North Boarhunt, Wine Croft c1960
North Boarhunt, Wine Croft c1960 Ref: n185008
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Memories of North Boarhunt, Wine Croft
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North Boarhunt & local memories
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Living in North Boarhunt - 1965-1968
My parents moved to North Boarhunt in 1964/65. We lived at the top of Trampers Lane - sideways to what was then Doney's Garage. Our house was called "Tryfan". I went to Newton Primary School and have very fond memories of this school with the two teachers, (one) was called Mrs Mahoney, and two classrooms. The main classroom had a coal fire which burned away behind the teacher's desk, and outside was a large store for all the coal - next to the outside toilets! We had a lovely field to play in, with a "Wendy House". If you took an egg to school, in the afternoons you were allowed to make fairy cakes. I also remember thinking the school was very advanced because we had a libary and a music room and used to listen to education programms on the radio. When the weather was fine we would go on lengthy nature walks and learn about frogspawn, birds and catkins. My best friend at school was called Lyn Johnson, who lived further down Trampers Lane towards the Rec, and I also used to play with David Stairs who live on the other side of the Portsmouth Road. I was also friendly with a girl called Jackie Smith, the family lived next door to Doney's garage (I think) which was at the back of us. Another girl I remember was Maria Crook who lived in a row of cottages near the Rec. We used play on the swings at the rec and try climb on the roof of the nissan hut.
My mother was an member of the WI and used to go to dressmaking classes at the hall. I also remember seeing the Black & White Minstrel Show in the hall.
Sometime I used to go out walking with our next door neighbour Mrs Cantel; we used to walk down the lane on the other side of the main road and and pick primroses and bluebells. I remember this all being closed off when the Foot and Mouth outbreak occured and remember the awful sight of the cows all being cremated in a field en route to school one morning!
We were collected for school by an old royal blue coach (I think)! I also remember coming home from school one day to see pylons errected across the fields opposite which wasn't very pretty.
Opposite our house was a farm which belonged to a Mrs Beattie (I think that was her name) and she had a very fierce sheep dog who was always chained up by his kennel.
I learnt to horse ride when I was 6 and was taught by the daughter of the Dadds family, who lived just up the road from us along the road to Wickham. On the other side of this road were "market gardens" that grew huge dahlias and crysanthamums! Whenever I see these flowers now, I am always reminded of these happy days!
My parents had friends who live in Hundred Acres (and they are still there now)! they had four children, all around similar age to my sister and myself . We used to run amok in Hundred Acres wood and have a great time building camps etc.
In 1965 my sister was born at home. We used to walk with the pram along the very narrow road grass verge / pavement to Mr Chalmers store, which was on the way to Wickam. One year we went to the circus at Wickham - it was really spectacular, with performing large aminals and cats pushing pushcairs!
I loved my short time living in North Boarhunt and was really sad when we moved to Ringwood, Hants in 1968.
Shared on 15 March 2008
My mother and father moved to 1 Birch Hill Cottages when I was in arms. I went to the tiny school in Newtown by mini bus which was really a Bedford van with seats in the back. I played in the field with the swings and on some Saturdays watched the football played there. My Uncle David used to play for Wickham, those were the days when shorts were below the knees! I played with the other children that lived at the top of Trampers Lane, names like the Crooks, Smith and Parretts come to mind. My mother used to do "weddings" in the working mens club, known in those days as the hut. She ran the WI for many years from there, then later the over 60s. My father was in the Royal Navy, so wasn't at home very often, not like they are to day. I played in the woods, we all did, but we shouldn't have - playing dens was so much better if it was built in a tree. Sometimes it would take us the whole summer holidays to build it which meant we never got to play in it, but oh the fun we all had. Sometimes we went to the sand pit, again it was a place our mothers used to say to stay away from. My mum told the tale that a car had been buried in there and the bodies were still there. I think it was to scare me, but I could never work out why they didn't move it if they knew it was there. By going through the sand pit, you would come out in Hundren Acres where one good friend had her grandparents, and they kept bunnies, all furry and soft. We used to pick dandylions and hog weed on the way there, then we fed them to the bunnies. Loved going up there as you can tell.
I can remember one winter when it snowed really bad. We used to have a paper lady and she couldn't get up the lane on her bike. The milkman wouldn't even try it, the fish man on Fridays stopped all together. Mum borrowed an old pram, took the wheels off and set off down to the bottom of the road where a message had been sent to mum via a fit neigbour who had gone to fetch a paper 2 hours earlier, normally only taking 20 mins. The milkman had left what he could at the garage, and mum piled them into the pram and took these back for the famlies "up the top end". We were always having snow in those days, so each year was mostly bad.
When I went to secondary school (Portchester) we were picked up by a double decker bus. It came up the road as far as the big tree, turned, then picked up, stopping at the lower council houses and at the bottom by the garage. This year which was 1963, was snow up to your arm pits and as the bus turned, the wheels touched ice, all the kids ran, and the bus went over into the ditch. Why it ever tried to make it to the top of the road I shall never know. We watched it try the last "hill" for about 1 hour before it made it anyway. I forget whose garden it went into, but there I stood by myself and watched the bus man try to get out of this bus. The others had ran and had got home and no way were they coming out again. Mum didn't know what had happened until I took home this poor guy in desperate need of a cup of tea. There was only one phone as far as I knew at the time and it was owned by the lady who lived in the first house by the tree, so after having had a good chat and lots of tea the driver made it to the house and made his call. I couldn't believe my ears when he said that as well as sending a pick up truck for the poor old bus, they were sending another damn bus out for us kids. Sorry one kid, me. No one else was going to school that day, but as it turned out it never got as far up the road as us, so I had the day off. Well half a day by the time I was allowed to take off the school uniform. Sadly we moved from North Noarhunt when I was 13. Dad had bought a place in Portchester which was easier for him to get to and from work in Portsmouth as he no longer went to sea. I really missed Boarhunt and for some years after would ride my bike over the hill to see the "old" place once more.
Shared on 02 May 2007
Newtown, Ye Swan Inn c1955
Ref: N197006
I remember I hadn't had my 5th birthday, and my mum said that tomorrow I was going to start school. School, I thought, whats that!.
The next day I was dressed up and at about 8.30 a small van with seats arrived outside my house, mum took me outside and kissed me and said I was to behave myself and to enjoy the day. "Ok mum, bye."
The van stopped outside a house, or that's what it looked like to me, and a lady came to the van and opened the door. "Come on children let's be having you out." she said. Ok I thought, I will see where we are going.
We were taken into a big room and were given some paper and some pencils and asked to do some drawings of our family... and so the day went on. We were shown where the toilets were, and given tiny bottles of milk to drink at what we were told was a break time.
Looking back on all of this, it was a beautiful little school, with a church to the back of it where we were taken sometimes to pick fir cones. Once we went inside and I remember thinking that the windows were pretty but then you have to remember I was small at the time. I stayed there until I went up to Droxford school, by then the van had gone and we used a small coach which first dropped off at Newtown and then went on to Droxford.
By the way, the next day when I had to go to school, I decided that although I had enjoyed it I wasn't going again!!! Is there anyone out there that went to that school with me? Vanessa Miles
Shared on 28 August 2007
Newtown, Ye Swan Inn c1955
Ref: n197004
Living in the Swan Inn - Newtown - 1936-1943
I lived at the Swan from 1936 to about 1943 - below are some extracts from my memoirs. I hope you find them of interest.
In about 1936 my father resigned, or to be more accurate was forced out of his company, a story in itself. My mother was getting concerned about the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the very real possibility of a war starting and wanted to leave the London area. The result was that my parents became the proprietors of Ye Olde Swan Inn in the village of Newtown just outside the old market town of Newbury in the County of Berkshire. A river ran through Newtown and the bridge crossing the river was the County demarcation line between Berkshire and Hampshire. So Newtown was in Hampshire, Newbury in Berkshire. The inn dated back to the 12th century when it was a bake house to nearby Sandleford Priory a large estate nearby. A newspaper article on the Swan some years later stated that there was a connecting underground passage between the Priory and the bake house, “presumably to keep bread dry in wet weather, and was in all probability used more often as a means of escape when danger threatened the occupants of the Priory”. (I have always been puzzled by that statement. Because to be connected with the Inn, the passage would have had to go under the river.) The bake house became an inn in 1448. It was in the original Tudor style with black exposed timbers and white painted plaster infill.
It stood at the intersection of the main Winchester road and a road leading to the village. The intersection formed a V and the Swan was situated in the V. The Swan in those days was not connected to a sewage system and all the toilets were chemical toilets, which had to be routinely emptied into a pit. I never actually discovered where. Perhaps I did not really want to know.
One interesting side note, I came back to visit the Swan in the 1980’s and found it undergoing extensive renovation. Going upstairs to my parent’s bedroom I took a look at the dividing wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. It was constructed in the mediaeval method of wattle and daub; this type of construction pre-dated wood studs and horizontal thin wood lathing strips nailed to the studs to provide a physical base for the plaster finish. Wattle and daub techniques used rough cut wood branches not necessarily straight and weaving the wood supports with thin pliable willow twigs horizontally (wattle). The structure was then daubed with mud pushed into and through the thicket of twigs and then smoothed over. These walls were solid, provided excellent insulation and lasted forever.
There were some encumbrances, which came with running the Swan. The first was that there was a petrol (gas) pump located in the parking area. My father had it removed eventually as he was tired of been woken up in the middle of the night by drivers honking their horn to get a refill. The other encumbrance was a 1936, 36 seater bus. This bus was the only means of transport for the local kids to get to school, my mother - all 5’-1” of her - had to obtain a bus driver's license and drive all over the area through narrow country lanes picking up children and delivering them to school and the same routine in the evening bringing them back home. We used to go shopping in it to Newbury, quite an experience and not easy to park in a crowded market town. This lasted until the war started when my father was called up in the RAF and mother had to run the pub by herself. The bus was released to pasture!
I was in London staying at my Club the Royal Overseas League off St James Street in 1993,reading the Telegraph in the Reading Room and came across an article regarding a visit to London by the President of Russia. He bought with him a number of items belonging to former British prisoners of war. These items had being captured along with the Germans and had resided deep in the Kremlin archives for over forty years. They included this gentlemen’s diary and the paper quoted some of his entries, which included his comments on my mother’s oysters. I wish my mother had been alive she would have appreciated that. The gentleman in question had died by then also and his son was astonished to know that his father had even kept a diary.
Howard Johnson –Mill Valley - California - 2009
By Howard Johnson
Shared on 05 March 2007
I used to go to a pre-school in Wickham that got turned into tendy flats/houses. It used to be just down the hill from Clarkes and had an old house with the most wonderful almost 'secret' garden ajoining the school and the old lady that owned it used to let us go and play underneath the huge old apple tree in it.
Also remember my mum buying me a pink sugar mouse from 'Caces' bakery every Friday afternoon.
Shared on 20 March 2009
