainable,
a friend’s father made and sold rather flat ones
which were unpainted.
Cars and buses
Like every boy, I had a collection of model cars and
buses. The buses were made of tin plate and were much
bigger than Matchbox scale. I had a toy racing car
which could be taken apart using a miniature spanner.
Also a clockwork car which was controlled by a wire
joining the car to a hand-held steering wheel.
Trains
One Christmas I was given an electric train set -
Hornby O gauge. There was a tank engine, three goods
wagons, rails and a control box. I already had some
clockwork track and wagons, plus stations and signals.
Over the years, further bits were added but I never got
round to points and more track. I recently sold it.
The Hornby catalogue was great. The best and most
expensive item, costing £5 (a fortune then) was the
Princess Elizabeth locomotive.
Other toys
These included building bricks, which were shaped and
coloured wood, tops, hoops, and a gyroscope which spun
on a miniature tower.
I also had a flying model plane - I think it was a
Lysander - which had a propeller and elastic
“motor”, which was placed in the bottom of
the box for winding up.
Books
I had lots of them. I recall linen ones early on,
picture books (one favourite was the story of a
little drummer boy, which I have tried to find again)
and then lots of story books - cowboys, Biggles,
A.A.Milne.
We also had annuals, such as Mickey Mouse. I forget
what else.
Then of course there were comics (at Hampton Grammar
second-hand comics were exchanged for a penny each).
There were comics for the very young - I forget what
they were called. After that there was the Dandy and
Beano, Film Fun, Radio Fun, and Adventure, etc. I also
had the magazine The Scout.
We had some bound volume of old Boys Own Papers,
as well as encyclopaedias, atlases and other
reference books. We also had lots of copies of the
National Geographic magazine - I remember the
advertisements more than the articles, symbols of
the USA so different from England.
THE RIVER
Swimming
The river was the centre of activities at home. I
didn’t learn to swim until I was about
seven and in fact I fell in four times before I
could swim and not once afterwards. I remember the
last occasion, seeing my toy boat over my head.
We swam two or even three times a day in the summer.
My parents had some friends who lived nearly
opposite and we usually swam over to their house -
the Creek was about 20 yards wide. Mother and
father joined in. I was very skinny and got cold
and shivery quickly.
Boating
We also had boats. The best was what is called a
double-sculling skiff. It was a beauty, with
cushions and carpets. We also had various dingies.
Later on I had a canoe which my father made from
barrage balloon fabric (which I still have).
Finally I had a sailing boat, called an
International, which we needed to take downstream
to get enough width in the river.
Ann and I learned to row very early on and we spent
hours going up and down. Going upstream was an
adventure because there were shallows where it was
necessary to get out and push. The stream was
always fast at these points, so it wasn’t easy
to manoeuvre the boat.
Downstream was also an adventure because it was
necessary to go through the main Sunbury weir pool,
where there was very fast, swirling water which
was dangerous.
I had a lovely toy sailing boat, given me by a
neighbour. It had four sails and a wooden hull.
There was a plate on it giving the maker’s
name and date, 1896. (I sold this recently, too.)
Later on, another near neighbour started hiring out
rowing boats and we got great entertainment
watching the antics of his customers, some of whom
had no idea what to do. His parting shot as they
left in a boat was invariably, “Keep one eye
behind you.” “Left (or right) hand
down a bit” was another regular instruction.
On one side of us was an access plot to the island,
where there was a private camping site. There was
a chain ferry for crossing the river and Ann and I
often helped newcomers to handle it, as we quickly
became experts.
Fishing
This was a regular sport, from the bottom of our
garden. We caught Perch, Pope, Dace, Roach and
Gudgeon, using different kinds of bait.
My father was a keen fisherman. I remember with
very great pleasure getting up very early (I mean
3am) on a Sunday morning in summer, to go fishing
with him up the river.
His fishing was bigger stuff - Bream, Chubb and
Barbel. His secret bait for Chubb was a white-heart
cherry (the red and yellow one, not the dark red
one, which was useless). The stone was removed and
the cherry threaded on to the hook. It was
irresistible to Chubb and he caught some big ones.
When he was 80 he took up fishing again and was out
in the dinghy one day when he stood up, overbalanced
and fell in. He couldn’t climb back into the boat
so he swam to the bank, towing the boat behind him
and then was able to get in. One can imagine what
my mother said when he got back home dripping wet !
Skating
In the winter of 1939/40 it was very cold and the
Creek froze over. Our neighbour checked the thickness
of the ice, four inches, and pronounced it safe for
skating. My father somehow found skates for us -
they were the clip-on variety, and we learned to skate.
We learned by pushing an upright chair in front of us.
The lady next door, who could skate well, tried it,
hit a bump, fell over and broke her nose.
When the thaw came, the water flooded our lawn and
then froze again, so we had our own private ice-rink
for a day or two.
Floods
These were a regular occurence in the winter. The
Creek was a safety-valve and was allowed to fill up,
flooding into all the gardens. The houses were in
fact bungalows built on stilts. There were very bad
floods in 1948 and the house had to be abandoned -
my parents moved everything three feet up from the
floor, but ours was the only house on the estate not
flooded inside.
Games in the garden
The river attracted lots of visitors and garden
games were another favourite. We might play cricket
(into the river was six and out, and recovering the
ball usually entailed a boat trip). Or it might be
badminton, tennis, clock-golf, french cricket,
football. The plants were badly knocked about and
windows were sometimes broken.
A visit by my Uncle Reg and his wife Auntie Bobby
added to the fun. He always played, with little
skill but great gusto and something always happened.
We also played table-tennis in the dining room,
where there was barely room to get round the table
and part of the skill was using the walls.
Land yacht
I once tried to make a land yacht for “sailing”
round the garden. We already had a wooden box
on pram wheels which could be steered. I fitted it
with a mast from the family skiff and made a boom
and a sail out of an old sheet.
It worked all right but was very slow!
Scooter
I was given a scooter, I think as a birthday present.
On my first attempt on it round the garden path I
hit a bump or something, fell over and pushed a front
tooth through my lip.
I had to be taken to the doctor for stitching and it
was, I believe, the day of the coronation of King
George VI. I was not popular as we were going to see
the procession and didn’t make it.
I never saw the scooter again!
THE MEADOW
Near our house was a meadow, which ran partly along
the bank of the upper reach of the Creek. It was cut
in half by a tributary called the Ash, which was only
about three feet wide and was fordable and bridged by
a tree trunk.
As children we spent hours in the meadow. The grass
was long and it served as a prairie for playing
cowboys and indians. We had home-made head-dresses,
etc. There were also lots of climbable trees, mainly
willows along the river bank.
We also had lots of good climbing trees in our garden -
each tree had its own climbing characteristics and I
remember particularly a sycamore and a horse-chestnut,
side-by-side but quite different.
When we played out like that we were summoned home
for dinner either by the ringing of a handbell or
the sounding of an old car hooter (used during the
war because bells were forbidden - they were the
signal for a gas attack!). Both were very distinctive
and capable of being heard from a great distance.
The river bank along parts of the meadow was liable
to be eroded away by the fast-running stream and
when I was older a friend who lived nearby and I
“encouraged” lumps of bank to fall in, by
heeling them down.
It was also a good place for birds’ nests.
There were holes in the river bank where kingfishers
built and I watched a nest for some time. When I went
back after not being to it for a while, there was no
action so I put my arm in and pulled out a sand-martin!
It had taken over the empty nest.
I remember a duck’s nest with 14 eggs in it. I
collected eggs and took one, but made the mistake of
telling someone else. When I went back they had all
gone.
FARMING
The meadow was owned by Farmer Vincent of Vicarage
Farm. He seemed a dour old man but one summer when
I was about 10 my mother arranged for me to work there.
On reflection I didn’t do much even though I got paid
something (I forget how much - sixpence a day perhaps).
I really enjoyed it. I remember helping to put the milk
through a cooler and separator. Also cleaning out the
muck from the cowsheds. There was a girl working there
as a land-girl and she supervised me. She was very
attractive, grown up and definitely upper class.
At the end the farmer asked me to look after the meadow
for him, which seemed to give me the right to go in it
whenever I wanted - which I had been doing anyway !
PETS
We had few pets; no cats or dogs. We did have rabbits
during the war but they were for food. I remember how
lovely the baby rabbits were.
The only pets I ever had were two mice. They were
black and tan in colouring . They were kept in a wooden
box with a glass lid. After a while I neglected them
(they were not very interesting). One died and my
father disposed of the other (how I do not know). I
suspect it ate some of the dead one. Maybe one killed
the other because I did not feed it enough.
HOLIDAYS
We had a few family holidays in the years immediately
before the war. Two years running we went to a holiday
camp with another family who were friends. It was at
Hemsby on the Norfolk coast and was called Maddisons
(the name of the owner).
We went by hired car (a Morris with a dickie seat at
the back) and when we arrived my father went in.
Everyone was having a meal and when they saw my father
they started chanting ,”Take that tie off !”
My mother was horrified, but we all enjoyed those
holidays.
Then we went to farms in Devon for two years. They were
good, too. The last one, Tarr’s farm in south
Devon, sticks in my mind more, partly because they had
two children roughly the same ages as Ann and me.
(We recently visited the area and - with some difficulty -
found the farm and also met the older boy, now and old man
like me, but he did remember us.)
On both occasions we joined in the farming as well as
going out. I remember helping at the harvest, stacking
the sheaves into stooks and, when the reaper reached
the middle of the field, chasing the rabbits with sticks.
We also did some horse riding but once when I was on a
horse and we were standing still, talking and laughing,
my horse threw me. Apparently whilst laughing I had been
sliding backwards in the saddle and reached the horse’s
sore point ! I was never interested in horse riding again.
SUNBURY PARK
My friend Evan Jones lived at a lodge for a big house
called Sunbury Park. The house was a ruin, but we were
able to explore it and the huge grounds around it.
That was a great place for birds and I think my
life-long interest in them stemmed from that time.
We had no binoculars in those days but we were good at
spotting birds and finding nests. We also collected
eggs - it was not illegal then and not even considered
wrong provided you only took one egg from a nest.
WIRELESS
Listening to the wireless was a family leisure activity
(there was no TV in those days). My first memory of a
programme is the Ovaltinies on Radio Luxembourg. I
think it was for half an hour on Sunday evenings and
was a children’s programme.
Then of course Children’s Hour, every day early
evening. Uncle Mac and David plus a woman were the
presenters. A favourite programme was Toytown, with
Mr. Growser and Larrie the Lamb.
I also recall a serial on Radio Luxembourg called Number
Seventeen. I think it was a story by W.W. Jacobs and it
was set in a seaport where it was always foggy and
frightening. There were Chinese baddies but here I may
be confusing it with another mystery serial called
Dr. Foo Manchu.
Later on there was ITMA, with Tommy Handley and a host
of characters with imitatable voices and catch-phrases.
Also Band-wagon with Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch.
Monday Night At Eight was another favourite, “Once again
we stop the roar of London’s traffic toring you
some of the interesting people who are In Town Tonight.”
The war brought a number of service-related comedy
half-hours - Much Binding in the Marsh was the Air
Force one, The Charlie Chester Show the Army and the
Navy one was Much Sinking in the Ooze.
CUBS
I joined the Wolf Cubs when I was eight. The meetings
were at the school I was attending then, Nursery Road.
I enjoyed it a lot. The “pack” (our group) were
divided into “sixes” and the leader of a six was
called a sixer, with the second in command called the
second (not very original, was it).
We tied knots and played games. There were also badges
to pass but I remember little of that even though I know
I passed some. Anyway, it is probably still very similar.
Generally it seems that females supervise cubs. The
group boss was called Akela, from Kipling’s The
Jungle Book ,and lesser mortals had other names from the
same source.
We wore uniforms, coloured green, with caps, scarves
which were different for each pack, and the “six”
insignia, which I believe was a colour. When you passed
the initial test, you received a metal cap badge in the
shape of a wolf’s head.
SCOUTS
On reaching the age of eleven, you graduated into the
Boy Scouts. This happened whilst I was still at primary
school, so I went into the 1st. Sunbury troop, which had
its own headquarters in an old school bulding in Sunbury.
(There was a troop at Hampton Grammar, but I stayed with
Sunbury).
The troop was divided into patrols. We only had two,
Owls and Peewits (they were all names of birds). I went
into the Peewits. My patrol leader then was a senior boy
at Hampton Grammar called Mike Brudenall who had already
qualified as a King’s Scout, the highest level you
could reach and the only one we ever had.
(Mike became school captain, went on to be a doctor and
eventually became the Queen’s gyneacologist. I
have seen him at school re-unions; he is quite small
compared to the giant I remember).
Camping
Soon after I joined I went to camp for four days with
three other boys, one the same age as me and the other
two substantially older. We had a splendid time charging
about in the woods. We cooked our own food, which we
took with us aas well as tents etc. on the troop trek-cart
(a two-wheeled cart which could be pulled along by hand
using along pole and cross-piece at the front), which
we towed on our bikes.
Our troop campsite was at a place called Whiteley
Village, near Walton in Surrey. It was designed as a
protected home area for retired employees of Whiteleys,
a large department store in London. There were lovely
woods all round.
There were other camps from time to time, usually of a
lot more boys. My cooking skill was making sponge
puddings, which I mixed in one pot and put it in another
with water for steaming. The pots were called billy-cans.
Another boy was the best at slicing bread (you couldn’t
buy it ready-sliced in those days - I wonder what was the
best thing BEFORE sliced bread - real bread ?)
When I became a patrol leader I formed a new patrol and
was allowed to choose its name - I chose Swifts (another
boy chose Cuckoos for his new patrol). I had weekly
patrol meetings at my house and on one occasion took my
patrol to camp. This was a big responsibility for a
14-year-old and something went wrong - an argument about
something but I forget what - and one boy went home early.
Games
We also had something called wide games. This was usually
a day out in an open space, where one team had to try to
capture the HQ of the other, by creeping in . We usually
did this at a huge sand-pit on Wisley Common. I went back
many times with my family to find that pit, without
success - its apparent disappearance is a family joke.
Now it is probably under the M25.
In addition to outdoor games there were certain
traditional games which were played indoors.
One was called bunk-the-barrel, where one boy stood with
his back to the wall, another put his head between the
first boy’s legs and the rest of the team formed
a line of backs behind him. The other team had to run
and jump on the backs, in turn, wriggling forward. When
all were on, the team on top rolled from side-to-side,
trying to make the underdogs collapse. It was tough
stuff, especially for the little ones.
Another popular tough game was where one person stood in
the middle of the hall and everyone else went to one end.
At a given signal those at the end ran to the other end
and the one in the middle had to catch one and lift him
in the air whilst shouting “British Bulldog”
(the name of the game).
That one was then in the middle, too, and so it went on.
Obviously the little ones got caught first and it was an
almighty scrum trying to catch and lift the biggest.
It was entirely permissable to kick out with one’s
legs, to fend off the attackers. There were many bruises.
Waste paper
One of the things we did to raise money was the
collection of waste paper. We collected it on Saturdays
and stored it at the back of a shop owned by one of the
scoutmasters. Then when we had a full trek-cart load we
took it to the depot. As it had only two wheels, the
trek-cart had to be properly balanced.
Running with the full load was a hazardous experience,
especially if you were small, as you had a job to keep
up and the wheels were threatening.
Tests
As time went on I passed various tests for badges, such
as second-class, requiring a series of subjects eg
semaphore, and individual badges, such as first aid.
Eventually I passed all my first-class tests except the
last. This entailed hiking 14 or cycling 30 miles,
camping overnight, cooking and then writing up a log
afterwards. Two of us did the cycling version together.
When we got to the camp-site, the girl guides were
camping nearby and they kindly cooked our food. I thought
we were pretty resourceful, but the scoutmaster found out
(his wife was the guide-mistress) and he failed us. I
never forgave him and left soon after.
ATC
Following my return from Blackpool, I joined the school
ATC. We had parades and one thing I really enjoyed was
being in a team which did a series of marching movements
without any orders - ie we memorised the movements.
We also went to camp and I had my first experience of
flying. The camp was at an airfield in Cambridgeshire I
think, where there was a squadron of Lancaster bombers.
This was just after the war and they were rehearsing
for a goodwill tour of the USA. They were doing close
formation flying and it was very exciting.
HARVEST CAMP
The school organised harvest camps in the summer holdays
and in 1945 I was old enough to go. There were four from
my form and we kept together and worked on a large farm
in Berkshire. The camp was in a village school nearby.
We slept in the school hall on palliasses - bags filled
with straw (we took our own blankets).
We had great fun on that farm. On one occasion we were
given a box of matches and told to burn the stubble in a
field. There was no supervision. We certainly burned the
stubble and nearly took a row of cottages with it!
We also did some bailing. This was following a combine
harvester on a bailer pulled by a tractor. We sat three
a side . The straw was drawn up into the machine and
compacted into a bail. Our job was to pass wires through
the bail, to tie it together. Also there were wooden
slats between each bail, which had to be caught when the
bail was pushed out at the back, and re-inserted at
the front.
Another day we were put on weeding mangle-worzles.
They were in rows in a huge field which seemed a mile
long. It was so boring that for a change we weeded out
all the mangles in one row and left in the weeds.
One of the masters at that camp was keen on ballroom
dancing and we had dancing lessons twice a week in the
village hall, with the girls from the village. Naturally
the village boys were jealous and there were fights.
I enjoyed dancing and was good at it (quicksteps,
waltzes and foxtrots - real Victor Sylvester stuff -
he was the most famous dancing teacher of the day).
We all four went back the next year and it was a repeat
of the year before, except that I had to leave early to
start work.
PEN PALS
It was the custom then to have pen pals and I had quite
a few - all girls! I think the contact came through
school. My pen pals were in Australia, New Zealand,
Canada and France. I suppose we learned a lot about what
life was like in the other country. I did meet the New
Zealand girl when she came to London, but only once.
HOBBIES
There was a stage when I made model aeroplanes. These
were from kits consisting of pieces of balsa-wood, glue,
paint and transfers. It was possible to carve realistic
models, eg of Hurricanes, Spitfires and Messerschmit
109’s and I hung them from my bedroom ceiling.
They were much better than their plastic post-war
successors.
Another hobby was stamp collecting (my father was a very
keen collector all his life). I specialised in stamps
showing aircraft and had a few valuable ones.
In those days everyone collected cigarette cards and I
had a lot, mostly mounted in books. I still have them.
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I do remember “the day war broke out”, that is of course the second world war. I was just 10 years old. First of all the air-raid sirens went almost immediately, shortly followed by the “all-clear” - a false alarm. Secondly I remember being quite upset and crying after I had gone to bed, because I was afraid. It must have distressed my parents. We already had our gas masks and our identity cards - I still have them both. We had to carry the gas masks with us all the time. Later on, an additional section was added, due to a new potent gas. Nothing much happened in the first year, except that our schooling was interrupted. Ann and I and a few others living locally went to school at the house of a teacher who lived nearby (about a half-a-mile away instead of 1 1/2 miles). I think that lasted for the first year but then we went back to the school, just in time for the real war to start. THE BLITZ The battle of Britain started in August 1940 and we saw some of the dog-fights high in the sky. Also the bombing started and we spent some time at school in the air-raid shelters. Mostly we sang songs. There were benches to sit on, along the walls. At home we also had a shelter - of sorts ! Our house was a mainly wooden bungalow with a corrugated-iron roof, raised on stilts (for flood protection) and the shelter was built under the only room which was made of concrete blocks with a tiled roof - which happened to be my bedroom. The floor of the room was laid with old mattresses and there was a trap-door in the floor to get into the shelter (there was also access from outside). Underneath had been dug out a bit and sides had been added (of wood). We had a paraffin stove for heating and cooking and took down hot-water bottles and blankets, because we had to spend nearly every night in there during the autumn of 1940.This was because the German planes attacking London headed for the River Thames and had the extra land-mark of the large reservoirs in our area. So in fact although we heard the planes going over we didn’t get bombing - except once. We had our local “blitz” one night. My father put out an incendiary bomb which landed in our garden and there were a number of small high-explosive bombs around the area. We explored the craters the next day. Apart from that, we had the noise every night of the anti-aircraft guns. There was a box barrage fired from nearby, which made a tremendous racket. (Shells exploded in a cubic area of sky and nothing in it could survive - but there was never anything in ours!) We collected lots of shrapnel from these affairs. Shrapnel could kill - one of the reasons air-raid wardens and others wore tin hats. My father was an air-raid warden and was based at a post near our house. He was on duty some nights of the week. He also did night duty at the Natural History museum in London, where he worked. They had much more bombing and the museum suffered a lot, with incendiary bombs and high explosives, including a very big one called a land-mine. Many of the books from his library had been evacuated to the country, but some rare ones were caught in the fire and we had individual pages of unique books pinned on a clothes-line in our kitchen, to dry out. Before the war there were 15 staff, but during the war there were only two of them. They did have to provide information for potential targets from time to time. I think it was for his devoted work during the war as much as anything that he was awarded an MBE when he retired. Incidently he cycled to work throughout the war - 16 miles each way.I went with him a few times when I was big enough. It was exhausting. There was one occasion when he and two friends were in a fishing punt near the weir in Sunbury that they saw three planes going in to land at Vickers factory at Brooklands and they saw that the last one was German ! It had sneaked in that way and dropped its bombs on the factory. My mother was in the WVS (Womens Voluntary Service). On one occasion she mentioned in conversation that her father-in-law was an air marshall. She had missed out two words, because he was an air-raid shelter marshall! One of the things she did was to accompany evacuees on trains - this was while we were in Blackpool. THE FLYING BOMBS I remember the flying bombs very well and, in particular, the night the V2 rockets started. They were very frightening because you couldn’t hear them coming - just the explosion when they landed. One Sunday we had a lot of people at the house and we went on an expedition up the river where we lived. At the end was a weir called Tumbling Bay and it was an exciting expedition because you had to get out and push the boat over shallows. After we had started back, the air-raid siren went, which in those days meant a flying bomb was headed our way. As we arrived back at our house we heard the bomb coming (I shall never forget that noise) and heard the engine cut out. That usually meant an immediate vertical drop and so safety for us as we could tell it was still some distance away. I rushed to the top of the bank to look for the explosion and I saw the flying bomb apparently coming straight towards us - it was of the rarer glider type. I shouted a warning, then realised it was not heading quite our way. Well, it hit that weir at Tumbling Bay where we had been thirty minutes earlier. Two people were killed and the weir flattened , causing the river to flood. Of course we realised afterwards that we would have set off for home when the siren went, anyway, so would have been safe, but a Dutch merchant sea captain visiting us that day, who had been through numerous convoys, said he had never been more frightened. I think it was that event as much as anything that caused my parents to arrange for my sister and I to be evacuated to Blackpool to my aunt and uncle, where we stayed from August 1944 till March 1945. THE GERMAN PRISONERS Our house was almost beside the Thames River Board offices and one day agroup of men appeared working in the grounds. Their working clothes had large coloured patches on the jacket and trousers: they were prisoners of war. My mother made them tea and gradually my parents became friendly with them - one in particular named Eric, who in fact was nearer my age than theirs. Their camp was about 10 miles away and myfather, my sister and I cycled there once to visit them in the camp. We were allowed in without any difficulty. After the war, Eric brought his wife over to visit my parents and they remained in touch for many years. I think all the prisoners appreciated meeting some ordinary English people, on friendly terms. FOOD As a child my diet was normal. My mother prepared the food and had the problem of making do during the war, when there were shortages. We did not have sugar in our tea and always had a surplus which could be exchanged with other people for other rationed foods (this was the fringe of the so-called black market). We had ration books, which were partly for portions of specific food, such as butter (two ounces a week) and partly for a choice of less basic items (such as tinned food) by use of a points system. The only eggs were dried eggs, in powder form. Some people were favoured by shop-keepers, hence the term “under-the-counter”. We always ate together as a family although there was a time when my father had a special diet to try to cure or avoid attacks of migraine - he suffered very badly from these in middle age and could be prostated for two days at a time, about once a fortnight at the worst. He had always been keen on dieting for health, but didn’t inflict it upon the rest of us. School dinners started at primary school, just after the war started, presumably as government policy to ensure an adequate diet. Certainly I never remember not having enough to eat, although I have a recollection of seeing oranges for what seemed like the first time when visiting a Dutch ship in harbour in London near the end of the war. Immediately after the war food was just as short. I remember going to what were called British Restaurants, where the food was a bit like school dinners except that there was some choice. These were again government policy. Rationing still existed when we got married in 1954, but only for clothing, not for any food. D DAY AND AFTER D day caused great excitement, We had a map of France on the wall, with coloured flags for the Allies and the Germans and we listened to the news to find out how to move them. I remember seeing American bombers flying back from daylight bombing raids, sometimes with huge chunks missing where they had been hit. VE DAY This was the day to celebrate victory in Europe. I think it was in June 1945. We had a big outdoor party at our house. All the scouts and guides were there and lots of other people. We had a bonfire on which we burned an effigy of Hitler. My parents obtained from somewhere a large number of coloured jars in which they put candles, so that we had coloured lights. All the flags that could be found were flown. It was a great occasion. VJ DAY This was in August 1945 and I was at school harvest camp. We joined in the celebrations in the Berkshire village where we were billeted. They had a huge bonfire and we boys had great fun with the local girls. I had no understanding at the time of the horror of the atom bombs which had achieved this victory.
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LLOYDS BANK When I left school I had no idea what job to do. My paternal grandparentshad a friend who was well up in Lloyds bank and he arranged an interview for me. I was accepted and started at the Piccadilly, London, branch in August 1946, just before I was 17. I suppose I thought it might be a suitable career for me. It was a large branch, over 50 employees. I was one of three junior clerks. We worked from 9am until the day’s work was done, ie usually about 5.30 pm but at month ends it was later and the year end could take till nearly midnight. This was because every transaction that day had to be recorded and the books balanced. The bank opened on Saturday mornings and we worked every other Saturday, till about 1 pm. You could wear sports jacket and flannels that day but otherwise it was a suit (I started work with my first and only suit). One of our duties as junior clerk was to go with one of the messengers to collect the registered post. This was a walk there and back, with a stop at a cafe on the return journey. One of the messengers was a tremendous character. His name was Captain Beadell and he was someone from the upper classes who had fallen on hard times. He had tremendous stories to tell of his army life in the Middle East. He was also a great drinker and invited me to the nearest pub for a drink after work. This was my introduction to beer and I drank too much on some occasions. Another of our jobs was to send out the post, sticking on the stamps which were bought with a cash float.We were supervised in this job by older clerks, most of whom were back from the services. I regret to say they introduced us to fiddling the books - entering more letters than there actually were and pocketing the additional stamp money. There was no independent check. I still feel guilty ! We never worked on the counter and spent most of the time on the first floor, which was a mezzanine floor overlooking the banking hall. Another job of ours was checking bank balances for customers at the counter. The system was a mechanical hand-written message, written on the machine downstairs and automatically repeated on an identical machine upstairs. The answer was given in the same way in reverse. In those days of course there were no computers and all entries in bank accounts were done on electrical machines operated by a gang of girls. So there were a lot of young women around. 1946/7 was a very bad winter and there were many power cuts. When the machines were not working we sometimes had to enter the day’s transactions by hand on long sheets (called for some reason the waste). These had to be added up by hand and everything still balanced before we could go home. (All done by lamp- light.) That was an experience ofwhat anking was like before mechanisation. It was a very interesting branch as a number of customers were famous people in show business. I suppose it is no longer a breach of confidentiality to mention for example the comedian Arthur Askey and there was a well-known family of impressarios. I decided to forward my career by studying for the banking examinations and took four subjects in the first year, two of which were new to me. I didn’t work hard enough and failed those two. As you had to pass three for any to count, it was a waste. That was the only time in my life that I failed an exam. My first pay weekly packet was about £3, from which I gave my mother half. I managed very well on the rest. Travelling to work was by train from Sunbury to Waterloo, about 40 minutes, with another half hour to get to Sunbury station and about 20 minutes on the tube to Piccadilly Circus, about 1 1/2 hours altogether. The journey up was fun. There were enough of us to fill a carriage and someone had a key which locked the doors, so we could keep others out. ROYAL AIR FORCE In October 1947 I was called up and went into the RAF. The reception centre was at Padgate, near Warrington, where we got our uniforms, had medicals and “jabs”, etc. That took a week. Initial training (known as square-bashing) was at Bridgnorth in Shropshire. It took seven weeks, reduced for me from eight because of my Air Training Corps experience. That was education in the university of life, because all sorts were thrown together and had to survive. Pay was 28 shillings a week - about £1.40, paid fortnightly. Of course there was substantial comradeship because it was us against the establishment, in the form of the corporals and others in charge of training, which was pretty tough and very fit-making. There was little free time but it was occasionally possible to get into town and there was home leave half way through. This was the time when I first got the nickname “Ginger”, partly because at the time the RAF were running a recruitment campaign aimed at men with previous service, with a poster showing a red-headed man in uniform, saying, “Ginger’s back, join him in the RAF”. The name stuck for some years and I always liked it. But I remember one wit who called me “Long-John Pound Note” because I was more valuable than silver! Personnel selection training We had to choose our service career. They told me I should become an accounts clerk but I turned that down (I was already aiming away from banking). I discovered that a personnel selection clerk automatically became a corporal (acting, but paid) so I went for that and got selected. The course for that was at the Air Ministry in Aldwych, London, so I was based in a block of flats at St. John’s Wood, near Regents Park. We caught the bus to work, just like the other commuters. I found that most of the others on the course were due to go to university after National Service, so how I got in I do not know, except that I did very well at the battery of standard tests and administering those tests would be part of the job. At that time the services were in the forefront of standardised personnel testing. Our tests were general intelligence, English ability, mathematical ability and mechanical aptitude, mostly of the multiple choice type. Also we learned about aircrew selection tests. North Weald I passed the course and found myself “posted” (the technical term for being moved) to the RAF central medical establishment, near the Middlesex Hospital in central London. Working there at the time, doing his National Service, was Bob Monkhouse, who was then just breaking into radio. After a few weeks I was moved (“detached” was the correct term here, as I remained under the control of London) to a subsidiary office at the medical board part of the aircrew selection board at the old wartime RAF station at North Weald in Essex. The medical board was in a separate building away from the main camp, in a wood which was part of Epping Forest. There were two personnel selection clerks there and our job was to give some standardised hearing tests, which entailed explaining and then playing two gramophone records, one being a voice speaking one-syllable words against the background noise of an aircraft engine and the other a series of three or four bleeps at different frequencies. The job was dead easy and we only did about four hours work a week. My colleague was Michael FitzGerald and he had a considerable influence on me. He had been to public school (Stowe) and was due to go to Oxford. He was a great personality as well as a fine sportsman, going on to represent the RAF at cricket and rugby. He was also very much a womaniser. I had never met anyone like him before. We got on well and spent a lot of time together. We were paid fortnightly and pay night was a booze-up with two others. We drank eight pints of beer each and then went to a dance ! Our group was self-sufficient and we played cricket in a clearing in the summer and challenged Epping Town cricket club to a match. I was captain. It was a disaster ! Hornchurch After a year the whole aircrew testing group were moved to another station - Hornchurch (where Douglas Bader the fighter pilot ace was based during the war). Now we the medical board were on the main station and it was rather different. As corporals we had to control some 20 people who slept in one large room - we had a small room to ourselves off the main room. We were subject to the discipline of the main camp. I quickly discovered the advantage of knowing four people, one each from the medical room, the guardroom, the cookhouse and the orderly room (who gave out passes). Michael worked out that the furthest we could get on a free railway pass was Dublin, as the railway also controlled the ships in those days. We were entitled to two passes a year, so we went there twice. This was in 1949. My period of service was extended a bit by the Berlin airlift, but I was “demobbed” in October 1949. THE CHRISTMAS POST I decided to take a holiday whilst looking for a job and spent a lot of time canoeing on the river and fishing. The river was very attractive in the autumn, with mists and autumn leaves. Then I signed up to help with the Christmas post, which lasted for about three weeks before Christmas. My job was collecting from post boxes rather than delivering. The best job was delivering parcels, because one travelled in a van. VICKERS The company secretary’s office I did not want to go back to Lloyds Bank, but did not know what else to do. I had previously read books about careers and had been attracted by the profession of company secretary, because it seemed to involve a variety of work and access to the top level. So I was interested when I heard from a girl-friend whose sister worked there, that Vickers were looking for an extra person in the company secretary’s office.I applied and was accepted, although I remember very well being told by the Assistant Secretary, “We want you but you are too expensive” (we had to state salary required). His name was Tomlinson. I worked for him, directly or indirectly, for the next 20 years and he had a considerable influence on my working life. My starting pay was £249. 12/- a year. Travel was once again from Sunbury to Waterloo and then a bus to Victoria Street. For me, Vickers was the factory at Weybridge, Surrey, near home, where aircraft were built. What I found was a large group of companies in engineering and shipbuilding as well as aircraft manufacture, with a head office in Westminster employing some 300 people. I calculated that I was joint tenth in line of succession to the company secretary and my first job was second-in- command of the records section, supervising the filing of papers and the delivery of files as required by others. One strange job was the sealing and signing of share certificates. There were hundreds to do each week. The certs were first sealed with the company seal (a gigantic metal object) in the presence of the finance director and the company secretary and then we placed the certs in front of each of the bosses in turn, for signature. There was a team of four operating. It was very fast but very old-fashioned. The office was big enough to provide lunches, which were free, and trolleys came round with morning coffee and afternoon tea. On one occasion I received a chain letter, which required me to send £1 to the name and address at the top of the list, re-write the list leaving off that name and putting mine at the bottom, five times, and passing them on. I took it into Vickers and within two weeks it was all over the building, with the typing pool running off hundreds of forms. I received back about £5 before it ground to a halt. There was an enquiry in the office and I was told, “Never again” but fortunately no other action was taken. Studies I soon decided to start studying for the examinations of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries. At first this was by correspondence course and it took two years to complete the two intermediate sections. By this time there were three others in the department doing the exams, two being older and senior to me, the other on a par. When we reached the final two stages, the company gave us day release and two of us travelled by bus to the City of London college in the city, twice a week. Steve Marshall and I probably learned as much arguing on the bus as at the classes. Our law tutor was Professor Schmitthof, a tremendous character. One of his events of the year was a “moot”, a mock trial, and he picked Steve and me from the class to act as junior counsel (senior counsels were junior barristers and the judge a senior barrister). The case was a complicated one involving the law of contract and it went on for ages. I had to present the less important points of our case (for the defendant). The judge took an hour to sum up, then found for the plaintiff, by which time my senior had left. Costs were awarded the other side and I had to argue against that, without any preparation, or help. I lost! When it came to the final year, I was fed up with studying and decided to speed it up and take the exam at Christmas instead of the following summer. I worked extremely hard by correspondence course again, starting at 3am each week day, for two hours. I had also learnt by this stage to analyse past exam papers, to establish the likely questions, which proved very useful. I passed and was the first of the four to get through. By 1955 my job had changed. After taking charge of the records section for a time I started working mainly on the board aspects, preparing papers for meetings, making returns to the registrar of companies and and handling a number of subsidiary companies. The Chairman Then in 1956 the company had a new chairman and he wanted a personal assistant. His idea was to have a youngster in that job for a couple of years, as good experience, although that was not made clear at the outset. (Previous chairmen had had the same man throughout, but he had retired.) I was picked and interviewed without any warning and offered the job. I think one of the reasons I was chosen was because I was married (in 1954) and had a child - giving stability. Some of my colleagues said it was a dead end job and not to take it, but I jumped at the chance. So I came to work for The Rt. Hon. Viscount Knollys, GCMG, MBE, DFC, former chairman of BOAC, former balloonist/spotter in the first world war and with a pedigree which went back to the days of Dick Whittington, but the Knollys’ - pronounced noles - ancestor had been Lord Mayor of London only twice ! I was told to call him “My Lord” or “Your Lordship” but he immediately put me right - only servants used those terms of address; I should say “Sir” or “Lord Knollys” - just like Mr. Knollys, he explained. In time I learned (with the help of a book on etiquette) how to address, both formally and informally, all kinds of people. This was a formative period of my working life. As a nervous and shy person, I had been terrified of the directors. Now I found some of them seeking me out. I gained great confidence. Also I moved into the exalted position of having a four-figure salary. My duties included meeting important visitors at the main entrance and escorting them to the chairman’s office. Among these the most notable was Lord Mountbatten. The most difficult task I had was to organise a dinner in connection with the European Movement. I had to send out the invitations, receive the replies and arrange the table plans, which were to be tables of ten consisting of politicans, businessmen, trades unionists and press, one each from the UK and continental Europe. I was working till 4am one night finalising that. Then I had to be there in case of problems and my heart sank when I recognised one trade unionist coming in the door, who was not expected. I had to apologise, but next day I found his letter - of refusal ! He did apologise back after that. However I got another one wrong. His letter went on to the second page explaining why he couldn’t come, but I had not read it to the end, where he accepted after all. That was an important lesson. During the Suez crisis, Lord Knollys was in the USA and at the wrong end of lots of anti-British criticism and incorrect news reports. So I had to telex to him each day a summary of the news and comment. On another occasion, there was a top internal conference on education and two of us, with the help of four secretaries, had to write a report which was to be available by the end. That was a task, but we did it. We each took a session and wrote it up during the next one and there was a lunch break at the end, so we could catch up. Another job was to organise the setting up of a guest- house for important visitors to Barrow-in-Furness, especially for ship launches. A suitable house had been purchased about 10 miles out of Barrow. The refurbishment and furnishing of it was taken over by Lord and Lady Knollys, with me to see that their instructions were carried out. Enormous sums had already been committed and Lady Knollys was horrified to find that much of the furniture was being specially made, when in her opinion it could have been bought “off-the-shelf” for far less. All in all it was a fascinating experience. Lord Knollys was kind enough to give me tickets for various test matches at Lords, some during the working week and some on Saturdays. As a member of the House of Lords, he received two tickets for the opening of parliament procession in the Houses of Parliament and one year he gave them to his secretary and to me. That was an interesting experience, now seen every year on TV but much more exciting in reality. Barrow-in-Furness After two years as pa. to the chairman, I was offered the opportunity to join Mr. Tomlinson again (who had in between been company secretary and so I had remained in close touch with him). The aircraft, engineering and shipbuilding groups of Vickers had separate management teams. A new chief executive of engineering had been appointed and Mr. T. was appointed Commercial Director (in Vickers, commercial really meant financial). The two of them set up shop in Barrow-in-Furness and I was invited to become their office manager. Travel to work was now a half-hour bus ride, so different from commuting to London. I still could not drive when I got there, but the boss insisted that I learn and I was taught by one of the chauffeurs. I passed my test first time and immediately bought a second-hand car - a pre-war Rover 16. It was a very small office - there was another young man as technical assistant and about three secretaries, a couple of chauffeurs and a cook/housekeeper. Really my job was mainly assisting Mr. T. in overseeing the financial aspects of the group, with the office managing part insignificant. There were meetings to arrange and record - one in particular took place every quarter and was a review of the development of all the commercial products (we had armament products, too). I was also involved in the preparation of the annual accounts of the Engineering Group, as it was called, and one year the only chance to discuss these with the bosses was to join them on the trials of a ship (the engineering company in Barrow built the ships engines). The ship was the Empress of Canada, built for Canadian Pacific. The trials are of food as well as everything else, so we had sumptuous meals. It was a great experience but I have something else to relate. About 20 years later we took an American colleague who was mad on ships to the National Maritime museum at Greenwich. I had related my story of the ship trials and he found in the museum a cabin from - yes, the Empess of Canada! From new to museum in 20 years demonstrates the change in Atlantic crossing from ship to aircraft. We travelled round the country a lot as we had factories in Newcastle, Swindon, Weymouth and Crayford in Kent. We usually went by road and the journey from Barrow to Newcastle was spectacular, down the old Roman road from Carlisle to the Tyne. There was a time when I had to spend about three months working at our factory in Weymouth ( it was originally a torpedo factory). I was there secretly to investigate its closure. The period included the whole autumn school term so I suggested that, instead of paying my hotel and travel bills, it would be cheaper for the company and better for us to rent a flat. This worked out very well. The children went to the local school in Weymouth, which they hated. Also they hated living in a flat ! When we got home they were very happy with their house and school. I got my first middle-age spread through lack of exercise. We didn’t like the Weymouth people very much. They were very hard. We decided it was because so many ran boarding houses as well as having an ordinary job. Later on, I became involved in a big study by outside consultants McKinsey & Co. into the future organisation and control of the whole of Vickers. This produced a system of forward planning, quarterly reporting against plan and project evaluation. Organisation and methods After seven years in Barrow (1958 to 1965), the office moved to London following a change in top dog. Also my job changed and I was put in charge of a small organisation and methods department, still under the control of Mr. T. I had four people working for me, all recruited by me as fairly expert in the field and we performed various investigatory tasks around the engineering companies. Crayford After a year of that, a vacancy arose for a Commercial Manager at the Crayford, Kent works of the engineering company. Mr. T asked for my views on the appointment and I cheekily suggested myself ! He agreed, much to my surprise and off I went. At the relatively young age of 35 I was now the equivalent of Finance Director of a company employing some 2,000 people. Under my control was the chief accountant and all the accounting staff, the buying department, the factory raw material and finished part stores, a small organisation and methods team and the garage and transport department - about 200 people. I also had my own secretary for the first time. Crayford was the old first world war machine gun factory (the Maxim gun). We still had armament products but mainly commercial - the manufacture and sale of bottling machinery and packaging machnery. We also made petrol pumps. Stock control of finished parts was a nightmare. Travel was a bit difficult. We could have moved (at the company’s expense) but it would have been very upsetting again so soon. Instead I tried commuting. This was a double commute - up to Waterloo and then out again to Kent. It took two hours each way. However the time on the train was useful - I even managed to do some dictation (the Crayford side of the journey was quiet as it was against the rush). One year there were floods and the river Cray overflowed. The factory was below normal water level and we had three feet of water in the machine shop. The first job was to dam the breach in the river. I could not get through to work and instead went in to the Vickers headquarters in central London, which turned out to be a good idea as I was in constant telephone touch and could organise a lot of help. Vickers were aways re-organising and we acquired control of another packaging factory in Walsall, a brewing machinery factory in Bury St. Edmunds and a bottling machinery factory in Belgium. We had to travel to Belgium for board meetings there and we were invited to their staff annual dinner in Brussels. I was on the top table, at the end, next to the company chairman’s wife who could speak no English. After three hours, my schoolboy French was getting quite good. Studies After I had been at Crayford for about five years I realised that I needed to consider my future. I had a qualification as a company secretary but no recent experience. On the other hand, I had recent experience as an accountant, but no qualification. I realised that I liked the finance role less than the company secretary, but had no chance of getting that job in Vickers, because the current holder was not going anywhere else and was only two years older than I. So I decided first to start studying for the Cost and Management Accountant qualification. With the double commute, it was hard work but I found that I could manage it. I got some exemptions from my existing qualifications. It also had a salutary effect upon our children - they could not grumble about homework when I was doing it too. I was also getting increasingly disinterested in my work, partly because it was beginning to go wrong, so I started looking for a job in the company secretary field. DAVY I answered an advertisement for an assistant secretary of Davy International Ltd., a well-known engineering public company. After getting short-listed by the consultant I was interviewed by the company secretary. We immediately got on well and I knew I was going to be offered the job and started at the beginning of 1972, at a salary of £5,000 a year. It was an emotional wrench to leave Vickers after nearly 20 years and especially to leave Crayford, where I had enjoyed the company (and the status). However I reminded myself of how I would feel if I were not going (much worse !). So now I was back to company secretarial work, albeit so different from Vickers - not joint tenth in line of succession as there were only the two of us. And also back to commuting into London but one way only. The office was in Portland Place - near the BBC - so it was a tube ride from Waterloo to Oxford Circus and a total journey of just over one hour. After my appointment was confirmed, following a probationary period, I was offered my first company car. For my price bracket I chose a Morris 2000, which was quite a big car. I had some interesting times. In the 1970’s we were subjected to a take-over bid and I was a member of the team formed to fight it. We did a lot of research into the bidder and tore them to pieces, defeating the bid easily. I was also involved in acquisitions, including one success and one failure in the USA, which involved me in visits to New York, Houston and San Francisco, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was a trustee of the UK pension schemes and organised the inclusion of employee trustees. I went on a trusteeship course with the employee nominees and this forged a comradeship which worked extremely well. In 1979 my predecessor vacated the company secretary job and I took his place, but he was still around for another couple of years, which restricted me a bit. After that I became a member of the company management committee and had much more influence on events. I became chairman of the pension scheme trustees and took responsibility for the foreign subsidiary company schemes, including the German one, which we pushed into equity investing, something they had never previously considered. As well as having a Count as legal adviser, we had a Prince (of Leichtenstein) as pension investment adviser. During later years I was much involved with the chairman in arranging top management succession and rewards for top management, including share option schemes. I managed to set up a wordwide executive share scheme, which I think had not been done before. My normal retiring age was 62, but I received a good offer to go a year early as part of several management changes. Little did I know at that point that the company was going to be brought down within a couple of years by a huge contract that went badly wrong, resulting in Davy being taken over by Trafalgar House (which in turn has been absorbed into a Norwegian company, Kvearner).
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CHILDHOOD SWEETHEARTS
There were two girls in my class at primary school
(aged 11) that I secretly admired. One was a dreamy
blonde called Ann Turner and the other a lively
brunette named Myrtle Thurloe.
ADOLESCENCE
But it was not until I was in Blackpool several
years later, during the war, aged about 14, that I
actually took one out. I knew a number of girls
then because my cousin Jeanne, at whose house I was
staying, had three close friends.
The girl I took to the cinema (we said “to the
pictures” in those days) was Joan Stephenson.
I liked her a lot but the girl I really fell for at that time lived
next door. She and my cousin used to knock to each
other on the bedroom dividing wall and of course I joined
in. Her name was Jean, too.
However, she was a year older and unattainable -
she had boyfriends in school classes above mine.
When I returned home from Blackpool, and went back
to the scouts I became very interested in some of
the girl guides. One of them in particular I really fancied.
She was called June and was tall and very dark with
very black hair.
Another girl from the guides I remember taking out at that
time was called Beryl.
GROWN-UP AFFAIRS
When I started work at the bank I was suddenly faced
with “grown-up” girls working there. The other
two junior clerks and I were rather mesmerised by
all these “women”. I did take out one in particular.
Her name was Ann Colegate and she was a couple of
years older than I (and a good few more in
experience!).
Ann was small, pretty and very provocative - I
learned from her the joys of kissing and touching.
I was overwhelmed ! We went out together quite a lot
in that year - to the cinema, boating on the river,
walking in Richmond park. And I took her home; my
Mother liked her a very much.
In particular we met at Richmond ice rink. My
sister Ann and/or a friend who lived nearby -
Douglas Burnett (known as Bayonet) - came with me.
Ann (Colegate) had other, older boys to skate with
(or one in particular) but she gave me some of her
time.
We met a few times after that year but lost touch
in the early 1950s.
Just before I went into the RAF I went to a local
dance and met a girl my sister knew at school.
She was very attractive and she liked me despite
having a regular boyfriend of long standing. Her
name was Joy Watson.
We met a number of times, always arranged by me
writing to a girlfriend of hers. She was also
called Joy and I met her again around 1990, when she
was at the till of a local petrol station. She told
me that she was still in contact with the first Joy,
who didn’t marry the long-term boyfriend after
all.
In the RAF I had a few short affairs with girls also
in the service. One in particular I also took home
at Easter. I have forgotten her name and all I
remember is that she painted on her lipstick with a
brush.
After I returned home following ‘demob’ I
joined up with a group of young people and started
an affair with one of the group. Her name was Barbara
Edney. She was quite good-looking but rather docile
and submissive. That went on for a year or two and
became quite serious.
At that time we were a foursome, the other two being
a useful friend with a car - Roy Grainge- and his
girlfriend Anna O’Reilly. Then Roy and Anna got
engaged and I realised that I was expected to follow
suit. But I knew it was not “the real thing” for me
so I broke it off.
Around then I saw a girl I found very attractive.
We travelled on the same train to work and I passed
her house walking to the station. I finally found a
way of meeting her (I didn’t have the gall just
to do it directly). But when I asked her out she told me
she had just become engaged. Her name was Maureen
Stone.
We got on extremely well and had great fun travelling
up to work and home again, with a crowd. But she
remained engaged and got married, so that was that -
very disappointing.
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ICE SKATING I had a pair of hockey skates, which were THE skates for young men to have.There were sessions of “pair” skating (boy and girl together) and speed skating, as well as ordinary round and round. This was at Richmond ice rink and I went twice a week. My sister Ann often came, too. One very cold winter the lake in St. James's park froze over and I skated there in the lunch hour as well as in the evening (it was just round the corner from the office). We also skated on a lake at Wisley Common in Surrey at the weekend. SPORT In the summer of 1947 I started playing cricket for Lloyds Bank on Saturday afternoons, first as a wicket- keeper, but then I discovered I could bowl, slow left-arm leg breaks (I was never any good at batting). I began in the fifth eleven but was promoted to the fourth !. The home ground was in Beckenham, in Kent, or rather south-east London, a long journey from home. We also played away, all over the London area. After National Service I took up sport more seriously. I joined Sunbury cricket club and in a year or two became a regular first team player. In those days there were no leagues in the south - all matches were “friendly”. But our captain, who had played for Durham in the minor counties league, didn’t like losing, so would play for a draw if winning was unlikely, which made him unpopular with opponents. I also took up soccer, with Sunbury British Legion. However, although I really enjoyed the game, I was not very good. As soon as a second eleven was formed, I was in it and then had to try to start a third eleven to keep playing. What they really wanted me for was administration, but I was not interested. In Sunbury there was a large house owned by the Salvation Army and used for conferences.Some other young people I knew attended a club there (called the Torchbearers) and I joined in. None of us had a religious bent, it was purely a youth club for us. They had a sports field, so we played football there, too, although it was difficult to find opponents for matches, so mainly it was a kick-about. Dancing on Saturday evening was sometimes difficult due to exhaustion and/or injuries from football ! At Vickers there was a games room and I frequently played snooker at lunch time, also darts. We organised a cricket team, where I was again captain, but we all lived too far away for it to succeed. Also there was an annual Christmas party. MUSIC I had a friend when I was 16 called Reg. Marshall. We both discovered swing music and bought and played a lot of records. These were the old 78’s and our favourites included Harry James, Woody Hermann, Arty Shaw, Benny Goodman and Stan Kenton. Unfortunately Reg contracted meningitis and died. Later I became more interested in classical music. It was Disney’s film Fantasia which changed me, not the cartoons but the exciting music. I saw that film every time it came round. I also attended a few concerts with my cousin Jeanne, who also liked classics. My taste progressed backwards over the years and since middle age my preference has been for the Baroque, my favourites being Bach, Handel, Telemann and Vivaldi. DANCING I also attended local dances on Saturday evenings. These would be in school halls, mainly. I am still talking about ballroom dancing. There were always a lot of youngsters I knew, boys and girls, so we all enjoyed ourselves. THE CINEMA Another regular Saturday evening out would be a visit to the cinema, usually locally in Kingston, Staines or Walton. Again it would be as a group. Those were the days when there were two feature films, with the news in between and continuous performance. We usually went into the middle stalls, which cost 1/9d. The most expensive seats were 3/6d and the cheapest 1/-. For a time I was a member of the National Film Theatre, where I saw a lot of old, famous films such as The Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane, the Marseilles trilogy and some of the early Italian ones. HOLIDAYS Soon after the war we had what turned out to be our last family holiday. It was a disaster ! We went back to the boarding house in the Isle of Wight my parents had taken me to as a very young child. But it had deteriorated and now I was a sulky teenager and hated being with them, especially with my little sister. However, even on my own, I did not know what to do, as I had no courage to “chat-up” the girls. After National Service I went to Paris on my own - a last-minute arrangement, but I met up with a girl of my own age who was a family friend and she was staying with some English poeple living there. We had a good time visiting the sights together. Another year I went on holiday with a friend (a useful friend as he had a car). We spent one week at a sailing school in Salcombe in Devon, which was very pleasant, and a second week touring in Cornwall. In 1951 I went to Majorca for the first time, with another friend. We stayed in an annexe at what is now a very expensive hotel in Palma, the Victoria. Richard met a Swiss girl who could not speak English. They conversed in German (his origins were middle European) and I talked to her in my poor French. It was very confusing. We went on a lot of coach trips and became friendly with a young man who was a guide. He introduced us to a tiny night club called Tito’s, which is now a huge place. It is amusing to remember talking in the hotel bar to other holiday-makers and hearing one say, “It isn’t like it used to be, you know”!
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HOW WE MET Marie and I first met in March 1949, when Michael FitzGerald and I went to Dublin on our free RAF pass. In fact, he went on ahead. I arrived on a Sunday morning, on my first time outside Britain, and the first person I met was a beggar. In those days there were no beggars in England. He was very enterprising, too, as when I said I had no change he took me to the GPO - this was the famous one used in the 1916 rebellion. It was another first to find a post office open on a Sunday. Michael had started attending a dancing class, where he met Marie and our first meeting was at a dance, from which I took home another girl I met there. Her name was Imelda Egan. We met a few times during that holiday, including one day at the beauty spot in County Wicklow called Glendalough. Michael and I had gone there the previous day. I stayed but he went back to Dublin to keep a date with Marie and he brought her back the next day. We started hitch-hiking home but it became foggy and it took us hours. We went back again later that year. On this occasion he went home before me. I had a terrible crossing on the boat - 14 hours instead of three - and I felt ill so I went home first rather than straight back to RAF camp. I should have mentioned that we “bought” sick notes from a doctor to extend our leave and mine was still valid for a further few days. I was stopped by the Service Police at Holyhead and that was my undoing, because when I finally arrived back at camp I found I had been charged with being absent without leave. I got off with a caution but the Station Commander said I was the worst NCO he had ever come across. We met a few times after I left the Air Force, always with Michael (our motto was two is a quarrel, three’s company and four’s a crowd) and we kept in touch through the post. I had a few unsuccessful affairs in the early 1950’s, as did Marie, but in the summer of 1953 I made another trip back to Dublin, having arranged in advance to meet Marie. I persuaded her to come on a trip with me. We went back to Glendalough, where she shed a few tears for times past and we enjoyed each other’s company. As a result, I went back again in September and we got engaged. We met again at Holyhead at Christmas and agreed to get married the next year, in Dublin, on 12th. July 1954 (by coincidence it is Orangeman’s day ! THE WEDDING I did write a letter to Mr. Bannon asking for his permission. He replied that he could not give his blessing for religious reasons but otherwise was happy with the arrangement. I was under no pressure from my family and both sets of parents were at the wedding. Since this was a “mixed” marriage, catholic and non-catholic, there were a number of problems to overcome. First I as the heathen had to visit my parish priest in Sunbury so that he could satisfy himself that I knew what I was doing. I had to undertake to have our children brought up as catholics. Also the wedding (which was in Dublin) had to take place in the vestry of the church, in the early morning, with only the witnesses and immediate family present and no confetti or photographs outside. We obeyed all those rules, but Marie’s friends didn’t ! They were unexpectedly outside afterwards, armed with cameras and confetti and they turned it from a minor into a major event. Our wedding reception was at Dublin airport, as we were flying to the Isle of Man for our honeymoon. There were ten people present and we had an extra “guest”, as we saw Gregory Peck the film star arriving - he was then making “Moby Dick”. We had a good honeymoon on the Isle of Man, with lovely walks along the cliffs and we tried our hands at golf. We stayed in a hotel near Port Erin and afterwards we flew to Blackpool and took the train to London. HOUSEKEEPING After marriage, Marie did the cooking. I helped with the washing up ! This was so from the beginning, even though she was working, too. Then of course when the children came on the scene she was at home all the time, so it semed natural that she should cook. We always ate together as a family in the evenings and at weekends.This situation continued until Marie had a stroke in 1990, when I had to start taking action, but that was almost entirely using prepared meals from stores such as Marks and Spencer. When I developed high blood-pressure I cut down on sugar, salt, coffee, butter , etc. Apart from that I have always been able to eat almost anything - without putting on weight or suffering any adverse effects. CHILDREN We had no plans regarding the size of a family but vaguely intended to have children. The first came quicker than intended and Caroline was born in November 1955, at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Hammersmith. Marie had a difficult birth, taking over 24 hours. Queen Charlotte’s has a high reputation, but Marie was not at all impressed. The thing I remember most about the early days was giving Caroline her late evening feed. I laid her on my lap facing me and I listened to “book at bedtime” on the radio. Julian came along (again unplanned) in March 1958. He was born (very quickly this time) at Hammersmith hospital, much superior in Marie’s view. Both Caroline and Julian were baptised at the local Roman Catholic church in Hammersmith a week or two after their birth. We realised how fortunate we were to have had one child of each sex, so close in age (they always got on well with each other) and we decided two was enough. PARENTHOOD I found our babies a bit of a bore and always wanted them to get a bit older, so that they could do more things for themselves,a foolish idea I realise now, because perhaps I did not enjoy their babyhood as much as I could have. At least I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed the babyhood of my grandchildren. During their childhood my work took me away from home a lot, so again I failed to participate sufficiently, although I did attend school functions such as the Christmas plays and parents evenings. Compared with the present day, I think we were more strict but we never resorted to physical punishment or compulsory eating. Also I believe we encouraged success, whether at school work or leisure activities. And I believe we got on well enough as a family. There were times when we tried to get away from television by having what we called family evenings, when we played games such as scrabble and monopoly, or cards. Later on, we assisted Caroline’s attendance at the church youth club, by helping to supervise it and when it folded we had them meet at our house. There were other activities - brownies and guides, horse-riding, army cadets. For us, their leaving home happened when they went to university, as they were only at home for short periods thereafter. Marie felt the wrench much more than I did because she had always been at home when they came in from school, particularly when the younger child was no longer around. Our two children have done well. They both went to single-sex grammar schools, Caroline to St. Catherine’s Convent, which is situated in Popes Villa in Twickenham, and Julian to my old school - Hampton. We remember well being interviewed by the Headmistress at St. Catherine’s, Sister Mary Hilda. She was a formidable woman and all the parents were terrified of her, never mind the girls ! At one parents’ evening a mother had the temerity to ask why tights were not allowed. There was a one-word reply - “Unhygienic”! Both children got sufficient A levels to gain entry to university, Caroline to London (Westcliff College) for biology and Julian to Manchester for town planning (a four-year course leading to two degrees). Caroline chose Westcliff because her boy-friend Philip Rush (who lived near us in Sunbury and whom she later married) was going there, too. Julian chose Manchester because it had a sandpit where they laid out town plans! Caroline also did a further year, a post-graduate library course at Aberystwyth in Wales. There was no grant for that and we were quite annoyed the she was expected to help an overseas student who had everything paid for and who was quite unable to cope with the course. CAROLINE AND PHILIP They live in a village called Randwick, near Stroud in Gloucestershire. Philip is head of English at a Catholic secondary school in Gloucester, where Caroline is librarian (they have both remained staunch Catholics). Their two children, Emily and Aidan, both attended the same school. Emily is a nurse and is married to Trevor Hudson. They have a son, Lawrence Robert, who was born in 2008 and are expecting another baby in August 2009. So we are now great-grandparents. The odd thing to me is that our little girl is now a granny! Aidan has a degree in Spanish and is planning to do a post-graduate library course. The main interest of Caroline and Philip outside work is music, old English country dance music to be precise. They have been in a band for many years and perform at local dances, weddings and so on. Philip is a very fine fiddle player. JULIAN AND JULIE Julian met Julie at Manchester university and they lived together for some years before getting married. (Julian stopped being a Catholic as soon as he left home.) They have two children, Finn and Sophie and live in Bristol. Julian was a civil servant in the Department of Environment. He progressed well and reached a level which used to be called principal. He was responsible for government policy on large endangered species. Then in 2000 he and Julie decided that one of them should be at home more for the children. As Julian had always wished to do an Arts degree and could get a five-year leave of absence without penalty, they decided he should take it. (He has always been good at art - painting and such. He did an extra A-level in art and has kept it up as a hobby. We have a number of his paintings hanging on our walls.) He got a first at Bristol after two years and a Masters degree after a further two years. When his five-year leave expired, he went back to work at DEFRA on a part-time basis - three days a week - and does art activities the rest of the time. Julie has also done well. She now works for the Cabinet Office, partially at home, on human resources. Previously she was in the organisation which administers courts of law and was responsible for personnel matters in the south-west region of England. Finn is now at Portsmouth university. His subject is computer games!. Sophie has done her A levels and goes to university. this year, to study criminal law. meanwhile she is on a gap-year trip round the world with her boyfriend, Dan Howard.
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RAVENSCOURT ROAD
When we were married in 1954 there was no possibility
of buying a house. We started married life in a
furnished flat. The big advantage was that it was
owned by my grandfather’s younger brother Bob and
they prepared it for us beautifully.
The flat was in Ravenscourt Road, Hammersmith, on the
first floor of a large house. The rear overlooked
Ravenscourt Park, which was full of birds. We had a
nice veranda along the back and it was like being in
the country.
The flat consisted of a living room, a bedroom and the
kitchen, as well as the veranda, but we had to share
bathroom and separate toilet with another tenant
(we could wash in the kitchen sink). The rooms were
interconnecting but each had a door to the common
landing. The rent was £3 a week. We were there for a
year.
Incidently we had no fridge - I remember arguing with a
left-winger at speakers corner in Hyde Park, London,
who said a fridge was a necessity. There was no central
heating - we had paraffin stoves. Also no washing
machine - we went to the local launderette on Saturday
mornings. Finally, there was no telephone.
DORVILLE CRESCENT
I had a cricketing colleague who lived nearby and the
four of us used to meet up. Then they announced that
they were emigrating to Canada and offered us their
unfurnished flat if we bought their furniture. (In those
days you had security of tenure in an unfurnished flat
but not a furnished one.)
This co-incided with Marie becoming pregnant, so we
decided to accept. At the time we thought it was the
right thing to do but my Great-Uncle and -Aunt were upset
about it.
The cost of the furniture was £222 and this included a
three-piece suite; a dining room suite; a bed, wardrobe &
dressing table; gas cooker & kitchen cabinet, table &
chairs - and a pram ! Some of the furniture was of the
post-war “utility” style.
We bought a plain blue carpet for the living room. It
looked lovely but was hell to keep clean. We had one
bedroom, living room and kitchen. In the kitchen there
was an open fire and also a bath with a cover on it, next
to the sink. We had our own toilet.
Our flat was on the first floor and the owner - an elderly,
deaf, spinster lady - occupied the ground floor. The rent
was 30/- a week. We had a telephone.
We did start looking for a house to buy. There was one in
Worcester Park, Surrey, near another of father’s uncles,
which was a typical suburban semi. The price was £2,400
but we thought it too expensive.
We lived in the flat until I was transferred to Barrow
in 1958 and we passed it on to Marie’s brother Robin
and his family. Meanwhile Marie’s parents had come
over to England following Mr. Bannon’s retirement from
the police. We had found them various places to live
but in the end, with Miss Bottle’s agreement, they
took over the second floor of the house, previously
unoccupied.
ULVERSTON
Company policy was only to pay for buying a house on a
move if you already had one, but this was relaxed in our
case. We decided that, as Barrow was very much a
company town, it would be advantageous to live out of
town.
I had to live up there for a few weeks on my own
(though I got home every other weekend). I found a
house in a town 10 miles inland, on the edge of the
Lake District, called Ulverston. It was a four-
bedroomed semi-detached house in one of the best
streets and cost an astronomical £3,500, well over
the odds in some people’s view.
We were provided with a chauffeur-driven car to convey
the family up (this was before I could drive) and we
took two days to get there - it was before motorways
existed. Marie had not seen the house or even the town
before then and she was a bit disappointed with both.
We still had no central heating but at least we now
had a small refrigerator and a sort of washing machine
with a built-in mangle.
We soon discovered that Ulverston was also a company
town - Glaxo had a factory there - and some of our
neighbours were the senior executives.
Ulverston is a typical small market town with a
population of about 10,000. It was very old-fashioned.
Everybody knew everyone else’s business and the
gossiping on the street corners on a Saturday morning
was phenominal.
We regularly shopped at the main grocers (there were
no supermarkets then) and they sent us a bill once a
month and gave us a discount when we paid it.
A carpenter did some work on the house and took a year
to send in his bill ! (But I remember as a child that
the greengrocer brought samples to our house, a mile
from the shop, took my mother’s order, then went
back to the shop to collect it.)
We lived there for seven years until I was transferred
back to London.
We advertised the house for sale in the local paper -
three days for 14/6d. I was away and Marie sold it for
our full asking price of £5,000 the first day .
(I telephoned the paper to cancel the advert for the
next two days and asked for a refund of 9/6d but,
needless to say, didn’t get it.)
SUNBURY
We did a scientific job for our next move. I worked
out where in the London area it would be sensible to
live with the journey I had to make to work and we
got details well in advance (of nearly 1,000 houses).
We spent two days looking at the outsides of a short-
list of 100 and the third day viewing the final list
of ten.
We finished up with one in Sunbury, where I had spent
all my childhood and where my parents still lived.
This time it was a detached four-bedroomed house in
one of the best roads, near the station for commuting.
And at last we had central heating ! (In fact our
radiators were unique in that they had built-in
electric fires.) The cost of the house was £8,150.
Caroline and Julian hated the idea of moving and
leaving their friends but very quickly adjusted.
Their accents changed from Lancashire to London in
no time.
We had a lovely garden with six foot high brick
walls on either side but with a chain-link fence at
the end, giving us a view of school playing fields
and especially a beautiful old oak tree which Marie
guarded as if it were hers, warning off any of the
girls from the school who even touched it.
The house we bought had been demolished by a flying
bomb during the war (someone was killed in it) and
had been rebuilt just after the war in exactly the
same style. Before the war it had been owned by an
Indian family and Pandit Nehru had slept there.
The road was called The Avenue and the avenue was
of horse-chestnut trees, which were in the front
gardens and subject to preservation orders. The
London Irish rugby ground was just down the road and
that was where I had played cricket for Sunbury,
15 years earlier.
Our next-door neighbour turned out to be one of my
schoolmasters at Hampton Grammar. Next to him was an
elderly couple whom my parents knew from way back
when I was in the scouts.
There was one through living room and we put in
sliding doors to divide it into two rooms.The only
other change we made was to add a conservatory,
which we did on a do-it-yourself basis using a kit.
We lived in that house for 16 years, from 1965 to
1981. By that time both our children had left home
and we felt like a change. Again we tried
advertising in the local paper and sold the house
the first day, for £78,000, nearly 10 times the
value in 16 years. However we were in a chain and
it took months to sort out.
For a short time we owned two houses and while we
were over at the new one checking that it was safe,
we were burgled at the old one. We must have
disturbed them as we did not lose very much.
VIRGINIA WATER
We found a house we liked on the Wentworth Estate
at Virginia Water. It was a chalet bungalow, that
is the first floor had windows in the roof. There
were four bedrooms, two up and two down, and two
bathrooms (one up en-suite and one down), a big
kitchen, living room with dining area and a sort
of middle room.
We had a fine garden, really in a wood of silver
birch trees, with many rhododendron bushes which
bloomed in succession, also azaleas and camellias.
We paid just under £100,000 for it.
The Wentworth Estate, connected with the golf club,
consists of private roads and there is a separate
road rate to pay. Annual meetings of the organisation
were a scream - one old fogey referred to the smaller
plots (which ours was) as half-acre hovels!
Our garden ran the full depth of the plot and the
house was in effect built sideways on. We had a
dining area with a quarter-curved window giving a
lovely aspect of the garden. And we had foxes and
even badgers coming into the garden at night.
We had two greenhouses and a workshop as well as a
garden shed and I bought from the previous owner a
big pre-war lawn-mower with a seat - it was a
bargain for £30 as it lasted for over 10 years.
In the 1987 gale we had three or four big silver
birches blown down , one would have hit the house if
it had not fallen against another - we got that
sorted out quickly the next morning.
Whilst we were there we had an extension built which
gave us an extra bedroom and bathroom upstairs and a
two-car integral garage down (the existing garage was
only big enough for one car - not that we had two in
those days). It was a great strain having it done,
especially for Marie, being there all day. She was
really site-foreman.
We also added a burglar alarm system and outside
automatic lights.
We lived there for 10 years, but after Marie had a
stroke she felt she wanted a change and as I had now
retired we set about moving again. Unfortunately we
hit the time of the slump in house prices and it
became very difficult to sell what would in normal
times be a very attractive house. We finally sold
for just over £300,000.
Looking back now over all the places we have lived, this
was my favourite.
LYNE
Initially the idea was to move to the riverside. Marie
became keen after visiting a neighbour who had done
that and I needed no persuading. However the only
house we found at that time was in my view too
squashed in between two others. Meanwhile we became
attacted by a house in the village of Lyne, near
Chertsey, which was a conversion of farm buildings.
It was a one-story building, converted from cowsheds
and stables. There were three bedrooms and two
bathrooms in the main building, as well as living room,
dining room, kitchen and office. There were many old
beams in the ceilings.
The big attraction was an indoor swimming pool, part of
a separate annexe, which has bathroom, bedroom and
combined living room/kitchen on two levels. (The big
detraction was a nearby caravan site and also closeness
to the M25 motorway.)
The main garden was half the old farmyard, the other
half being retained by the original farm-house next door.
The site was very old. It was beside a fine old building
called Almners Priory, originally part of Chertsey Abbey.
The farm was built around 1830 and the conversion of our
property was post-war (someone who called at the house
once remembered coming to our old front door as a girl
to get milk, so it must have been a dairy then). The
swimming pool had only been there for about five years.
There was no garage, so we had one built and made other
changes, such as a new front entrance, improvements to
the annexe, added burglar alarm and lights and, later,
a conservatory. We also greatly improved the garden and
put in a Wendy house.
We were there for 12 years.
OLD SODBURY
In August 2002, when we were in Newquay at our new time-
share, we saw some McCarthy & Stone retirement
apartments being built,so we went to have a look. They
were much too small for us.
However, in the brochure we saw some three-bedroomed
houses, so we went to have a look at them. The houses
were all right but there was no private garden, and we
decided that we still wanted to have one.
By this time we were bitten by the moving bug again,
so in September 2002 we put our house on the market.
There was much interest but the nearness of the caravan
site and the M25 put many people off.
We started looking for a house in Gloucestershire
and Wiltshire, to be near our children and their
families. We soon found suitable places.
It was not until May 2003 that we had an acceptable offer
and at about the same time we found what we decided
was the best house for us, and which had just come on
the market. The price of the new house was considerably
less than the one we were selling.
It took another three months to reach commitment on
both sides and we finally moved in September 2003.
The house was named Colts Green End (Colts Green
being an open space nearby). It was a fairly modern
house on the outskirts of Chipping Sodbury in the
county of South Gloucestershire and within 30
minutes drive of both our children.
It was large (five bedrooms and an integral double
garage) but we still had difficulty in accommodating
all our stuff.
There was also a large garden - much larger than before
but with plenty of scope for improvement. (We put a
greenhouse in the garden and then added conservatory
to the house.)
We were next to a pub and on a main road although the
house was set well back so that it was not too noisy.
Also we had a railway line at the back, with an old siding,
which was quite noisy at times and was made worse
after we got there by the whole area being opened up.
PORTISHEAD
After a couple of years at Old Sodbury we realised that, at
the age of 75, the house and particularly the garden were
too large for us. So we started looking at retirement homes
again.
We quickly found a retirement village at Nailsworth in
Gloucestershire, not far from Caroline, which we liked
very much. It consisted of terraced houses with a very
small garden. There was a communal restaurant, a lot of
services including mini-buses, various activities and hotel-
style accomodation if one became too frail to manage a house.
The disadvantages included a lack of storage space, made
worse by not having a garage, and a penalysing buy-back
arrangement.
However, we put our name down for a three-bedroomed house
and set about selling again.
Colts Green End was also difficult to sell because of the pub
and the railway. In the end, however, our agent found a family
who had wanted to buy the house when we did and were still
very interested.
However, we lost our opportunity at Nailsworth and in any case
I had become very concerned at the lack of space. (We might
think again if a four-bedroomed house becomes available, as they
have much more space. They had all been sold when we first
went there.)
So we looked elsewhere and using the internet we found a house
in Portishead which, though smaller than Colts Green End, still
provided ample space. Best of all, it had a very small garden.
We agreed a price and moved in March 2006. Again the price was
substantially lower than we got for the one we were selling.
The house was only five years old and is on a modern estate,
something we have never experienced before. The front is open
and the estate is a bit claustrophobic but it is conveniently placed
(the town centre, which has a Waitrose supermarket, is only a
mile away).
We are near the sea - the Bristol Channel - and only some 15 minutes
from Julian, though Caroline is nearly an hour away.
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RADIO AND TELEVISION When first married we only had radio and I recall in particular one weekday evening we listened in succession to “Dick Barton, Special Agent” (with his assistants Jock and Snowy) and then “The Goon Show”. In those days there was still a programme on Sunday lunchtime called family favourites, which had started life during the war as Forces favourites - a request programme of music, mainly. This was before pop music but there were regular requests, such as Ronnie Ronald whistling “In a Monastery Garden” and Petula Clark with “Where did the Snowman Go ?” Our first television was second-hand, from a friend who was going away. It was a magnificent cabinet, three feet high, with radio as well as TV. At first we sat up very late watching test programmes after normal shut-down (all in black-and-white of course). However the tube went after about three months and as we were already addicted we rented a set. I suppose we have remained TV addicts ever since. THE CINEMA Living in Hammersmith was very convenient for cinemas and we went quite often. In those days there were usually two feature films (the second or B movie being of poorer quality) as well as the news. We were still able to go after the children came along, if we could persuade someone to babysit, but in time television became more attractive. HOLIDAYS Our first holiday was in 1955 and we went on a package trip to Spain with an organisation called WTA - Workers Travel Association. This was before flying was normal, so we went by train, to Blanes on the Costa Brava. Marie was about five months pregnant by this time. We managed to get too sunburned on the first morning, but it was a good holiday, marred only by a mix-up on the return journey. We missed a train connection and had to find our own way back, via Marseille, Lyon and Paris. We had a sleepless night on a very uncomfortable train and then about six hours to waste in Paris, where we were so exhausted we went to the cinema to see “Gone with the Wind”! After the children came along we still managed to have some holidays on our own, with my parents looking after them. We went to Devon one year and later on we went to Ireland with Marie’s sister and husband. By this time I could drive and we had a car. All the other three were learning to drive, so I had to put up with sitting in the front passenger seat - not a relaxing holiday ! We travelled to Ireland from Heysham, near Morecambe in Lancashire. There were no RO-RO ferries then and we watched our car hoisted on and off the ship by crane ! We did take the children to Ireland but our next package tour holiday abroad was in the late 1960’s, to Majorca. It was the first time the children had flown and we had a bad experience on the way out - an engine stopped just before reaching the point of no return and we had to go back. It was a full emergency landing, followed by a long wait. Eventually the plane was serviceable but by then the crew were running out of time, so they took us to Teesside airport to pick up a new crew. So, after 12 hours, we were 200 miles further away from our destination than when we started! However the holiday was a great success and we went regularly after that. The first time we took our car abroad was by sea to Bilbao, on the north coast of Spain and then we drove into France, visiting Lourdes and then back into Spain. This was our first experience of the paradores, a chain of high-quality hotels owned by the Spanish government, which were very cheap in those days (the 1970’s). Our son Julian was with us and we have always remembered being in our room in the evening when the staff came to turn down the beds. There were three of them - two to do the work and one to supervise ! Since then we have stayed at many paradores all over Spain. Originally they were meant for travellers and you could not stay at one for more than three nights, but that rule has gone. Prices are now higher but they are still good value for money. The best thing about them is that many are in old buildings, castles, monasteries, palaces and those which are new buildings tend to have stunning sites with panoramic views. About twelve years ago we had one of our best holidays in western USA. It included a seven-day coach trip, which took us among other places to the most amazing natural wonder of the west - Grand Canyon - followed the next day by the most amazing man-made wonder - Las Vegas ! We have also been on some short city breaks, of which the most spectacular was Venice, a place everyone should experience. In 1992 we bought a two-week time-share on the Algarve, after a “free” holiday to inspect it. I think we got a good deal and it has improved since. We also took out membership of an exchange organisation and have swopped our weeks to visit many places, including most of the Canary Islands, Cyprus, Malta and Madeira. Fortunately our fortnight has been upgraded to the top level, so we can go anywhere at any time, provided there is space. When we were in Malta we entered a competition and as a result won a week's timeshare at the resort we were staying at, which we upgraded from a studio to a two- bedroomed apartment. In the year 2001 we bought another time-share week, this time in the UK, near Newquay in Cornwall, beautifully placed near the sea with lovely views up the coast. As part of the deal we traded-in the Malta week. The week is in August and there are three bedrooms, so we can have some of the family to stay. SPORT I did try to keep playing cricket and Marie came along and joined the other wives and girl-friends watching (and making tea !) but was not to her liking. Also I was no longer in the first team as I was not a regular and I became less attraced by it, so I “retired”. In Hammersmith we were well placed for watching professional football, with Chelsea, Fulham and Queens Park Rangers all near. I went now and then and particularly remember Chelsea against Manchester United, which was always one of the big games of the season. THE ROUND TABLE After we had been in Ulverston for a year or so a colleague at work invited me to join the Ulverston branch of the Round Table, an organisation like the Rotary Club but for the under-forties. Membership was spread over as many professions as possible and there we had farmers, vets, shop-keepers, dentists, one from the local authority and the town market superintendent. I enjoyed the fortnightly meetings and other activities. One of the best functions was an annual fancy-dress dance. One year I went as Archbishop Makarios and won first prize. One man there who had been in Cyprus in the army became quite belligerent, so I must have looked the part. There was a separate organistion for wives called the Ladies Circle, but Marie is not an organisation person (and certainly not for Ladies only !) so she did not join. One of the objectives of Round Table is charitable work. Our main activity was collecting money before Christmas in pubs and using it to buy gifts for the elderly poor. We also raised money by collecting bottles which had a return value. THE THEATRE There was a repertory theatre in Barrow which was financially supported by the Arts Council, providing the local council and industry matched donations. Industry in Barrow was Vickers and Mr. Tomlinson became the company representative on the Trust which managed the theatre. He recruited me as secretary of the Trust and later on I became company nominee too. Weekly rep is tough. The theatre manager explained it to me - they were acting this week’s play, rehearsing next week’s, learning the following week’s - and forgetting last week’s ! Some of the young people I met there became famous - Peter Purves later joined Blue Peter, John Tovey became an internationally famous chef and some others have regularly appeared on TV. The theatre was always living off a bank overdraft and in the end (after we had left the district) it folded and the lovely old building was knocked down. EVENING CLASSES We have taken many evening classes over the years, sometimes together and sometimes separately. Languages have been the commonest subject, starting with Spanish and going on to German. Marie is far better at foreign languages than I am. I have also attended classes on photography and philosophy - the latter with an organisation called “The University of the Third Age”, (U3A) i.e. for the elderly. The classes are led by members of the local group and are much cheaper than adult evening classes. They also have social activities
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PART-TIME WORK I felt that I still wanted to do some part-time work and I put my name down on several lists. One of these led to the Institute of Directors inviting me to join their panel of advisers to members. I worked on Wednesday mornings for four hours and also occasionally at home. My subjects are company law, board organisation, contracts of employment, insurance and pensions. However, I had to stop in 1999, when I reached the age of 70. I also approached the local office of Allied Dunbar and joined a young man authorised to sell financial products, with a view to getting him interviews by cold-calling on the telephone. It didn’t work out - not because I failed to open doors but because he failed to get contracts. He also failed to give me the agreed share of those he did get - he was a rogue and was later under investigation by the Fraud Office. At least it awakened my interest in personal finance. TEACHING The first positive step I took was to contact the local adult education people regarding a course. They liked the idea - it had been done before, successfully. So I developed a course, covering savings and investment, insurance, mortgages, pensions and tax, lasting ten weeks at two hours a time. They also suggested I should attend a course teaching how to teach, which was most useful. I use many of the techniques - overhead projector, group work, videos - to break up the two-hour sessions. In the new year 1999 we tried a shorter course of five weeks called an introduction to investing (I wanted to call it "Who wants to be a millionaire ?" but they were worried about being sued for misrepresentation. However, there were only a few students, so the organisers decided to drop it for the future. WRITING Moving on from there, I decided to try writing a book on personal finance. This took about a year. My first attempts to find a publisher were unsuccessful - some very unfavourable reviews came back. Then my daughter suggested "How To Books" and I struck a chord with the publisher. He encouraged me to play on the difficulties people have in this area and eventually I got it into the shape he wanted - pulled together by having three groups of people getting involved in the subject of each chapter and also three discussion points for each chapter. It was published in 1996 and there have been four editions. I have written four more books for "How To", all on the same theme - a slimmed down version of my first book, similar books on personal tax and on pensions, and a full-size book on investment. One of my students at evening classes approached me with a view to cooperating with him on a project to produce a computer program on personal finance, the object being to make lists of ideas on all relevant subjects , sorted into some order of merit. This took nearly two years to get to a satisfactory stage and was published in 1997 as a CD-Rom. However, it was never a success and we stopped work updating it in 2001. U3A I joined the local branch of U3A in Chertsey, gave a talk on personal finance and as a result led a group on the subject for a couple of years. INVESTMENT CLUB Arising from my U3A activities, I was encouraged to form an investment club as a separate but associated activity. Called the Golden Unicorn Investment Club, it meets monthly in Chertsey and made its first investments in 2001. I was chairman until we moved and am now a "country" member, though I do attend some meetings. PENSION SCHEME I was elected pensioners' representative on the trustee body of my company pension scheme in the year 2000 and served for five years until 2005, when new elections took place. As these were for a further four years, by which time I would be 80, I decided not to stand for re-election. FULL RETIREMENT As I update this in March 2009 at the age of 79, my part-time work has ceased and I now occupy myself at home with gardening, reading, watching TV and “playing” (as Marie calls it) with my computer. Then there is the occasional holiday and day out. Writing this autobiography has been like living my life over again and has been a most enjoyable experience.