Interview about memories of Wolverton.
Viva Chappill talks generally about life in Wolverton, growing up and attending carnivals and parties. She reminisces while looking through a family photograph album (not held at Living Archive) and mentions the schools she attended, subjects and teachers.
Her father owned a toy factory that was based in a row of cottages and during the First World War he housed several families of evacuees in the cottages. She recalls ‘we went all round Wolverton begging for furniture and crockery and that sort of thing for them. They lived there for quite a while and I remember quite clearly having some rabbit stew with them which they made quite differently from anything we’d ever had’ When the cottages were knocked down the land was sold to the post office. She remembers the generosity of her father, giving toys from his factory to local children at Christmas and how she took some of her own toys to a family of three girls who had lost their father.
After the factory closed her father turned the buildings into the Empire theatre, with a dance hall above. During the 1926 Strike, the railway men joined coal miners on strike, her father opened the theatre so ‘the strikers had some where to go and to stop any mischief’.
Her politics were Conservative, and she and her brother would ‘rush round to all the meetings to heckle’ Labour party speakers, especially at the Palace Cinema. New Bradwell was, as she recalled labelled ‘little Moscow’ and it was ‘terribly red down there’, but some of her ‘nicest friends were red’. Her understanding was that ‘men in the works pretended to go along with Labour … although they were Trade Unionists they were Conservatives at heart’.
The interview includes memories of Wolverton, the Whitsuntide two day ball, ‘they cleared one of the shops; the floor was a bit uneven of course… the sports meetings they were great fun’ and how she came out in spots after drinking canal water in the dressing room at the Park tennis club. Her mother was involved with the Wolverton Mother’s Union and Viva recalls a presiding member of the Mothers Union on a Mothers Union outing to London saying ‘I’m very proud of our mothers they do look nice today, all nicely dressed.’ When they got out at Euston a porter was heard to say, ‘I wonder where all these old geezers have come from?’
Mentions the horrific tram accident, when a boy lost both his feet.
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