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
On a recent Sunday afternoon I was taken for a ride round the district, during which, at Cosgrove, we came upon a number of young people who were on their hands and knees scratching a small piece of ground by the roadside.
I guessed that this was an archaeological “dig.” And I should say, in passing, ...
On the day before my 68th birthday (May 12), I went back to school.
That is to say, I sat in on a class of 11-year-olds while they did what passes today for the old “three Rs.”
I remembered my own schooldays – sitting at long desks, listening or not listening to a master as he stood ...
A recent news item that caught my eye concerned the local Freemasons’ acquisition of the former urban council offices at the junction of Queensway and Victoria Road, Fenny Stratford, and the sale of their former hall in the High Street.
To many elderly local people, of course, the High Street hall is still known as the ...
Casting a baleful eye on the big black blocks that now bestrew the bailiwick of Bletchley, I am reminded that this year, 1976, was to have seen the end of the town’s planned post-war expansion – a population target of 19,300 duly achieved over a period of 25 years.
In 1951 the population numbered between 10,000 ...
I suppose that if I start talking about Constable just now most people will think I am referring to the bicentennial of John Constable, the great English landscape painter.
This year, however, sees an exciting event of a different sort – the Olympic Games in Montreal. And the Constable I am talking about is not John, ...
The news that Milton Keynes citizens may soon be queueing for water from standpipes is serious. Nevertheless, if it does come to pass, it will not be the end of the world.
Curiously, except for the disabled, the people it will mainly inconvenience will be the very people who have known most about it in the ...
I liked the Gazette’s story of a few weeks back about Mr Jack Parslow Kirk’s refusal to be removed from Drayton Parslow, the village which gave him his second name.
The trouble started when Mr and Mrs Kirk and their neighbours were told their semi-detached houses in New Road were unsafe owing to subsidence and would ...
While writing my recent article about Bletchley’s Olympic runner, Charles George Constable, the thought came into my head that sometime I might look back on local athletic and sporting achievements with a view to finding the best all-rounder Bletchley has even produced.
I have now chosen my man and I nominate him not only champion of ...
In my article on the 1951 Festival of Britain celebrations in Bletchley I was able to make only a passing reference to the wonderful exhibition held by the Chamber of Trade at the Assembly Hall (now Wilton Hall) during that month. I will now remedy this, for to my mind the three-day exhibition was the ...
Two or three weeks ago the Sunday morning service on the wireless came from Washington. As I happened to be washing-up at the time, I thought this quite appropriate and I enjoyed the first hymn, which was to the tune of Glory, Glory, Hallelujah. Then the preacher explained that the service was not from the ...
Whether or not the development of Milton Keynes is a good thing, it is at least having one interesting effect. Most of us who have been here any length of time – say, 20 years or more – remember the days when this area seemed to be “the frozen north” as far as the Bucks ...
Women are fond of saying that men remain boys at heart, however old we become. I think that is true of most of us. What other explanation can there be for our continued interest in sport long after we ourselves have ceased to take an active part? After all, there is no real importance in, ...
Some weeks ago I told how, in the 1890s, the Bletchley Road Schools (now the Knowles School) were opened and how the old High Street National School and the British School (formerly a Lancastrian School, so-called after the celebrated educationist, Dr Lancaster) were then closed.
The new schools, however, were not occupied exclusively by the pupils ...
As we are now into what we used to call the “silly season” I will content myself this week with telling a tale or two.
The first concerns a dog named Towzer. He belonged to Mr Alfred Duffield, who with his brother Frank used to keep a men’s outfitting shop in Aylesbury Street, Fenny Stratford.
One morning ...
It is now a full 30 years, if not a little longer, since the Bletchley Community Centre Ladies Choir began their so far unbroken run of music-making. This makes then the oldest secular musical organisation in Bletchley, and possible in North Bucks.
The centre – formerly the Temperance Hall – in George Street was organised during ...
One thing about this summer – it has been ideal for camping holidays. In fact, you have scarcely needed a tent, except for the occasional bit of privacy.
Very recently I spent nine glorious days and nights camping on the Costa Cwmry or Cymru, whichever is Welsh for Wales. Incidentally, you don’t have to bother much ...
I am sorry to hear of the impending closure of the Tetley factory in Bletchley. Sorry not only for the more obvious reasons. But also on what might be called sentimental grounds.
Tetley’s came to Bletchley in 1940, after their London premises had been bombed out and first occupied the factory at the corner of Osborne ...
“Great oaks from little acorns grow” and a classic example are the Milton Keynes Co-operative Society.
They began with threepenny-bits saved by working men. Today their turnover is reckoned in millions of pounds and they have just opened the first phase of a stores development in Bletchley whose cost, when completed next year, will also run ...
My congratulations to the Bletchley St. John Ambulance Brigade on reaching the 50th anniversary of their formation. Theirs is a long and honourable story of voluntary public work if ever there was one.
Actually, first-aid work in Bletchley goes back a good deal further than 50 years. As with so many other movements in the then ...
August 7, 1899, was a red-letter day in the annals of Fenny Stratford, for it saw the opening of the Leon Recreation Ground to the public “in perpetuity for ever.”
A crowd estimated at over 4,000 turned up for the event – a remarkable figure considering that the population of the Fenny urban council’s area, which ...
I wonder how many local people who saw the widely acclaimed thriller, Rogue Male, a week or two ago knew they were watching the 4th Leon baronet in action? He took the part of the rascally Blackshirt major, who keeps the hero – played by Peter O’Toole – trapped in a burrow for a day ...
One April morning in 1909 Bletchley Railway Guard Jim Bates set forth on a routine trip that was to make him a national hero before the day was out.
Jim was a middling-sized man, aged 45, and lived in St. Martin’s Street. He and his wife had several children and had just recently celebrated their silver ...
Every now and then a major row blows up over the subject of education. It usually happens in times of economic stress. This is hardly surprising. Those holding the public purse-strings look round for costs that it might be possible to cut. The education service is costly. Its product is comparatively intangible.
So it comes under ...
How do you divide a raw egg into two equal parts, so that you have as much yolk and as much white in one half as you do in the other?
No, I am not joking – at least, not all that much. You see, since I began living on my own I have had to ...
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