Ferndown memories
Here are memories of Ferndown and the local area. You can start now: Add your own Memory of Ferndown or a Ferndown photo.
Ferndown
I was born in a cottage called Oak Cottage on the Ringwood Road between the Angel Inn and the Rambler Garage as it was then. I was 9 when the Second World War started and remember the Southampton buses bringin the evacuee childen to stay in Longham and Ferndown. We went to Ferndown school in Church Road which has now been demolished and is now council offices. The school now is at the back on the land where the trenches were dug during the war which were to keep us safe. The Village Hall is still there and the British Legion is a nice modern building next door were we play skittles once a month. I remember when the evacuees came we went to school in the mornings and they went in the afternoons untill things got sorted out. My best friend at school was Eddy Grubb whose whole family came down from Southampton and lived near us and went back after the war, but we are still friends... Read more
Zoo
The zoo was in Ringwood Rd near the junction with Church Rd. It closed in 1955 after complaints about Ajax the lion. Now the site of homes in Longacre Drive.
Wartime in Ferndown
I have so many memories of growing up in Ferndown during the Second World War, when it was just a village. Collecting pigswill and old papers to aid the war effort. Scouting adventures with scoutmaster Doug Gabe. Playing games on the common and collecting tadpoles and newts in jamjars. The bomb that fell in Victoria Road, and the night when incendiaries rained down - a neighbour beat "ours" out with the hydrangea he pulled up from the front garden! Carol singing. Being told off for throwing stones at the church bell. Ajax, the lion at Ferndown zoo that made national headlines because its roar was too loud. Those were the days. We lived at Delkeith in Dudsbury Avenue, niow the site of Delkeith Court. I left Ferndown in 1954 to do National Service, and didn't return for years, by which time it had exploded into a town that I hardly recognised. It was so different that I wrote a book about what it used to be like (Ferndown, the Back... Read more
Ferndown Zoo
I don't remember the year but I think it was in the 1950s. Where exactly was the Ferndown Zoo? I have a photo of one of my cousins taken with a goat. I really don't remember much about it, I just know I went at least three times. Please help.
Visiting Ferndown
(Not just 1955, probably most of the 1950s.)
When my mother was a little girl, she was looked after by a nanny, who in her later years lived at Fairways, a bungalow at the end of Carroll Avenue. In the 1950s when I was very young, we used to visit what seemed a large bungalow in a very large garden full of pine trees and bracken, where my brother and I used to play while the adults gossiped. Years later, long after Nanny had moved away, probably 1967 or 68, when we went back to see what the place looked like, it was half demolished, and new houses were being built on the site. A sad day for us.
Memories of Dorset
My School
I go to Ferndown Middle School.
Canford School
My mother was a cook at Canford School. I remember her Christmas parties being held in the great hall. It was/is such a magnificent house. Oh - happy memories.
My Strange Connection With Canford
I lived between Boscombe and Southbourne from 1954 until 1956 and I remember some family outings in our very first car - a black Ford Prefect saloon. Trips into the Dorset countryside were exciting for me and also for my father who had never taken a driving test because he had a licence before tests were introduced! Sometimes we went through Canford and my father told me it was a wonderful boarding school.
For this ten year old it sounded attractive as I had been brought up on a diet of story books about Billy Bunter at Greyfriars School and similar schoolboy yarns. I so wanted to go to Canford School. In the event my father promised me that if I failed the scholarship for Bournemouth School for Boys then he would send me to Canford. It was probably the worst thing he could have said as it was a positve inducement to fail my exam!
As luck would have it, fate intervened. I damaged both... Read more
Corner Shop
I used to work in the shop on the corner, there is a man standing outside the door. It was called Langer and Son. It was then a saddler, sports and shoe shop. I met my husband there in 1963. We are celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary this year so this picture brings back many memories.
Family Connections.
The lady standing on the bridge is my great grandmother Hannah Elton nee Churchill and the small boy her grandson, Cecil Henry Stickland, my uncle. He became the verger at Christchurch Priory. Hannah lived with her husband Henry, a carpenter, in the cottage to the left of the photograph just out of shot. Hannah was the local midwife and at the time the photograph was taken her daughter Louisa Eliza had returned to her parents home for the birth of my mother, Ivy Emma Stickland.
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Places this week
Here are some of the places you've shared memories of this week:
- Streatham, Greater London
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- Earby, Lancashire
- Leytonstone, Greater London
- Plumstead, Norfolk
- Brynamman, Dyfed
- Coalville, Leicestershire
- Ringwood, Hampshire
- Wellingborough, Northamptonshire
- Woking, Surrey
- Seaton Carew, Cleveland
- Walsall, West Midlands
- Burnt Oak, Middlesex
- Orpington, Kent
- Pengegon, Cornwall
- Ipswich, Suffolk
- Kibblesworth, Tyne and Wear
- Aveley, Essex
- Gratwich, Staffordshire
- Bonnyrigg, Midlothian
- ... and lots more - Browse this week's memories now.
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