In loving memory of Frederick Harry Morse who sadly passed away on 10th February 2019
Memories of Fred Morse born November 28th 1931
Some of these are my own memories, some have been passed down through the family.
My first memory was being taken to school at Anerly Infants School at the age of four years. The school was about half to three quarters of a mile from where we lived at 20 Milstone Road. My mother walked me to school and was there to meet me when school finished. That was the first day, after that I was on my own to get to school and to get home. I got one penny old money for a transfer ticket on the 654 trolley bus, in the first instant it was a tram ride to and from Crystal Palace low level station which then changed to trolly buses. I teamed up with a group of boys whose names I still remember 73 years later. They were Donald Warwick, Jimmy Fisher, Ronnie Earl, Brian Tinworth and Alan Everard. Alan Everard I still see, he married a very dear friend of mine many years later, Vi Blanchard who lived at 28 Lucas Road, Penge.
My next vivid memory was standing in the back gardenof our house at 20 Milstone Road and waving to my father on the balcony of the south tower of the Cyrstal Palace. This would be about 1934 - 1935.
I remember 30th November 1936 because it was two days after my fifth birthday and the Crystal Palace burnt down.
We had to get out of our house because there was a fear that the south tower would collapse and fall down. After the fire the south tower was still standing and it wasn't demolished until 1939 - 1940 as the German bombers were using it to line up a direct bombing run on central London 10 miles away.
The north tower was blown up and the south tower was demolished bit by bit.
I can remember going to firework displays in the Crystal Palace, these were held once a week or once a month I can't remember which.
At the base of the south tower there was a public house called 'The Crystal Palace Hotel'. It was my father's watering hole. On one occasion when my father was walking round top of the rim of the south tower after fixing an aerial for Logie Baird. He looked down and in front of the Crystal Palace Hotel a crowd of people were looking up in his direction. At the end of the day's work he was talking to the CPH Landlord who asked him if he was on top of the tower earlier in the day. My father said 'Yes, what was the crowd of people looking at?' To which the landlord replied 'Why they thought you were going to jump off.' To which my father replied 'Silly sods!'
I remember Glynde in Sussex. My aunt Rose (my mother's youngest sister) and Uncle Harry Tasker lived there with my cousins Betty, George and later Robert. We, that is my two sisters Rose and Margie and myself used to go down there for a month's holiday every year and the Taskers used to spend Xmas week at our house together with Auntie Gladys, Uncle Fred and Joycey Utting also my godfather Harry Noyce who was head plateman at the Trocadero Hotel at the Elephant and Castle.
In 1939 we had just returned from our summer holidays in Glynde two weeks before war against Germany was declared. My parents with amazing foresight thought it was too dangerous to live in London and sent Rose, Margie and myself back down to Glynde to live with Auntie Rose and Uncle Harry. We all attended the village school together with Betty, George and out cousins.
The head mistress' name was Mrs Brian. There were only two classrooms, infants in one and juniors in the other from nine to fourteen years of age. Put in various forms in various stages of education so it was quite complicated for Mrs Brian and we spent a lot of time playing her up. Mrs Brian lived on the premises so part of our lessons was cooking in her kitchen and gardening, cutting her grass ad weeding her flowerbeds.
We went swimming in the swimming pool which was in the left hand corner of the recreation grounds next to the river. I learned to swim in that pool by being thrown in by my sister Margie and her boyfriend at the time, Cyril Hutson. It was a question of sink or swim, if I sank they would dive in and pull me out and when I got my breath back they threw me in again.
Opposite the school was the vicarage with the Reverend Lawson who we got to know well as went to church twice on Sunday as Uncle Harry was verger and baritone in the church choir. Up the hill from the school and vicarage was Step cottage where Grandad Eade was grandad to all the village and was known as 'Old Dill, Dill, Dill'. Betty and George Tasker and Margie and myself used to call in every Sunday after church and and see Grandad Eade in he bedroom. He didn't get up till lunchtime and laid out each week on his beside table were four pennies. We got one penny each, that was our pocket money. I don't know why we were so special. I think Auntie Rose and Uncle Harry previously lived in the cottage that adjoined Step Cottage before they moved to 15 Treavor Gardens at the other end of the village.
Two weeks after we returned to Glynde in 1939 war was declared and the air raid warning rang out. I and my best pal at the time Leslie Knight were missing and there was panic stations looking for us. We weren't aware of the fact that we were missing. We were collecting cob nuts from Pear Tree Wood adjacent to Carbeur Pit below Caburn on the South Downs.
I now have a picture of the cricket pitch at Glynde with a background of Pear Tree Wood, Carbeur Pit and Caburn.
I was sent back to London as my Auntie Rose said she couldn't handle me. I went back to elementary school, failed my 11 plus exam but my mother worked as a cook during the day and in the evening was on the ambulances at Tunnel Avenue. My mother's boss on school meals was Mrs Tillyard who had a son Philip who she got into a secondary grammar school by paying an education fee. She suggested my mother try the same for me. She was successful and the name of the school was Addey and Stanhope, one of the oldest mixed grammar schools in London. I was there for 5 years. It was five miles away from where I lived in Penge. It was in Deptford and is still going strong.
Phil Tillyard and I became firm friends and we were evacuated to Garnant in South Wales away from the V2 bombs but I was in London for the doodlebugs and saw quite a few of them.
1947 Left school and started work at TW Wingent West Wickham for two years.
1949 National Service for two years at Cranmore near Shepton Mallet.
1951 Demobbed, got a job at Nine Elms goods yard Southern Railway for one year.
1952 Started at Cinema Televison glass shop for 5 years.
1957 Joined Siemen Ediswan at Woolwich for 2 years.
1959 Transferred to Harlow Research Labs.
1962 Left Siemens joined Scientific Refiners.
1963 Took over TW Wingent to present day 1999,
Name changed to Hampshire R&D Glassware in 1969.
Glynde recollections of Fred Morse, 1939 - 42
I read in full the account of Glynde Cricket Team winning at Lord’s which brought back memories of lining the river bank in swimming costume to retrieve the ball when Harry Newham scored 100 plus with his partner who, I think, was ‘Shirty’ Miller who also got about 100 about 1939-1940. Harry Tasker was the umpire1.
I was quite surprised to read in the Glynde school admission register why I was sent back to London. It reads ‘returned to parents, aunt found him too troublesome’. I can understand why, on one occasion Les Knight and I joined the junior L D V [Local Defence Volunteers], forerunner of the Home Guard. Our job was to collect waste paper from Trevor Gardens and Spring Gardens and take it to a store at the other end of the village. This was a novelty for a few weeks till it became a bore, so we dumped the sacks of paper near the railway station until the sacks of paper got too many so we dragged them up to the pit near the station and set light to them and had a big bonfire. For this we were thrown out of the LDV juniors.
I was forbidden as a child to climb trees in case I tore my clothes but this didn’t stop me. There was one tree in the village recreation ground that I always climbed and it seemed every time I climbed it my uncle, Harry Tasker, would ride by on his bike and would look up and see me and would just say ‘Home’. I would have to run after his bike and he would wait by the back door of 15 Trevor Gardens and I would have to get past a big firm hand clip round the ear or, if he missed with his hand, it would be a boot up the backside.
But for all that we were still pleased to see one another when I went back to Glynde in 1952 as the photos show.
I was reading the account of Edgar Eade in The Glynde Archivist No 10. We always referred to him as granddad, mainly because Nell, his daughter, lived with him at Step Cottage and the Taskers lived in the adjoining cottage before they moved to Trevor Gardens. We used to see granddad Eade every Sunday after church when we, that is Betty, George Tasker, my sister Margery and myself, collected our Sunday penny, our pocket money, from his bedside. He didn’t get up till lunchtime. The picture on page 18, volume 10, must have been taken 1939-1940, sitting by the wall opposite Step Cottage. I was originally in that picture on his left hand side, until I was moved away by the Southern Weekly News reporter.
Why we got pocket money as children I don’t know. I can only assume that because my sister and I were relatives of the Taskers, who had lived in the adjoining cottage to Step Cottage, that we were not left out. A penny in those days would buy ¼ or ½ lb of sweets at the village shop which was run by your relatives.2
I remember 1940 when a German plane dropped a stick of bombs across the Eastbourne road up near Bishop’s Corner. They didn’t hit the road but the bombs straddled the road. The one on Bishop’s side exploded and the ones on the other side of the road just went straight into soft earth.
I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps as a tradesmen as a carpenter (pattern maker) but I was so bored with it that I was given a weekend to think what I wanted to do. I said, ‘Play cricket, join Surrey groundstaff’. I was told play cricket in your spare time and learn a trade. My father was carpenter to John Logie Baird when he invented television and stayed with the company till he retired. Fortunately, the company he worked for was called Cinema Television and they had a glass shop so my father suggested glass-blowing as a trade. He got me an interview and I was fascinated and I became a skilled scientific glass blower. Ornamental and decorative glassware was a hobby of mine. Some examples of my work I have enclosed in photographic form. We have a society called The British Society of Glassblowers. We have a national competition for decorative work and since 1980 I have won the award nine times. I like making horses so these feature in most of my exhibits.
1 Fred may be thinking of a match played at Glynde 18 August 1939 when Glynde beat East Dean in the Cuckmere Valley League. Harry Newham, in fact, scored 96 runs in a second wicket partnership with E. Turner who scored 120 not out. The two of them shared a seventh-wicket partnership of 161 runs in less than an hour, an extraordinary feat in village cricket at this time.
2 Fred Lusted, Andrew Lusted’s great grandfather.
Karen writes;
Dad was a great story teller as indeed his father Joe was. These are some of the stories I remember dad telling us as we grew up. Most of his best stories were about the war years.
One day, probably during the Blitz, dad was at school as usual and the teacher told them there would be an air raid soon. She gave pupils a choice, they could stay in school and go down to the school shelter or they could go home. Dad of course opted to go home. As he walked down the street a Messerschmidt flew low over the rooftops and followed him down the street firing into the road. Dad ran and one of the doors flew open and a lady called out 'Quick sonny, in here!' but dad flung himself to the ground and when the plane had gone he got up and went home.
When I told this story to a book club I belong to there were shrieks of mock horror and laughter because in this day and age of risk assessment many aspects of the above story would have been unthinkable.
Dad was 9 years old when he was evacuated to South Wales with Phil Tillyard who became a lifelong friend. They arrived at night in the dark. Phil went off with people who looked after him well. Dad stayed with a childless couple for 2 years who didn't show him much affection just so long as he behaved himself. The house wasn't very comfortable and in the winter his room was very cold at night. He only had one blanket. Later he discovered that the food parcels his mother sent him must have been consumed by his hosts or perhaps sold on.
Apart from these hardships which he never mentioned in letters home to his parents Joe and Dorothy, he enjoyed the freedom of the village and the surrounding countryside much as he did in Sussex. He played in the woods with friends and they built camp fires. Once when he got his socks wet in a stream he hung them up to dry in front of the fire and burned holes in the socks. When he got home he used boot polish to hide the holes next time he wore the socks.
Dad learned to speak Welsh. He was able to sing a Welsh carol and could recite the very long name of a Welsh village.
Llanfairpwllgwynggyllgogerychwyrndrobwlllantysiliogogogoch
He could do this in what sounded to our ears, fluent Welsh until the Parkinsons disease and dementia robbed him of his memory. He mixed with local people and won some money playing cards. He spent it on black market chocolate. With a friend they retreated to the woods to enjoy their chocolate up in the branches of a tree and between them they ate so much that they made themselves sick. When Dad was stationed in the West Country he spent a day's leave going back to the Welsh village to which he was evacuated. When he knocked on the door of the couple who had looked after him the husband greeted him but didn't invite him in. Disappointed Dad went to say hello to the large lively family next door who invited him in for tea and saved the day.
I had read some of the Just William books as a child and I identified my dad with William, always getting into scrapes and sometimes avoiding punishment by ingenious means. Like William he was a rebel and content to go his own way until an adult intervened.
In Glynde he was told repeatedly not to climb trees in case he tore his trousers. There was a particular tree in the village that he liked to climb. Despite being told not to climb trees he persisted in climbing this tree. Every so often, Uncle Harry whose house he was staying in to avoid the bombs in London would pass under this tree, look up and shout 'Home!' Dad would scramble down the tree and when he got home Uncle Harry would be waiting by the door to give dad a kick with his heavy hobnailed farm labourer's boots.
We had the impression that Uncle Harry was a stern man of few words.
In recent years I went online to look at the history of Glynde and found the school records for the period of time dad was there as an evacuee living with Uncle Harry and Auntie Rose the younger sister of my grandmother. To my surprise all the children's details were there, whether they were local or an evacuee. This included how long the evacuees stayed, who with, when they returned home and why. Alongside Dad's name it was recorded that he went back to London after a few months because his aunt couldn't cope with him. We thought this was hilarious and when I read it out to Dad although he had always revelled in his past exploits, he coloured up with embarrassment that his naughtiness was officially recorded for posterity.
Dad and his friends used to get lifts into Lewes with the milkman, riding on his truck.
Years later when I was in my teens Dad took us to Glynde with the idea of crossing the Sussex Downs to Newhaven and then catching the train back to Glynde. We had lunch at a pub then set off. It was a very hot day. Dad was frustrated to discover that it was impossible to find the path he used to walk along to Newhaven. We kept encountering barbed wire and then he wanted us to cross a farmyard. In the middle of the farmyard there was to us townies, an ominous looking black bull, its head lowered slightly giving us a menacing look. After much protestation from Mum myself and my sisters about the likely danger from the bull, we went round the farmyard. We reached the top of Downs eventually and could see Newhaven and the sea gleaming in the distance. Given the difficulty in reaching this point Dad conceded that his plan although a good one in principle might prove difficult given the obstacles we had already encountered so we returned home. It was nevertheless a memory we all laughed over in later years especially remembering our fear of the bull in the farmyard.
Dad collected magazines from Glynde produced by a villager Andrew Lusted who was interested in researching the village's history. I emailed Andrew and he realised his father had known dad. Dad was delighted. Reading these magazines and looking up Glynde online I learned that there was a game of stoolball which was a forerunner of cricket and was still known in the village. There appeared to be a league of teams still playing in the south east
Dad had a black and white photo of Uncle Harry bringing the hay cart back, drawn by two horses. He recreated the photo in glass and placed it in a display cabinet. It was one of his many much praised pieces of work and won a prize at the Glass Symposium.
Dad's fondest boyhood memories were of his time in Glynde where despite the war he was free to roam the woods and hillsides. He wanted to return to Glynde in the last couple of years before he died and I regret that we were not able to arrange it before his poor mobility and dementia set in.
God gives allmen all earth to love,
But, since man's heart is small,
Ordains fo each one spot shall prove
Beloved overall.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground - in a fair ground -
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
From 'Sussex' by Rudyard Kipling
When Dad returned to London he played on the many bomb sites left by the Blitz. He and a friend went into bombed house and found themselves in a roomful of stamps, they were everywhere. The blast must have blown open boxes of stamps owned by a trader or serious collector.
Dad's father Joe would not contemplate going into an Anderson shelter and said if he was going to die it would be in his own bed. One day Dad was at home with one of his sisters and a bomb fell nearby and blew the front windows out.
During the war Joe helped the Fire service and Dorothy worked on the ambulances.
Dad was close to his mum and didn't like to hurt her feelings. When he started work she made him cheese sandwiches to take with him. When she asked if he had enjoyed them he confirmed that he had which resulted in her making him cheese sandwiches every day thereafter. He couldn't bring himself to ask her for a change and then grew to dislike cheese intensely. He would not touch cheese ever again which ruled out many dishes that otherwise he might have enjoyed such as pasta and pizza. He preferred traditional meat based dishes and had a very sweet tooth taking 3 sugars in his tea. He loved dark chocolate and nuts.
When Dad was a toddler his mum who doted on him, let his hair grow in long ringlets. One Saturday when she was out His dad took him to the barbers saying he was looking like a girl and needed a haircut. Nan when she came home and saw dad's hair was very upset and cried.
When dad was a bit older he took some money from Nan's purse and when he was found out Grandad marched him down to the nearest police station where the officer on duty doubtless exchanging a wink with Grandad gave dad a ticking off and warned him not to do it again.
Dad did not have a close relationship with his father mainly because Joe liked a drink and the camaraderie of the pub. He often came home late and worse for wear spoiling a meal my grandmother had prepared hours ago. This would result in rows and objects flying across the room. The effect this had was to put dad off pubs and drinking very much. Dad did occasionally enjoy a drink and his favourite was a whiskey mac or a glass of wine with his meal. He was not a beer drinker. It was later in life when dad had found a job he loved and was established with a family of his own that he found he was able to establish a good adult relationship with his dad, one of mutual respect.
It was both surprising and mortifying to us girls when on our first holiday abroad in Austria, on a night out Dad drank too much schnapps and entertained people on the coach back to the hotel by singing risque songs into a microphone at the front of the coach. This was a side of dad we had not seen before. At 14 I felt as disapproving and confused as Saffy in Ab Fab. On the same holiday which was a skiing holiday, he quickly tired of the beginners skiing lessons which went far too slowly for him so he set off on his own. Unfortunately he twisted his knee and had to spend the rest of the holiday watching everyone else skiing.
When we were younger we often went on holiday to the West Country and the Lake District. Our first ever flight was from Cambridge to Guernsey. Aged 8 I went to Guernsey with Dad's parents and my cousin Sue who is a year older than me. We travelled by train and ferry. We stayed with a family my grandparents knew who lived in Guernsey. There was Olive who was my grandparents' age and her two daughters, one of whom had two young daughters and the other daughter had seven children. which gave Sue and I plenty of ready made friends to play with. It was an even bigger adventure when as a family we flew from Cambridge to Guernsey in as dad cheerfully pointed out much to our trepidation, quite an old plane.
In later years Mum and Dad travelled widely to the US, Canada, Europe, south east Asia, the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. Dad was asked to give a talk and a demonstration at a glassblowing conference in New Zealand by someone he knew who had emigrated to New Zealand. This gave mum and dad the chance to travel to south east Asia and Australia on the same trip. They went to visit my husband's aunt and uncle in Whangarei, North Island who they had never met before. Derek's uncle worked for Pilkingtons in Warrington before they emigrated so they had the glass world in common. All four got on very well and stayed in touch thereafter.
Having been in the RAF for his National Service, Dad was always interested in aeroplanes and for his 65th birthday my sisters and I clubbed together and bought him a ride in a vintage plane. He looped the loop and posed for photos with his characteristic broad grin and thumbs up sign.
Dad was 15 when the war ended and on VE day he went to Trafalgar Square to join in the celebrations. By this age he attended a Grammar School. My grandmother was worried about Dad mixing with boys who were a bad influence on him so she spoke to someone she knew whose son attended the Grammar school. She applied for Dad to attend the Grammar school and took on an evening cleaning job on top of her day job as a cook to pay for him to go there. Dad was by this point not interested in academic work, his main focus was sport and girls as he readily admitted to my sisters and I later. He also commented that transferring from one school to another supposedly better school, he went from being with a 'bunch of low class crooks to mixing with a bunch of high class crooks.' His point to us was that he had wasted this golden opportunity to achieve academically and he didn't want us to make the same mistake.
However Dad through his glass work more than proved himself capable academically when he learned the science involved in his craft. He was also able to collaborate with university professors when they needed to create glassware for certain research purposes. He was a good communicator and problem solver. With his upbeat attitude he relished a challenge. He also had to acquire resilience to cope with his work taking an extraordinary amount of time, skill and patience. Occasionally things would go wrong at the last moment. He would put a piece of work in the oven to be fired overnight only to find it in pieces when the oven door was opened the next morning. This would result in all his work being thrown away and Dad having to grit his teeth and start again. Not only was it personally frustrating and annoying but it cost the business time and money.
Dad helped set up the Glass Symposium and the glass examinations by which apprentices could be assessed. He was heavily involved in the symposium for many years and he and mum enjoyed their annual excursion to wherever in the country the symposium was being held. He and mum made many friends in the glassblowing world. The last symposium Dad was able to attend was in 2014. It was held in Edinburgh so supported by my husband Derek who was retired by then, they flew up together from Southampton. The Glass Society presented Dad with a life time's achievement award for his contribution to the society and to the glass industry. By this stage his mobility was very poor but he managed to go up to receive the award and it was a very emotional moment for all concerned.
Dad's achievements in artistic glassware regularly won prizes at the Symposium. His ventures in this direction came about because in the early days he needed to earn extra money to support his young family. Even when living with my grandparents because he and mum could not afford a place of their own, Dad set up a little workbench in a cupboard in the house and produced glass animals which he took to Petticoat Lane market to give to a trader he knew who would sell them for him. From there as the business grew and there was less need to earn additional income this interest developed over many years into a form of self expression and artistic endeavour which was much admired. He won many awards for his artistic creations at the annual Glass Symposiums
Mum and dad met through mutual friends. Dad went to the wedding of his friend Len who he knew from his grammar school days. Mum knew the bride Doreen. Dad said he saw mum go into the church wearing a very smart brown suit and was immediately impressed by her style and figure which was very trim from the hardship of the war years.
Dad would do anything for anyone. On holiday in Yorkshire once we went for a walk at Ingleton, a well known beauty spot. Halfway round the trail we came across a family whose toddler had just fallen down into a steep overgrown gully. The mother was distraught. Dad didn't hesitate, he plunged straight down the hillside and disappeared from view leaving my mum and my sisters and I very anxious about him in our turn. He was the first to reach the toddler who was lying face down in a stream. He gave him the kiss of life and the boy started to recover. A number of other people had come down the hillside to join him and they formed a human chain to carry the boy back up the hill as quickly as possible. Emergency services arrived and the boy was taken to hospital to be checked. The next day the family who had found out where we were staying delivered a bouquet of flowers to express their thanks.
Dad loved sport and was a natural sportsman. He never seemed interested in football or rugby but played cricket, tennis, badminton and golf. As a teenager Dad joined a church youth club and at weekends he would go out cycling with a large group of friends from the youth club. Sometimes there would be as many as 30 of them setting off together. There was relatively little traffic on the road in those days and they used to cycle into Surrey , Sussex and Kent, sometimes going as far as Brighton. Once Dad said he cycled to Weston-super-mare. Later this enjoyment of independent freewheeling led to acquiring a motorbike in his twenties. He and mum travelled by motorbike to the north to stay with a friend from the RAF and to the West Country on holiday. He often declared with great pride that mum was the best pillion rider he had ever had, that she took the bends fearlessly. As a newly married couple they hired a boat with friends and went sailing on the Broads.
In his schooldays Dad occasionally bunked off school and would go and play pool. This may have been the reason my grandmother decided he needed to change schools. He admitted that he could easily at that stage have taken a wrong turning in life as he enjoyed risk taking and gambling. Well into later life Dad still enjoyed a flutter on the horses and after a game of golf he played the fruit machine. Golf was his lifelong passion and late in life when his back pain from a slipped disc sustained in his early 30s, became too great he was sad to have to give golf up.
Dad also loved animals especially dogs. His first dog was a dog called Dekko, a terrier. Mum and Dad had a ginger cat called Tinkle when I was a baby. I was in my early teens when we got our first dog, a black Labrador called Jet which we changed to Jess.
Irene recalls:
I met Fred at the wedding of my friend Doreen. We worked together at William Hill in Fleet Street. When she married Len Collier I met his friend Fred. We went out together and kept in touch when he went away to do his National Service over the next two years. We wrote to each other occasionally and met up when he was home on leave. If I wanted to speak to Fred on the phone I had to go to a call box because my family didn't have a telephone although Fred's did. When he had finished his National Service he needed to find a job. After working on the railway for a while he went to work in the glass shop at his father's company Cinema Television in Sydenham. We went to dances, the cinema and went out with friends.
After we got married we lived with Fred's parents to begin with and eventually moved into rented accommodation in New Cross. Fred's mum was very kind and helpful to me. She made space for us to prepare our own meals and advised me on how to manage on a budget. At New Cross we had a kitchen and sitting area in the basement and the bedroom was up on the top floor. By the time we moved, Karen was a few months old. The building had a shop at the front, and a railway line lay behind the building. At night we put Karen to sleep in a carry cot and later took her up with us to the bedroom. She slept through the noise of the trains rumbling past. In the kitchen there was a gas stove in which I used to boil up the nappies. Upstairs we shared a bathroom with other people in the building.
Later Fred heard of a job in Harlow New Town and was told that if he got the job it would be possible to have one of the many new council houses being built after the war. Fred went for the job and met his future business partner Jack Green working there. Our second daughter Jan was born at home in Harlow. The man the business belonged to was not a glassblower himself so he let Fred and Jack run the business between them. They grew tired of this extra responsibility which they were not paid for and so they decided to set up together again in Cambridge as a lot of work was coming from there. Fred and Jack built up a reputation for being good reliable workers. We lived in Cambridge for several years and Gill was born there when we lived in Shelford. We bought our first home there, a bungalow in Thriplow. From there we moved to the north of Cambridge, Woodlark Rd off the Huntingdon Rd. In 1969 we moved to Southampton where Fred was going to set up another branch of the business with Jack remaining in Cambridge to run the Cambridge branch.
As the business grew we were able to take holidays and travel more widely both here and abroad. My best memories are of the times we spent travelling. When we were married Fred had a motorbike although he later bought a Ford when we had Karen. We went to the West Country on the motorbike and Fred always said that I was the best pillion rider he ever had because I was completely relaxed and took the bends with him. We lay under a tree to rest on the journey to the South West and fell asleep. In that time the sun moved round and we both got very badly sunburned. We also went sailing on the Norfolk Broads with two friends. Fred also taught me to play tennis although I didn't play much. When Fred took up golf we went camping with Karen in Scotland. My sister Barbara and her husband Ron who was a keen golfer came with us and the two men played at St Andrews golf course. Looking back on our time together we met when Fred was 18 and I was 19, we stayed in touch in spite of Fred going away on National Service for two years and we were married for 65 years. Before Fred and I were married I bought him a silver cigarette case and had it inscribed with the words 'I will always love you'. I still have the cigarette case with a photo of Fred in it. Although there were many difficult times especially in the early days when money was short while Fred was developing the business, we stayed together through thick and thin. The photo of us holding hands when Fred was in the care home shows our love and devotion to each other.
Final song played at Fred's funeral, 'Let there be love' by Nat King Cole
Let there be you,
Let there be me.
Let there be oysters
Under the sea.
Let there be wind,
An occasional rain.
Chile con carne,
Sparkling champagne --
Let there be birds
To sing in the trees,
Someone to bless me
Whenever I sneeze.
Let there be cuckoos,
A lark and a dove,
But first of all, please --
Let there be love.
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