First Royal Visitor For Town (18 February 1977)

Does it seem to you like 25 years since Princess Elizabeth became Queen?  I suppose your answer will be the same as mine – sometimes it does and other times it doesn’t.  It does when you look at all the changes that have since occurred both locally and nationally.  It doesn’t when you consider all the things that have stayed pretty much as they were.

George the Sixth had been a good king.  His accession had been none of his seeking or expectancy.  Up to then he had been just a royal duke in the shadow of his elder brother, Edward, and had hoped to stay so.  Edward’s dramatic abdication had spoilt all that.  He had suddenly found himself called upon to accept the ultimate responsibility.  His blessings were his vivacious and popular wife and his two little daughters.

His 16-year reign had encompassed most troublous times – six years of dire peril followed by six years of tightened belts.  He had never been exactly robust, but he had borne himself manfully throughout and when he died at a comparatively early age those troublous times were all but over.

Consequently, our first feelings were those of sorrow at the passing of an admirable man and of sympathy with his wife and children.  It was not until later that there was talk about the dawn of a new Elizabethan Age.

The year 1952, however, was notable for Bletchley in that it saw the first royal visit to the town.  This occurred in October, when the Duke of Edinburgh, as head of the National Playing Fields Association, came to the district; first to open a playing field at Stoke Hammond, and then to do likewise at the children’s playground on the Manor Farm estate and at the Bletchley Town Sports Club’s Manor Fields.

This was quite an occasion for the little town of just over 10,000 people.  At Manor Fields there was a strong guard of honour from the RAF.  The Duke had a good shaking of hands with the club’s officials and with playing members already stripped off for the ensuing fray.  He rode round the cricket field standing on a pick-up truck and joined the company for tea in the new pavilion.

Before the ceremony I heard him ask:  “What am I supposed to be opening, the fields or the pavilion?”  Actually the footballing fields had been in use for some time and the cricket field for that season, while parts of the pavilion had also been used.

I doubt whether the royals remember much about these ceremonies they are constantly performing all over the place on request.  The main point is that the people concerned remember very well and so much better than if the opener had been a mere president or other party politician.

Bletchley Town FC celebrated by joining the Spartan League and winning the league cup at the first crack.  On the cricket field Bletchley Town’s Jim Clarke had hit its first-ever six and had followed it with a least 10 more before the season ended.

In that year also Mr Nye Bevan opened Bletchley’s 500^th post-war council house.  It was on the Manor Farm estate and was occupied by Mr (now the Rev) and Mrs John Mead.

Bletchley also began to expand officially under the 1952 Act by building the Saints Estate.  September saw the arrival of the first ex-Londoners.

I have always regarded that as the first seed from which the new city itself began to grow, as there has been no break but rather an overlap in government-sponsored development from that day to this, albeit under different regimes.