Blackwater, Hampshire

Re Cove, Bridge Road (c172009)

The photograph of Bridge Road clearly shows The Cove Supply Stores building on the right. My parents ran that shop from about 1936 to 1945. The Bridge Road end of the shop in the photo was the Off-Licence. Opposite the shop on Cove Road was the Ivy Leaf Club. I have such memories of Cove... I attended the Hawley Road Elementary School, and remember one teacher well, a Mr Harold Crapper, who was a devil with the cane! Later I attended the Farnborough Grammar School.

I wonder whether anyone can remember Mr Thornton's menswear shop? (Opposite Mr Munday's.) He used to place an advert in the local paper, always with a little poem referring to "'hornton's Bib-and-Brace'.  Mr Munday's Newsagency was always popular with boys and girls because of the comics he sold. If I remember rightly, there was a battery charging and bicycle shop on the corner of Hazel Avenue run by a Mr Young.

Being 12 years old when we moved to Cove, I cycled everywhere around the place, and through the flood waters covering Hazel Avenue at times! During the war years there was a lot of activity with Canadian soldiers being based just west of Cove.   I can still remember a Mr Jack Lamb (who was in his late 80s) who used to ride a tricycle from somewhere along Minley Road to collect his rations every Saturday. Cove did not escape the war, a bomb fell into the farmlands along Hazel Avenue. Luckily there was no damage, just a large muddy crater in the field.

As mentioned in a previous 'Memory', I too used to check the 'B' button in the public phone box near the Post Office on Bridge Road to see if anyone had forgotten to get their money back - sometimes I was lucky and found tuppence!
Although I cannot place the date, I remember a fatal railway accident at the Bramley Golf Course Halt, where a train ran into some people crossing the line.

On a return visit in the 1980s I found Cove had not changed a great deal from as I remembered it.
     

  
  

Addition to Cove in wartime

The two stores at the bridge across from West Heath Farm run by Jim Blunden (who had a daughter Pam Blunden) were stores we frequented every Friday, namely the one next to  the railway track. This was run by Kath Owen. Her husband had been killed during military exercises in Aldershot, but Kath continued to run Owens Sweet Shop. I remember we used to buy bags of sherbert and suck it out with a licorice straw. Does anyone else remember going to Owens Sweet Shop?  My name back then was Anne Ainsley, and I lived at The White House, 16 Minley Rd.

The Village

Going ‘down the village’ pretty much referred to the stretch of Cove Road, between Hazel Avenue and Marrowbrooke Lane, where most of the shops were. Once upon a time Cove must have been the typical English village: two houses, three pubs and a church. The ‘Tradesman’s Arms’, the ‘Anchor’ and the ‘Alma’ were all together, right beside the vicarage and St Christopher’s church. The two houses must have fallen down in the interval because the pubs and the vicarage looked older that anything else around. The church was odd because it looked very recent and I always wondered if there had once been an older building on the site.

Along one side of the Tradesmans Arms there was a narrow ally that always smelled strongly of pee. It was very convenient for the drinkers when they lurched out of the bar at closing time. On the other side of the pub, in a grubby little building beside the Methodist Church, was the chip shop, the Elite Fish Café. In the vernacular, pronounced Ee-light Fish Caff which actually better described the place. They did do a good three penn’th though, wrapped up in newspaper that they got from who knows where.

Further along, the newspaper and tobacconists shop was run by Bill Munday. Munday’s was on Cove Road at the junction of Bridge Road, next to Webb the butcher. Hill the butcher, where my mother shopped, was on the corner of Bridge Road and Highfield Road. Bill must have had money because soon after the war he was driving a Jaguar. He and Charlie Christopher both raced pigeons and it must have been in that connection that, one day, Charlie and I found ourselves passengers in the Jag going to something in Fleet. Charlie usually went places pedaling a heavy old trade bike with a big steel frame on the front.

Charlie Christopher and his mother owned a sweet shop, opposite what was left of Cove Pond at the side of Cove Green, just down from the Green Café, another rather seedy joint. I helped out in the store around the time that the new (c. 1949?) counters were installed. They were covered in plastic laminate with sloping glass fronts, very moderne. Part of the store was given over to haberdashery where Mrs Christopher sold a few reels of cotton and stuff. When the store started opening on Sundays, they had to cover all the counters on the north side and only sell sweets and ice cream. Rationing lasted until well after the war and sweets were in short supply. Christopher’s used to sell ‘Licorice Root’, a sort of woody substance with a strong flavour that kids would suck on. It wasn’t rationed.

Yeoman’s Dairy was on Cove Road between the brook and the railway bridge where the Fleet, Minley and Hawley Roads met. Every day in the early years Mr Yeoman came down the street with his horse, and cart filled with milk churns, and dipped out pints and quarts into customers’ jugs. Bottles came much later.

Busk Crescent

Late in 1945 my parents moved to 25 Busk Crescent, in Cove. The house was on top of a hill and overlooked the Farnborough airfield. From the front bedroom you could see aircraft landing on the runway. The house was one of a string of brand-new red-brick semi’s, built on the crescent and down Fowler Road, bordering an estate which had been constructed in the 1914-18 war. We were one of the earliest tenants on the street and the plaster wasn’t even dry. They said we were not to distemper the walls for at least six months. For some time there were no paths or fences, just mud and a few plans to walk on. Eventually a concrete path was laid to the street. At the back about ten feet of wooden privacy fence was attached to the house wall, and then a series of concrete posts supported three strands of galvanized wire to divide the gardens. Each house was provided with a really solidly built, flat-roofed, shed a few feet from the back door. A dividing wall split the small building into unequal halves. The smaller half for coal and the larger for general storage.

The houses on each side of ours were already occupied when we arrived. Doris and Tom Martyn and their kids Roy and Alan were in the adjoining semi. Verdon Over and his wife, in number 23, shared the driveway. They had four kids: Beryl, John, Daphne and Jennifer. The middle two were about my age but we were not in the same classes at Tower Hill School. Several years later when the Martyns moved out, Jack and Peggy Budd and their brood of kids moved into number 27.

A few months after we moved in, the war in Europe ended, the blackout was rescinded and eventually the street-lights were fixed up and came back on. They were gas and somebody came by every now and then to wind up the clockwork timer, to replace the delicate mantles when they broke, and to relight the pilot flame if it blew-out in a storm. On a foggy night, the glow of a gas street-light had a certain ambiance quite lacking with high pressure sodium.

On the corner of Busk Crescent and Weir Avenue, there was a public phone box. When we passed by as kids we always went in and pressed button ‘B’ and it was surprising how often a few pennies would drop out.

At the bottom of the avenue was the RAE coal depot. Trains of little trucks full of coal were pushed by an old steam tank-engine along the spur that came off the mainline at Farnborough station. The track ran down the middle of Elm Grove Road, across Victoria Road, and then, when the big corrugated iron gates were opened, through the woods to the coal yard. Unloading was effected with an old steam crane equipt with a clamshell bucket. I don’t recall that we were ever chased away as we walked along beside the wheels of the old loco with steam hissing around us.

Close to the coal yard was a storage building for aero-engines. The huge empty packing cases were stacked up at one one end of the building and they were an ideal place for climbing and hiding. For some reason, we were often chased away from there.

St Christopher’s Road connected the crescent to Cove Road at Tower Hill, where the closed-up Instone’s Garage occupied the corner. At about the halfway point, housed in some very dilapidated old wooden buildings left over from the first war era, there was a social club that had a rather sordid reputation. I don’t recall the official title, but it was fondly referred to as the ‘Bum and Tit Club’.