Interview with Ronald Flinn (b.1923) about moving to Bletchley from London, amenities, employment and the development of Milton Keynes.

Ronald Flinn, born in 1923 in Hampstead, London, recalls his early life in a family with ten children. Leaving school at fourteen, he worked for the Express Dairy until the outbreak of war, when he joined the Navy.

After the war he married, had children and first lived in a shared ‘halfway house’ in Neasden. Then they were offered the chance to ‘go on a new housing list for them who lived in London… would we like to go to a new town?’ They didn’t know where Bletchley was but decided ‘we’ll take a chance, we’ll go to Bletchley’, so they took a look at ‘the Saints Estate… It was only just being built… I think that was in 1954’. With the housing came work, ‘ the choice of the railway, brickyards or a building site. I chose the railway … got put on the signals and telegraph’. The Royal Naval Association funded their relocation.

He talks of settling into their new three-bedroom house, the new school and getting to know people: ‘They was all people from London …they had a little club house down the Shoulder of Mutton, Yeomanry Hall’. He remembers family life in the 1950-60s including holidays and activities for the children; local shops, Keys mobile shop in a van, the local doctor and Bletchley in general. After three or four years working on the railways he moved initially to a local company, High Precision, on the new Denbigh Estate.where he learned hand-scraping for machine tools, and then to Hapgood Precision.

Asked about Milton Keynes, he said he was not worried by its development; he was used to plenty of change in Bletchley. On living in Bletchley, he comments: ‘I never regretted it, the move down here, at all. I wouldn’t even want to go up and live up there [in London] now’.