Barton On Sea New Milton Hants Dorset

A Memory of Barton on Sea.

My parents moved from Bournemouth to Barton-on-Sea around 1947, and purchased a business at 18 Whitefield Road, New Milton, and a home at 24 Barton Court Avenue which was our childhood home for ten years - that house holds most of our childhood memories. My three siblings and I were rambunctious and very active. The Wynn sisters lived next door at No.26, and they never complained in ten years about the yapping dog, the screaming children and the wild activities we got up to. To start with, we had a Nanny (Joan Woodland) who walked the legs off us around the golf course and along the beach for miles. On the Nannies day off, we were farmed off to the Miss Evans Nursery School around the corner. As we got older the change of nannies became more frequent, until it was hard to find anyone willing to look after us, but by then we were getting self-nannied. The Beach at Barton was not the nicest - in those post war years the sea front was littered with steel-work of the wartime beach defenses which provided the ambitious with diving platforms to show off to the beach crowd - the cliffs were unstable gravel, sand and clay (Barton Clay earned a spot in geological texts) and slumped continually down to the sea. The under-cliffs at Barton honed my brothers and my construction abilities, building dams in the gullies that drained the ground water from the gravel cliffs down to the sea, but no dam was ever strong enough to contain those lakes of water for long, and then woe betide the sun bathers on the beach below. When we learned to ride bicycles our area of childhood operations expanded to embrace all the surrounding districts.

---

---