From Our Files: Dad’s Army alert...save our bus...sex education row
75 YEARS AGO
Mr and Mrs H. A. Bessant and their 18-year-old daughter – a shorthand typist – eat, sleep and live in this garage in Wavendon Avenue, Barton-on-Sea. Its size is 16ft by 10ft.
The family bought a plot of land for £176 and, having nowhere to go, Mr Bessant set about building a home for himself and his family.
He first erected a garage in which to live while he built a bungalow which he had received permission to do by the borough council.
In February, however, the Ministry of Health issued an order cancelling this “little freedom” of the people who desired to erect or improve their own homes, and Lymington Borough Council was limited to granting only 12 licences for private home builders, and Mr Bessant was not lucky enough to be one of them.
Mr Bessant won the Military Medal at Passchendaele and a bar to it at Vimy Ridge when serving with the Canadians in the First World War.
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HIGHCLIFFE residents showed that they are keenly interested in the various boundary revision proposals affecting them when they turned up in force to a public meeting organised by the Highcliffe Citizens’ Association.
The chairman, Major Barton, announced that no definite proposition would be taken, but at the close of the meeting asked for a show of hands in favour of going in with Bournemouth.
Only 10 members of the audience held up their hands.
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AN amusing incident of the Home Guard during the late war was related to members of the New Milton Rotary Club at their weekly luncheon.
Each of the ex-presidents gave a five minutes talk dealing with his year of office, and Rotarian Herrington, who occupied the chair in the year 1943/44, recalled that he was then a member of the Home Guard issued orders to proceed at once to Barton, as the Germans had left Cherbourg in boats.
He said: “When we got to Barton, we were issued with rifles and were quite prepared to keep the enemy at bay for a fortnight! After patrolling the coast, one of the witty fellows in our platoon suggested that we had misread the message and that it should have read, ‘The goats have just left New Milton!'”
50 YEARS AGO
LYMINGTON Council has asked the County Council to subsidise Hants & Dorset’s 108/109 bus services, operating between Lymington and New Milton, to the amount of £6,678. The bus company says the service is “extremely unprofitable”.
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FISHERMEN from Mudeford, Lymington and Poole have joined in a final bid to save Britain’s fishing grounds from the “devastating fishing methods of Continental fishermen”. The Mudeford and District Fishermen’s Association has drawn up a petition – written in Old English on parchment and also signed by fishermen from Poole and Lymington – asking the Government to retain the Fishery Limits Act of 1964.
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BOOKS on sex education are to stay on the junior shelves at Hythe library. The house committee have considered letters from the secretary of the Catholic Women’s League at Hythe, and the clerk of Dibden Parish Council, suggesting that the books should be removed.
25 YEARS AGO
A MOTHER-OF-THREE who won her battle against cancer has raised the £45,000 it cost to save her life.
Helen Hodgkinson, who trained as a nurse at Lymington Hospital, was given three years to live when doctors diagnosed her with chronic myeloid leukaemia at the age of 33 in 1983.
“I was devastated,” she said. “I had three small children under the age of eight and my main thought was that I did not want anyone else to bring my children up.”
After a successful bone marrow transplant, she decided that she wanted to repay the Southampton medical team who had saved her.
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THE New Forest’s 6,000 council tenants could face huge rent increases if they do not agree to all the houses being transferred to a new landlord.
The council has been concerned for some time about its ability to continue delivering its housing service in the longer term because of restrictions on the building programme and the Government’s “rent cap”.
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CHRISTCHURCH Priory Church was packed, with standing room only, for a special service on Friday in last week to celebrate the life of Gordon Skirton, headteacher for 16 years at the Arnewood School, New Milton, who died at the age of 54 in April from an inoperable brain tumour.
The school’s acting headteacher, Mrs Jennifer Gilbody, said: “This was an evening to celebrate the life of a man who had led the Arnewood School with such vision and who had enriched the lives of the many people with whom he had come into contact.”
