Weaverham In The 1950`s

A Memory of Weaverham.

I moved to Weaverham in 1951 like many others from Liverpool when my dad got a job at ICI. My memories include playing in the felds at Gerrards Farm at the back of our house in Farm Road along with my sister Lesley and our cousins Kenneth, Pamela, Michael, Peter and Martin who lived in Farm Road and Keepers Lane. We also had summer trips to the river to watch boats pass and swim in the river in between (I only fell in fully clothed once). Also, playing in Owley Wood, building big dams at the firing range and letting the water go when it was waist deep - no health and safety in those days. Farm Road then was a quiet road with no more than a few cars if you were posh and a motor cycle and sidecar or push bike otherwise. Our neighbours were the Farrells and the Hughes with the Symonds, Smiths, Crones, Hughes, Bruce, Cowman, Boyle and Bristow. I attended the infants and primary school... both of which had lots of Johns`s as pupils...and remember Hornbys shop, Littlers/Minshulls butchers, Jones grocers, the headmaster`s wife ran the post office...Roskell? and the doctors were Ewing and Henderson. We used to sledge down Davis`s hill in cardboard boxes in the summer and go `scrumping` down Shady Brook Lane and the trees in Orchard Close. We left Weaverham in 1960 and moved to Crewe but I was reunited with some of my former schoolmates in 1964 at the apprentice training school at Crewe Railway Works including Laurens Prins, John Piper, Peter Rigby, and Brian Atkinson. I have long since left Cheshire having lived in South Africa, London and have lived in Milton Keynes for the last 28 years but the memories of those early years do not fade.