Blackwater, Bridge 1901

My mum and dad

My father and mother Mary and Bill Nash met here in 1957. The bus used to stop outside the pub, my mum went in one day because a lady called Betty Harris said a nice looking man with curly hair was in there. They met and 2 years later married at Aldershot Register Office but returned later for their wedding reception, also at the dog. Recently I lost my father Bill but guess where we had his wake - also at the dog. This place holds very special memories to me as I drink there as well with my dog Molly. So this holds lots of memories for our family. This is in memory of my dad Arthur Edward Nash ie BILL 4th of July 1925 till 29th December 2009. RIP DAD. Xlove my mate Mary x

Fond memories

I now live in Adelaide, South Australia, but lived in Holly Road in the 1950s and I too have fond memories of Christopher's sweet shop. My brother and I played on Cove green a lot and I broke my foot there atthe age of 6. I took a trip back down memory lane in 1984 on a very foggy day, Tower Hill School was very different from the little village school I remember.

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.
     

  
  

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.