Remembering Marske By The Sea

Year: 1950

Remembering Marske By The Sea

We came to Marske in August 1948 having just demobbed from the Army 9 weeks earlier, we purchased a shop at 221 High St selling groceries, rations, ice cream etc. Our daughter was just 5 weeks old and was baptized in St Germain Church, our son Peter went to school in the Old Tithe Barn, Mrs Buttery was the teacher. Mr Skippon ran the Pictures with 5 changes a week, each show had 2 features, a cartoon & news reel, he also ran the taxi business. Mrs Sanders worked hard for the British Legion [women's section]. Jack Lynch did a lot of work for us, he replaced the garden in front of the shop and made a concrete pad in front, & cement-faced the front wall, and also removed a wall inside the shop to make it bigger. Frank Carter was a very good friend to us, also Jean his daughter. Frank helped me a lot a & nothing was too much for him, we had pigs at the bottom of the garden and Frank would come & feed them while we were at the wholesalers, we had a cottage at the back of the shop and he helped me take out the wall under the window and  pour a foundation under it and rebuild the wall, then we dug out the floor in the living room & poured a concrete floor. Jack Lynch rebuilt the chimney in the cottage. We had wonderful customers and enjoyed meeting them each day. The fishermen, the Lynches, Andersons & the Coopes along with Mr Downs [who was the owner of the Ship inn] all had boats down by the beach, and often brought their crab catch and put them down on our shop front where people bought them for about 9 pence  each.
We moved to Domanstown in 1955 when my wife had a nervous breakdown, we sold the  shop to my mother and she sold it in 1956 when she moved back to Lancashire. We really enjoyed living and working in Marske and often reminise the good old days we lived there.
We have been back to England many times over the years and been back to Marske a few times and have seen many changes.
Trevor Williams.