Visiting My Father's Birthplace

A Memory of Portsmouth.

In 1972, when a mere slip of a boy of 40 summers, my late wife, two children and I flew from Australia on our first trip to Europe. Whilst in London, we travelled by train to visit my cousins Peter & Val Hatswell who lived at "The Stillions "on Windmill Hill, Alton. They took me to 13 Leonard Road, Landport, Portsmouth, the house with a bright red door where my father was born on 23rd September 1901. Of course I went on board HMS Victory to stand where Nelson fell - an experience still firmly fixed in my mind almost 40 years later. Standing there I remembered how my father the Reverend Thomas Westwood had told me "every boy born in Portsmouth is taken there as an infant to be laid on the hallowed spot where Admiral Lord Nelson fell".