Threeways & Churt Post Office

A Memory of Churt.

To the left of the little girls in the photograph of Churt Post Office there is a large house that was called Threeways in the 50's and 60's, perhaps it was always called this, I do not know. After WWII my parents, Norman and Leila Middlehurst, lived there in a flat with my brother Robert. They moved to Lower Bourne sometime just before I was born in early 1953. A small barn can be seen in the photograph; behind this barn there used to be a range of pig styes where, as rationing was still in force, my father kept pigs. He trained as a teacher whilst living at Threeways and first taught at The Bourne, then at Weydon when it first opened in the 50's. At The Bourne in my father's time the headmaster was Major Padgett, this being an era when ex-service men often retained their military rank in civilian life. My father used to make a great joke of this as he said the Major had never seen active service whilst he (my father) had served in the RAF in the Battle of Britain and then in North Africa throughout the desert war. However he only achieved the dizzy heights of Corporal having rather too much of a tendency to speak his mind. I attended The Bourne as a pupil between 1958 and 1964, an infant school and a primary school shared the site and Major Padgett was still the head at the primary school. A strict disciplinarian who would very accurately throw blackboard chalk at miscreants and who started each day with us reciting our tables, two times to twelve times. I remember him with affection. To return to Churt Post Office, it is a strangely remote location for the post office and I wonder whether it was vunerable even in the years preceding when this photograph was taken. Harry Baker, in his wonderful little book "Frensham Then and Now" published in 1948 but originally drafted in the 20s, tells of the wild men of Hindhead who raided the parish of Frensham. Even bee hives were chained down and Baker says "Not a house of any substance in Churt but had its windows strengthened against attack".