Acton Hill memories
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Memories of Staffordshire
Evacuee
I was evacuated to Milford in 1942 and lived with my parents at a bungalow called KENCOT. Father was a teacher at Stafford secondary school.
Sunday Outings
I was born in Stafford to parents who settled there after the war and came from Aberdeen and Newcastle-up-on-Tyne. My family often went to Milford and flew kites that we made or just explored and played hide and seek with each other, with an ice cream from the shop across the road. We emigrated to Australia in 1958.
Swimming Saturdays
I received a half-crown (2/6d) pocket money per week. This enabled me to travel from Gnosall by train every Saturday (8d return), pay for entrance to the brine swimming baths for the afternoon, (wonderful memories) and have enough for either a cup of hot chocolate, or use of the dryer for my (long) hair, afterwards. The hot chocolate usually won!
Public Disaster!!!!
This photograph is taken from the Lichfield Road. Veering off to the right in the distance is Greengate Street, and to the left, round the far corner of the library, the Newport Road. I used the library often. It had an annexe a little further up and 'off' the Newport road, past the Odeon Cinema, containing the library's music collection. I spent an even greater amount of time there. It was wonderful. Everything from Scarlatti to Lead Belly. What an education! (This was in my mid-teens.) You could actually borrow these records, take them home and play them on your Dansette if you wanted to, and/or listen to them in cubicles, rather like a 'language laboratory' as we used to call them. Then guess what? They moved the public library to the Shire Hall area, and when I asked where the records were, was told (somewhat disparagingly) that the collection had been AUCTIONED OFF!
The Music Library - Pride of Stafford!
The music library was in Friars Terrace until 1994, when it moved to the top floor of the library at the Green, which had been the Art Gallery before that moved to the Shire Hall.
By 1994 the LP collection was little used - it had been the biggest in any library in the UK. By 1994 we had the biggest CD collection in the UK, covering every possible kind of music. Stafford was the first library to lend CDs in the country, starting in 1983.
The Music Library moved to the Shire Hall in 1999 and is still one of the best CD collections in the UK (or world some say), priding itself on getting pretty well anything for anybody. It is one of the only county council services which is at the top of the government charts.
LPs were sold off in library sales because they were not wanted and were no longer being manufactured. We had no complaints.
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I Remember When...
This stunning compilation highlights some of the best stories selected from the thousands contributed here on the
Frith website. The result is an absorbing chronicle of British life from the Second World War to the mid 1960s.
A colourful treasure trove of memories, "I Remember When" is an
irresistible mix of personal stories and recollections that affectionately reveal the detail of everyday life in Britain.
