Interview with Patricia Frances Flinn (nee Sharp b.1929) about housing and employment.

Patricia Flinn describes life with her husband and children in a halfway house in Neasden.They moved to Bletchley in 1953 on the London overspill scheme. The Royal Naval Association paid for the relocation to St.John’s Road. She recalls their early days in Bletchley when she was a housewife and her husband worked as a railway signalman. The children went to Church Green Road school. She remembers the open air market and auction; paying the rent; the shops at St. Mary’s and the mobile shop with ‘Brasil Ron’s’ pies. She describes her first house and garden, and neighbours.

She talks of her employment: at the brickyards, Bletchley Park, Berry’s Magicoal Fires (where she learnt spot welding), and then as a bus conductress. She became cashier and then supervisor at the Studio Cinema (Bletchley), and worked there for many years. She recalls the cinema managers and her colleagues; managing the long queues; showing ‘The Clockwork Orange’, and the related copy-cat murder in Bletchley. She watched the Queen’s visit from the balcony of the Cinema. Later she worked at Cowley and Wilson’s garage; she remembers Luing Cowley.

Describing the family’s social activities, she remembers a club at The Shoulder of Mutton pub and a hall on the corner of Newton Road where events were organised by George Garman. Her son Robin had a fish and chip van. She talks of local medical services, doctors and the lack of a hospital (she gave birth at home).

They later moved to a bigger house in St Clements Drive; their neighbours there were friendly. And then they applied successfully to buy one of 50 new houses: ‘All parquet floors, ever so well built.’ However, she says ‘I wouldn’t live in Bletchley now, it makes me cringe… There’s no way I could live in a new house with modern stuff now. Your tastes just change.’ In her opinion Milton Keynes was for the better: ‘There was no big shops in Bletchley at all’.