That Reminds Me was a weekly column published in the Bletchley Gazette from January 1973 to December 1978.
Originally from Yorkshire, Harold (Heppy) Hepworth had worked on The Gazette for twenty years. He preferred to describe himself as a reporter, though his title was officially Leader Writer or Assistant Editor. Later, we believe after his retirement, he began this series of articles on a wide variety of topics – though mostly about life and the characters in Bletchley. Our volunteers Wendy Williams and Penny Perdue have transcribed these stories and we present them now, as before, in a regular offering.
Creator
Harold Hepworth for the Bletchley Gazette
Place
Bletchley
Reference number
TRM
Records in this Collection
I am writing this while on a month’s visit to West Germany, but you will not be reading it until I am home again. I must explain that my son Roger, his wife Mary, and step-daughter Linda have been living here since last September. They went to England by car ferry for the Easter Holiday ...
“Hurray,” they said. “We shall be late for the NAAFI. It closes at five.” I was amazed. A NAAFI that closed at five – impossible!
“Perhaps it re-opens later?” I ventured. They assured me it did not.
When we got there my bafflement increased. This was not the sort of NAAFI you and I experienced during the ...
H.S. Hepworth celebrated his seventieth birthday on May 12. Here he recounts his early days in journalism ….
On May 12, I reached the age of three score years and ten, the age of Shakespeare’s slippered pantaloons. So what? You may ask. Just this. I was a sickly child and I remember that as I lay ...
About this time of year I used to be looking forward to our fortnight’s summer holiday. If possible I always chose a fortnight in the period from the last two weeks of June to the first two weeks of July. For this there were good reasons. It covered the Wimbledon fortnight and usually the weather ...
I was touched by the recent Gazette story about the 12-year old Great Brickhill boy, Kevin Rolls, who walked four miles on his crutches to raise money for his fellow physically-handicapped. “Gradley, lad,” as they say in Lancashire. May you be cured of your disability. Failing that, may you grow up to be the fastest, ...
I am writing on June 2, and moisture is running down my neck. The moisture is sweat – or perspiration, if you are lah-di-dah – and it is caused not by the effort of typing, but by the heat and humidity of the weather. So very different from the weather on June 2 twenty-five years ...
FRED …. A MAN OF THE TREES
Many who were youngsters here 20 or 30 years ago will remember old Fred French, who was killed at the age of 80 while cycling down from Little Brickhill in the dark. Fred was an eccentric character. That is not to denigrate him. There are too few eccentrics today ...
I have just spent an enjoyable evening reading “Upon This Clay,” the book about Newton Longville written by the late Mrs. Catherine Skinner, of Yew Tree Farm, and published just recently. I have a kind of personal interest in the book. Mrs. Skinner wrote a weekly column about women’s topics in general for the former ...
In my pantry I keep what I have always known as the “wobbly buffet”. It is a stool, all wooden, with a round top and four legs, each of which is of a slightly different length. During the First World War I climbed on to it to draw the blackout curtain across the fanlight. Now ...
Cold, dark, windy – and its July
I am writing on a cold, dark, wet, windy day in the first week of July. The fire is on and very soon the light will have to be on too. Earlier this year I wrote about the old belief that if the weather was good on St. Paul’s ...
RECENTLY there has been a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the inception of equal voting rights for women – equal with men, that is, not with each other. Memories of the heroic days of the suffragettes have been recalled and it has generally been assumed that the final victory was due to their militancy. ...
I was rummaging the other day when I came upon a ration book issued in respect of my son for the period May 17, 1953, to May 15, 1954, when he was four to five years old. Most of the coupons for sugar, bacon, cheese, fats, eggs and meat are missing, indicating, perhaps that they ...
The report that the postal service had made £40 million profit reminded me of an incident that happened during my stay in Germany a couple of months ago. German postmen don’t just push a letter through the letter box; they knock and call out while they are doing it. At least, that is what they ...
The old man walked slowly along The Concourse. Normally, he wouldn’t have been there at all, but it had come on to rain outside. Idly, he wondered why they had given it that name. A concourse was a place where two courses merged. This course led only to a car park. The only other possible ...
When I called at the Gazette office the other week I was told that a Mr. Richard Griffiths, from the Bradwell Abbey Field Centre, had been asking after me and did I know him?
Oh yes, I knew him very well up to my retirement over five years ago, but I understood that he had returned ...
One of the interest of growing old is not only how we live and learn, but also how we live and unlearn. That thought struck me the other day when a talk touching on the subject of television was given by a man on the wireless – or on the radio, as it is now ...
I liked the recent Gazette item about the old windmill at Bradwell and how a young man was attempting to make it operational again on a do-it-himself basis. All power to his elbow.
When I first came to this district and travelled on the old “Nobby Newport” train from Wolverton to Newport Pagnell I used to ...
Learning Pitman’s shorthand, old edition (which many old reporters believe was actually faster than any revised edition brought out since). The first things to learn about abbreviated longhand was what not to abbreviate, chief of which were the words `not’, `no’ and `never’. It was hoped this would help to prevent disasters such as “He ...
I was rather pleased at the controversy in the Gazette’s letter columns by the proposal to introduce Canada Geese to the Mount Farm lake. Not that I relish the idea of people going at each other with beak and claw. It is simply nice to know there are so many people taking a keen interest ...
Back in 1927 Celia was a bright-eyed little girl who had reached what I can perhaps best describe as the doll’s pram age. Her father, Mr. E.C. Cook, was head of the Bletchley Road Senior School for Boys, and they lived in a brand new detached house along Buckingham Road. She so loved being taken ...
My article referring to Canada geese and thence to birds in general has caused a flutter in my dovecote, so to speak.
The 1930 list of birds in Bletchley which I quoted stands where it did as the only one I knew about. But I went on to suggest that local experts should get together to ...
When I was a boy of nine or ten I was playing with some other youngsters in one corner of a large pasture. In the diagonally opposite corner cows were grazing. We had been there for some time when one cow began making noises that told us something was amiss. We trotted over and were ...
Only three or four miles from my home when I was a boy an event called Lee Gap Fair was held annually. In medieval times it had lasted three weeks, but by my time it had dwindled to a small horse fair on the first day of the three weeks, which we called “First o’ ...
When we were boys, my brother and I went sea fishing whenever we could. This could only happen in those years when our parents could afford to take us to the seaside for a week.
As boys, we could see no point in being at the seaside if we did not spend most of our time ...
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