Sunday Trade 50 Years Ago (23 April 1976)
The first item of police court news I ever wrote was written in the 1920s. It ran:
“Borough Court, today, Friday. Thirty two Sunday traders were each fined 5s.”
It had to be the first. The court was always held on a Friday at 10.30am. The paper, a weekly, went to press at 1pm. The cases were written up as the court was proceeding and the Sunday traders were always the first in the court’s batting order. They were dealt with in a batch. None of them ever appeared and they occupied only the first few minutes of the court’s time.
The fine was always the same and the number of defendants did not vary by more than one or two, week after week, year after year.
You might think it must have a very east-going place. But you would be dead wrong. The town was overwhelmingly non-conformist both in practising membership and wealth. And visiting lawyers averred that it was harder to obtain a new drink licence, or an occasional licence, or even an extension of hours there than anywhere else in the country.
So I guess, though I do not know for a fact, that 5s was more like the maximum than the minimum fine which the magistrates of those days were empowered to impose for the offence of Sunday trading.
I am reminded of that early experience, of course, by the present argument about Sunday trading in Milton Keynes. There is this difference, however. All those 30-odd traders were keepers of small corner shops and the like. No substantial businesses were involved. Those old traders seemed to look on the fine not as a penalty but as a toll or a fee for a special licence – an attitude that would never do here in these days. They would have been thoroughly abashed had it been pointed out to them that, in fact, they had broken the law far more times than the town’s most incorrigible drunk!
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I sometime wonder whether Milton Keynes Development Corporation know that the expansion now going on in their area has been going on in the Bletchley part of it ever since the war. You would not think so for all the advantage they take of the fact. Surely they must realise than many of the snags they are encountering are not original but have already been met and dealt with in the older parts of their own area?
The latest case is at the old people’s bungalows at Myrtle Bank on the Stacey Bushes estate. The baths fitted there are plainly ridiculous for old people. Whoever specially designed them for old people certainly was not himself in that age group.
It does no credit to the corporation to describe the problem as “unforeseen.” The old Bletchley Council were nor perfect, but they foresaw the baths problem with the first old people’s bungalows they ever built.
Their answer was what was known as a “sits bath.” This is a short bath on two levels. The bather sits on the higher level and has his feet on the lower. Getting in and out is then as simple and safe as possible.
It could be that there have been problems with the “sits baths,” but I have never heard any complaints about them. Certainly it is the bath I would prefer when my time comes.
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The death of former Gaiety Girl, Miss Ruby Millar – a Grand Duke is said to have drunk from her slipper – reminds me that North Bucks used to have its own Gaiety Girls.
One was Miss Connie Gilchrist. She went on the stage in childhood as the Prince of Mushrooms in the pantomime, Jack in the Box, at Drury Lane. Subsequently she played several parts in pantomime and was also a skipping-rope dancer on the halls.
When she was engaged for the Gaiety she was still so young that articles of apprenticeship had to be drawn up. But fame came to her almost at once, for while still in her early teens she was the most photographed beauty in the land – the “pin-up” of the day. She was also the model for Whistler’s well-known picture, “Golden Girl.”
But all that came to an end in 1892 on her marriage to Edmond Walter Fitz-Maurice, Earl of Orkney, who lived at The Tythe House, Stewkley. She was 20 and he was 25.
The earl was well-known in this district for many years as a member of the Whaddon Chase Hunt and also as a keen local cricketer.
Though she had married at the height of her fame, the Countess took to the country life with enthusiasm. She was a follower of the hounds and on several occasions performed at local village concerts for charitable purposes. She died in 1946, aged 74, and the earl died five years later, aged 84.
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I hope Milton Keynes Borough Council accept the Church Commissioners’ offer of the site of the St Mary Magdelene tower at Stony Stratford. I also hope they can install the suggested camera obscura there.
When I was a child I went every year on a friendly society’s outing to some “pleasure gardens” near Halifax. A feature of the grounds was a large boating lake. In the middle of the lake was an island. And on the island stood a wooden building, with a door but no windows and a conical roof. Inside a shaft of daylight came down from the point of the roof onto a sort of table and on this you could see what was going on all round the grounds.
It bore the mysterious name – camera obscura – and it really was obscure to me, for I never did fathom how it was done.
Strange how these odd mentions in the Gazette bring back to mind things forgotten for all of 60 years.
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