Whitehill In The 60s And 70s

A Memory of Whitehill.

My husband Vic moved into the brand new council estate in 1968 with his parents and sister - Champney Close. His house backed onto the common and MOD training land. He’d stand up on the embankment watching the trains pass on the line below. Vic remembers watching The Marty Feldman show being filmed in Whitehill and a group of friends climbed on the show’s double decker bus. The bus was a prop. A golf ball was hit from the roof of the bus and landed in a train’s wagon full of sand passing under the cross roads bridge (now the sight of the dog bone /longabout round about in Whitehill). The Prince of Wales pub was the local and also had a hall behind it where the Friday night disco took place. (The pub is now an Asian/Nepalese restaurant). There was a Youth Club at Whitehill Village Hall, run by Zoya Faddy. Two-Ways cafe was on Petersfield road (there’s flats in its place now). That was owned by Geoff Cox. Mr and Mrs Dance ran the Post Office. (Mr Dance had a brother who married Mrs Dance’s sister. They operated Irvines coal merchants and lived in Oakhanger).Tom McLaughlin and his son John had the butcher’s shop. Leon Paul was the hairdressers. The barber was Mr Barney. Murgatroyds owned the fruit and veg shop and some supplies to this shop were provided by Oakhanger resident Peter Cozens. The cost of catching a bus from Prince of Wales to Chalet Hill was - 2p! Free time was spent making camps, bows and arrow, and playing over on the tank tracks. The army tanks were regularly seen manoeuvring through Whitehill too with soldiers learning how to operate them - some doing not so well as others.

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