Memoirs

From Wimbledon Regent Diana Fetterman

I have memories of going to London when I was 8 yrs old to watch the Coronation on my Aunt and Uncles TV in their flat.

I remember all the bunting and flags everywhere and what good moods everyone was in. So much excitement. In Portsmouth as in everywhere in the

country, there were street parties going on, everyone celebrating.

Another special memory was the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh who came to Portsmouth many times to board the Royal Yacht, Britannia. Their route always took them right past our house and my parents were always waiting and waving when they went by. Many times the Duke would turn and look back at them and wave, probably recognizing them. My parents thought that was wonderful.

The Royal Yacht Britannia was in Portsmouth for the 50th D-Day anniversary. It is now a tourist attraction in Leith near Edinburgh The masts of HMS Victory can just be seen in the background

Britannia

This Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons License agreement and the author Steve Daniels.

From Ex Centre Court Member Mavis Rioux

Interesting isn’t it how far back our memories go 🙂

I was 10, living in the “bush” in Western Australia in 1952 when the radio started playing
solemn music – and my Aunt, who was caring for me and my 2 younger sisters commented
that the King had died.

A year later, we sat around a battery operated radio and listened to the Coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II. Later we saw newsreel on the Coronation at the local hall where
movies were shown on Saturday nights! A far cry from the immediate coverage of today.
I also remember the wedding of Elizabeth and Phillip and the birth of Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

My sisters and I cut pictures out of mags and glued them into scrap books made from brown paper bags. One sister still has a couple of them in her “treasure” box – they date from 1948 and 1951 & 52. My ties to England, called “the Old Country” by my British grandparents and mother, have always been strong….God Save the Queen.

Thought you might find it interesting to have a memory from the Land of Oz

🙂 Fondly, Mavis.

From Centre Court Member Loni Pegg

My first experience of Britain was in 1962 when, as an 18 year old from Switzerland, I went to work for a year as an au pair for a family in Manchester. My goal was to learn English. My duties involved housework and looking after 4 small children. I had formal English lessons for one hour per week. Shortly after I returned to my native
Switzerland, I met David who was spending a couple of years as a physics and math teacher at an international school in my home town of St Gallen. Straight away, we had one thing in common. David went to university in Manchester from 1960 to 1963, although we never met during my stay there. In Switzerland, I used him to
improve my English language skills. We married in St Gallen in 1965 and left for the US the same year.

Before we emigrated I went to David’s beloved county of Cornwall to meet my in-laws. I have returned to Cornwall many times since and really love the scenery and the wild?owers in the hedgerows and on the cliff tops. Over the years we have hiked quite a bit of the Cornish coastal footpath. I have also had the chance to see other parts of Britain. We have rented cars and used Brit-rail passes to tour Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as well as scenic parts in England such as the Lake District, Hadrian’s Wall, East Anglia, Yorkshire, etc. David has a brother who lives in Surrey and we occasionally visit him and his wife.

On one occasion we drove to Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire to visit the towns connected to David’s genealogical research on the Pegg surname. That was very interesting. Of course, we have visited London many times. David was born there during the Battle of Britain in WW2 so it has a special appeal to him. I love
the cosmopolitan atmosphere and historical buildings of London. We have lived in the US for 48 years now. For thefirst 5 years we lived in New Hampshire. In 1970 we moved to Knoxville when David took a job in the Physics Department at the University of Tennessee.

From Wimbledon Member Joan McCulloch

As a British Comedian once said:
�I want to tell you a story�

Please read and enjoy this story for it is true, the only regret I have is that I neither got to hear my grandfather himself tell the story for he passed away long before I was born and also that my own
dear dad never got to taste the whisky for I know it would have “warmed the cockles of his heart”

Talk about whisky on ice: Three bottles of rare, 19th century Scotch found beneath the floor boards of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s abandoned expedition base.

Shackleton’s stash was discovered frozen in ice by conservationists in 2010. (Antarctic Heritage Trust/Associated Press)

Bottled in 1898 after the blend was aged 15 years, the Mackinlay bottles were among three crates of Scotch and two of Brandy buried beneath a basic hut Shackleton had used during his dramatic 1907 Nimrod excursion to the Antarctic. The expedition failed to reach the South Pole but set a record at the time for reaching the farthest southern latitude. Shackleton was knighted after his return to Great Britain.

Shackleton’s stash was discovered frozen in ice by conservationists in 2010. The crates were frozen solid after more than a century beneath the Antarctic surface. The bottles were found intact – and researchers could hear the whisky sloshing around inside. Antarctica’s -30 Celsius temperature was not enough to freeze the liquor.
‘Such a lovely aroma’

The bottles remained unopened – if Shackleton couldn’t have a dram, no one could – but their contents nevertheless formed the basis for a revival of the blend.

Distiller Whyte & Mackay, which now owns the Mackinlay brand, chartered a private jet to take the bottles from the Antarctic operations headquarters in the New Zealand city of Christchurch to Scotland for analysis in 2011.

The recipe for the whisky had been lost. But Whyte & Mackay recreated a limited edition of 50,000 bottles, costing about $257 each. From a sample drawn with a syringe through a cork of one of the bottles. The conservation work of the Antarctic Heritage Trust has received five per cent of the proceeds from every bottle sold.

The original bottles had flown in two combination-locked containers with Key to Antarctica in a U.S. Air Force transport plane from Christchurch.
Antarctic Heritage Trust manager Lizzie Meek, who was part of the team that found the whisky, recalled its pleasant aroma.

“When you’re used to working around things in that hut that perhaps are quite decayed and some of them don’t have very nice smells, it’s very nice to work with artifacts that have such a lovely aroma,” “And definitely the aroma of whisky was around very strongly.”

I am proud to be able to say that my Grandfather helped make history and I dedicate my story to the three men in my life who have all left a lasting mark.

Granfa Griffiths.

Dad – William, Arthur Lancelot Griffiths.

Hubby – James Joseph McCulloch.

Further Reading on this wonderful Scotch

From Centre Court Member Carol Montogomery

Lacock, Wiltshire

Even if you have never been to England, you have probably seen views of Lacock.

Late this September, on a sudden trip home to England, I met up with my New Zealand niece #1, her man and their 14 week old world-travelling son (brave parents – great baby) at a B and B she had found for us online at Reybridge. My husband and I arrived the day before they did and were charmed by the tiny hamlet and the old building where we were to stay. (Camilla has a home just up the lane.) The nearest place for an evening meal was one of several pubs ten minutes walk away through a field of sheep – and so we stumbled upon Lacock.

As we walked into the town, really just a big village, we were impressed by the unspoiled old architecture and felt we were travelling back in time by several centuries. It struck me that there were no wires, TV aerials or satellite dishes to be seen – how refreshing. I was intrigued and wondered if the whole village had been under one ownership. That turned out to be the case.

Henry VIII, in his fury against the Pope for refusing to annul his marriage so he could marry Ann Boleyn and sire an heir, ordered a rampage throughout the country seizing valuables from monasteries and abbeys and destroying the buildings. Instead, Lacock Abbey was sold to one of his cronies, the rogue William Sharington, with the proviso that the attached church be demolished and that he live in the remaining buildings. As the village was part the Abbey estate, it was cared for by the generations of descendants until in the 1940s it became too much to upkeep and was handed over to the National Trust to preserve for posterity.

The Abbey nunnery dates from 1232 and the town of Lacock was in the Doomsday Book. You’ll have seen it before because film crews use it constantly – they were filming an episode of Galavant, an American spoof of the Knights of the Round Table, there on the day we visited the Abbey with my niece and her family. Below are some of the glimpses you may have had of Lacock.
If you haven’t seen Cranford, the entire village was the setting for this wonderful BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel. I highly recommend it.

‘The village has been used as a film and television set, notably for the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice and the 2007 BBC production of Cranford. It has also made brief appearances in the Harry Potter films Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. In the spring of 2012, it was a filming location for the fantasy adventure film Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box. Most recently it was used for the upcoming series of Downton Abbey.’ Wikipedia

If you find yourself near Lacock, take a detour to visit the Abbey, the shops and the Photography Museum (the inventor of the negative lived in the Abbey.) You won’t regret it.
Carol Montgomery