Forty Years in Chandler's Ford - a Journal (Part 85)

Mozart – a tonic for the soul; Gran writes a “bomb”; visits to Regent’s Park, the Houses of Parliament and Chelsea; The Lake and Pinewoods to remain “natural”, a new bird and ten new plants; the Arend-Roland Comet and some black grapes.

As a “tonic to the soul”, burdened by the removal of her much-loved Yew, and other trees opposite The Ridge, Gran, on April 8th 1957, attends the Covent Garden Opera at the Gaumont Theatre in Southampton, where she witnesses the talents of John Lanigan, Geraint Evans, Joan Sutherland and other wonderful performers in Mozart’s Magic Flute. “The theatre was packed”, she writes, “and terrific applause again and again testified to the enthusiasm and appreciation of the crowd. It was late and bitterly cold when we came home…”

Destruction of more Yew trees commences on the 9th:

…I phoned the Police and asked if they were able to enforce the Bird Protection Act upon anybody other than small boys discovered taking eggs. A rather startled constable said, “Of course”, but seemed floored when I asked him to do something about the wholesale destruction going on here. After much discussion he said they would see what they could do – but another tree fell and was burnt in the meantime.

After failing to make headway with both the Police and the R.S.P.C.A. with her concerns, but admitting that the constable himself, “was both concerned and kindly”, Gran decides to:

…write to our Member of Parliament [David Price] to find out exactly what the Protection Act was for, and if I was not satisfied, then I would write to Lady Tweedsmuir, who introduced the Bill to Parliament”.

“Meanwhile”, she says, “I could burst with fury and frustration!” She seems to have hoped for a reply from David Price by return, because on the next day she continues:

No reply yet to my various letters and telephone calls… so this evening I wrote a letter to the Mayor of Eastleigh asking him if it could really be possible that the Eastleigh Borough Council had authorized the felling of the Yews during the breeding season of birds supposedly protected by Act of Parliament. A great deal more I said, also, and when I showed the letter to the Hockridges, Ken said, “That’s not a letter – it’s a bomb!” Well, I hope it explodes in Eastleigh Council Chamber tomorrow!

Just two of the Yews remain standing. And a reply does come quickly from the House of Commons, next day, from David Price’s Secretary – the MP himself being abroad, convalescing after a serious operation. Gran’s letter, she learns, has been passed to the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Home Office, and Gran will receive comments from her in due course. She also has a communication from the R.S.P.B., asking her to phone them with details of the trees’ destruction, and, following the resulting conversation, it appears that the R.S.P.B’s opinion is that this will be a test case for the efficacy of the Protection of Birds Act, with regard to the removal of nesting habitat during the bird nesting season.

In spite of these agonies, Gran is still able to find joy in the pursuit of Natural History, among like-minded friends. On the 13th, she is with daughter Jane, Diana Fowler, young Antony Harding, Hazel Bidmead and Paul Bowman at Stanpit Marshes, relishing the arrival of more migrants (particularly Yellow Wagtails) and the array of coastal birds and plants, and adding a female Ruff, a Reeve, to her Hampshire list. It is still some years before Stanpit finds itself in Dorset!

This is a Ruff without his flamboyant breeding plumage. Females are known as Reeves, and look a bit like this one. Image by Kev Chapman via Flickr.

Further succour is received at this time from her elderly friend in Compton, Mrs Durst. Gran has spent a number of days gardening for her in recent days, and on April 15th, she is touched, writing:

I felt greatly honoured when Mrs Durst gave me some black grapes to eat before I left! They had been given to Mrs Cremer, Compton’s centenarian, to whom they had been presented on her one hundred and first birthday yesterday, by the “Grapes for Centenarians Organisation”. What some changes this grand old lady must have seen.

And there is much beauty, with the burgeoning Spring, in the garden of The Ridge and the surrounding countryside – “What is left of it here” – she says. A range of common birds have built a total of nine nests in the garden; the first Cuckoo is heard at dawn on the 17th, and:

Looking at some twigs which I had put to protect a special Sedum from birds, I thought at first a brown leaf had become wrapped around one of them but noting that it looked strange, investigated more closely. It was a pair of perfect Swallow Prominent moths in copulation, their wings wrapped closely round the twig. They were very beautiful.

The Swallow Prominent. This one is not quite as perfect as Gran’s, having lost a few scales on its head. Image by Nick Goodrum via Flickr.

Rather than the usual three-hour-long Good Friday Devotion at Compton Church, this year the Service lasts just one hour and is conducted by the Vicar of Brockenhurst, “…quite a young man, with particularly nice eyes, who was forthright and spoke with great feeling without being too emotional. I found the service very inspiring and it left me with a great deal about which to think, and think deeply”.

Gran regrets retiring to bed early on April 24th, having spent much of the day helping the Fowlers’ with flowers for the Queen Elizabeth and the United States but suffering with a headache for, as she relates, she, “unfortunately missed a wonderful view of the Arend-Roland Comet, which was visible from this district in the north-western sky shortly after half-past nine. Jane saw it as she returned from a party…”

On the 26th, Gran attends a General Meeting of the B.E.N.A., held in the Members’ Library at Regent’s Park, in London. We are not surprised by Gran’s thoughts on the zoo there:

…which, on the whole, does not appeal to me much since the poor animals are so much out of their element. I did enjoy seeing the reptile house, and the very beautiful little Humming-birds, which, though confined, had ample room to fly long distances and in a place in which their native plants were growing. I cannot bear to see the Lions and Tigers miserably pacing to and fro in their cages.

She spends the night with Jock and the two grand-children (Barry being away, camping with sixteen boys in the New Forest) at Mill Hill. She travels there by Underground from Camden Town, and writes that our lovely neighbour, Mrs Archer sits in with me and Julian while she and Jock “climb the hill to look for the Comet”. They see it, return home, and then discover that it is perfectly visible from the back door! Gran also relates this: “Mrs Archer has a Sparrow who roosts inside her front porch and has now become completely unconcerned at the passing to and fro beneath him”. I well-remember “Aunt Dor” quietly showing me this or another rooster from a subsequent generation of House Sparrows on the same narrow ledge, and being struck by a feeling of privileged secrecy while observing this confiding bird – one of my earliest bird encounters.

Our neighbour at Mill Hill, Dora Archer, called her roosting sparrow her “lodger”. Image by Ianpreston via Flickr.

Book 65

April 30th:

A postcard from Barry, urgently sent from Beaulieu Road before he left yesterday, told me that the horse-pens there were full of Mouse-tail Myosurus minimus, a small plant for which we have searched for years, and Barry advised me to go as soon as possible to see it before it faded! And Jane and I cycled right past there yesterday afternoon without stopping!! There was only one thing to do, and, being me, I did it!

So, after seeing Jane (whose Easter break at home is ending) off to Nottingham on a train from Winchester, Gran takes another in the other direction, to Beaulieu Road, changing at Southampton. At the horse-pens she finds a great deal of this rare little plant of highly disturbed soil, and takes an example to paint. Alas, it no longer occurs there, just a few plants apparently last recorded there in 1989, as the muddy pens were covered with a deep layer of gravel.

The well-named, Mouse-tail, no longer at Beaulieu Road. Image by Oskar Gran via Flickr.

Gran had submitted a plant from her garden to Kew a few days earlier for identification and on May 2nd she receives a verdict from Mr W. Stearn of the British Museum Herbarium:

…who has identified it as Disporum smithii, a North American species. The genus is not much cultivated in this country but Mr Stearn believes that a Mrs Doncaster, of Chandler’s Ford, grows it in her garden! This, of course, explains its appearance in mine, for Mrs Doncaster gave me my pink Lilies-of-the-Valley and, no doubt, the Disporum was introduced with them.

Smith’s Fairy-bells *Disporum smithii* – a native of north-west USA but a nice thing to have in the garden. Courtesy of Peter Pearsall/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, via Flickr.

On May 11th, Gran is pleased to read in The Hampshire Chronicle that assurance has been given:

…that our Lake and Pinewood are to remain natural and are not to be made into pleasure gardens. The writer had taken a photograph and been to interview Eastleigh Council about it, and spoke, in no uncertain terms, of the disgust of Chandler’s Ford residents at the treatment their village has received since being annexed by Eastleigh.

Nevertheless, there appears to have been a plan to build a petrol station on the ground being developed opposite The Ridge, Gran recording at his time that a petition against it was brought round, “and needless to say, Mother and I signed it with alacrity”. On the 13th, she notes her first Lesser Whitethroat of the year, in the garden, and she also fondly remembers Jane’s birth:

My Jane’s birthday, and I think with joy and thankfulness upon that early morning twenty-three years ago, when I first saw the little dark head of my longed-for baby daughter. And how a Song Thrush sang that day in the grounds of the Highfield Nursing Home where she was born!

In Winchester, seats are booked on the London coach to take Gran and Mary Harding to Chelsea Flower Show in a few days’ time, Bob Fowler giving Gran his Member’s Privilege Tickets, since he is unable to use them this year. Later that day, Gran and “Mother” go next door:

…to see and hear Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, speak to the Children in Children’s Television, about his recent World Tour, during which he opened the Olympic Games at Melbourne. It was most interesting and Prince Philip is a very natural speaker with a quiet, but deep, sense of humour.

During the Spring, there has been no let-up in the number of trips on foot, and by bicycle, bus and train to Hampshire botanical hotspots, but it is unusual for Gran to record as many as ten new species in one day. This she does on a Natural History Society field trip to the Avon Water in the New Forest on the 18th, seeing for the first time a number of wetland species including Mud Sedge Carex limosa and Water Violet, which, she says, she has longed to see for many years.

The very attractive Bog Sedge, called “Mud Sedge” by Gran. It is a plant of north-west Britain but may be found in a few places in the New Forest. Image by Len Worthington via Flickr.

Her “Wild Flower” talk to the Inner Wheel, is given on the afternoon of May 20th. She has collected a number of specimens for illustrative purposes, and she also takes some of her paintings. The talk is held at the Kings Court Road House, and is, Gran says, well received and her watercolours popular, but that, with typical modesty, is all she says. The following day though, is the Chelsea Flower Show and Gran uses twenty pages to record her wonderful time there, describing in great detail many of the exhibits.

May 26th is “Mother’s eightieth birthday”. This old lady, who my generation knew as “Greaty”, still has another seventeen years to go and at eighty is still fit enough, as Gran describes, to jump “like a Grenadier” over some wet areas during a recent walk along the River Itchen! Gran spends much of the day searching for orchids on Cheesefoot Head and Stephen’s Castle Down.

June 1st sees her back in London, with the Portswood Conservative Club, visiting the Houses of Parliament and with a conducted tour by John Howard, M.P. for the Portswood Division of Southampton. Within the detailed descriptions of each section of the building, Gran writes of the House of Commons Lobby, destroyed during the War:

The only remaining part of the original is the Churchill Arch, which, as can be seen, is scarred by fire. The doors at each end of the Commons were presented by India and Pakistan respectively, the Table was the gift of Canada, the Dispatch Boxes, of New Zealand, the Inkstand, of Southern Rhodesia and the Mace Stand, that of Northern Rhodesia. Australia’s contribution was the Speaker’s Chair…

Gran continues, that she was “privileged to sit beside Mr Howard and I found him a charming and interesting table-companion”. She adds:

Additional interest was given to us by a cocktail party in progress on the terrace just outside our open windows. It was given by the Directors of the Worshipful Company of Pipe Makers, and we were much amused by the dresses and behaviour of some of the guests.

The Conservative Club Members return home well after midnight but Gran still finds the energy to cycle to Noar Hill and Selborne to search again for orchids and other wildlife the following afternoon. She gives us a little information, gleaned from a book she buys, about the village, including:

Selborne is the proud possessor of an ancient Church as well as the remains of the Priory of Augustinian Canons and a Preceptory of Knights Templars. The village was the home of Simon de Montfort, and his grave is in the Churchyard – a thirteenth century relic.

The old butcher’s shop is still shaded by Lime trees planted by Gilbert White in 1756 to screen the “blood and filth” from his view, his house, “The Wakes”, being on the opposite side of the road.

Selborne’s ancient Church – St Mary’s. Image by KevPBur via Flickr.

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Tags: Chandler's Ford, Chandler's Ford Today, family, Hiltingbury, Hiltingbury Road, history, Joan Adamson, Joan Adelaide Goater, local interest, memory, nature, writing

Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 85)

Mozart – a tonic for the soul; Gran writes a “bomb”; visits to Regent’s Park, the Houses of Parliament and Chelsea; The Lake and Pinewoods to remain “natural”, a new bird and ten new plants; the Arend-Roland Comet and some black grapes.

Book 65

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Mozart – a tonic for the soul; Gran writes a “bomb”; visits to Regent’s Park, the Houses of Parliament and Chelsea; The Lake and Pinewoods to remain “natural”, a new bird and ten new plants; the Arend-Roland Comet and some black grapes.

Book 65

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