Blast from the past… 32
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Apr 2025 (3 months before publishing this article)
My friend, Dave, from Unilever days came down for a chat, a coffee, a walk and lunch. It was great to see him, as always. We took a look at the Roman amphitheatre and ate at Blend in the old brewery building.
It was Donna’s birthday this month and we visited Hidcote which has to be one of our favourite gardens. Our grandson, Aidan, was trekking in South America, exploring the Caribbean coast of Colombia, sending back regular comments and photos on the family WhatsApp channel. He’s taken some time out between A levels last year and starting University in York later this year.
At home, Donna and I were building and filling two raised beds where she plans to grow vegetables this summer and we had a dumper bag of a soil/compost mix delivered and barrowed it all to the back garden.
JHM: I wrote about dinosaurs and the Bible; and the little wren which is a bird and a coin. World events: Fram2 carried astronauts on a polar orbit for the first time; and Pope Francis died at the age of 88.
< Mar 2025 – May 2025 >
January 2025 (6 months before publishing)
The new heat pump system was running by the end of the month and we had warm radiators for the first time on January 31st. What a joy! In the photo Akki, the team’s electrician, is commissioning the system.
Our leaking chimney was also repaired this month and a damp ceiling dried out well with no more drips in heavy rain; some alterations and improvements to the house were finished as well. We now have windows we can open in our bedroom on hot summer evenings, and that will be a huge benefit. Everything is getting better (but it’s all costing money too).
The CBC Small Group I go to every week had a social evening with a meal at Tony and Penny’s, there must have been ten or twelve of us there and it was a great time.
JHM: I wrote about a new supersonic test aircraft; and details of my breakfast choices. World events: There were devastating wildfires in California; and a ceasefire came into effect in the Israeli-Gaza war.
July 2024 (1 year before)
Our new greenhouse was erected today and looks just great. More good news is that Labour won the General Election and Roz Savage won our local constituency (South Cotswolds) for the Lib Dems.
The rather less good news was that Isobel had a fall while she was away with Donna for a Warner’s break. She had a partial hip fracture which resulted in a partial hip replacement operation and the need for recovery and physiotherapy.
Our friends Jim and Pam from St Neots stayed with us for one night. They arrived in a large camper van and were heading for a touring holiday in Wales. And on 17th I started my ‘Image of the day‘ series of posts here on JHM. On 28th we set off for Ireland via Fishguard and Rosslare for our annual summer holiday with the family.
JHM: I posted Vine and Branches about John 15; and an image of a sunset from Brazil. World events: Sir Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to a landslide victory; and the Summer Olympics were held in Paris.
July 2023 (2 years)
Our solar panels were commissioned and fully working by 3rd July, and they came with a phone app that would let us monitor their activity as well as that of the 10 kWh battery that we’d bought. It was great to see the power flowing on sunny days, meeting all our needs day and night on good days and often exporting power to the grid as well. We knew things would be less impressive in the winter months.
The Small group I’m a member of met for a meal at Phil and Judith’s house in South Cerney, it was good fun as always and an opportunity for longer conversations. Donna and I visited Batsford Arboretum, and Debbie, Aidan and Sara came to visit us for two nights at the end of the month. In the photo we’re strolling in Cirencester Park heading for the town centre.
JHM: I wrote an earlier ‘Blast from the past’; and began a series on our Scottish adventure. World events: New Zealand and the EU signed a free trade agreement; and the films Barbie and Oppenheimer opened.
July 2020 (5 years)
We visited Bradford-on-Avon to visit an old garden and take a look at the town. Much to my surprise, there’s a particularly well-preserved Saxon church there. It wasn’t open so we couldn’t look around inside, but it was fascinating to see a structure that dates back before the Norman Conquest. It may have been built in 1001 CE, so very late Saxon. (See: Wikipedia article)
We ate breakfast in Cirencester’s Toro Lounge, the first time we’d done this since the COVID outbreak.
Near the end of the month we visited Gloucester Docks and the Cathedral with Donna’s Mum, Isobel. The docks area is being redeveloped as a shopping centre with restaurants and a museum as well as all the old docks themselves now in use as a large marina. There’s a large plaza, places to sit, car parking nearby, and an easy walk to the city centre and the cathedral.
JHM: I wrote about a local musician; and a free way of writing online. World events: Russian voters backed an amendment permitting Putin another two terms as president after 2024; and the number of COVID cases worldwide passed 15 million.
July 2015 (10 years)
Our family holiday was at Noordbeemster in the Netherlands, we crossed on the ferry from Harwich. One of the places we enjoyed during this week away was the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen. In character it’s very like the Welsh Folk Museum and the children enjoyed it just as much as the adults. The photo shows Meredith in the distance and Aidan trying out weird Dutch traditional toy vehicles. Pump the handle to move and steer with your feet. This proved to be much harder than you might think!
I drove to Burton Latimer to meet Rachael and our friend, Jody, for lunch and to talk about meeting again in our homes to hear what the Holy Spirit would say to us together.
It was an exciting month for astronomy as the New Horizons probe flew by Pluto and Charon and began to return data on 15th.
World events: Cuba and the United States reestablished full diplomatic relations; and Microsoft released Windows 10.
July 2010 (15 years)
I visited the Christian Bookshop in Letchworth with my friends Jim and Paul to see if we could learn anything that would help us develop the new cafe/bookshop in St Neots. We were looking for good ideas, things to avoid, and advice from people who’d been through a similar process.
Our family holiday was in North Wales at the end of July this year. The photo shows Beth and Paz with their daughters Meredith and Verity on the narrow-gauge steam train, something we have to do on every holiday! This time we were on the Welsh Highand Railway. A few days later we went to visit the Dinorwig pumped storage power station which is an impressive feat of engineering.
World events: The first 24-hour flight by a solar-powered plane was completed; and Slovenia became the 32nd member of the OECD.
July 2005 (20 years)
Debbie and Steve were married in Cornwall at the end of July. It was a quiet but special occasion, with just the two of them, Donna and me, and Steve’s parents. We explored the local area briefly while were there, Steve’s Dad and I very much enjoyed the amazing Bicycle Museum.
Our friend Steph Bennett and her daughter, Sondra, came to stay earlier in the month. During their visit we travelled to Paris by train via the Channel Tunnel and spent a day or two in the city. In the photo we’re on our way to the top of Montmartre.
World events: Eris was discovered, the most massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System; and the Huygens spacecraft landed on Titan.
July 2000 (25 years)
Our friends Karen and Gert were married in Ampthill and I had the job of taking the photos, most were taken on Kodak colour negative film, and a few on my first digital camera. These were low resolution, but were better than film in low light conditions.
My Uncle Dick’s funeral was on 25th, and my branch of the family gathered at Churnside in Cirencester before the event and returned afterwards for a meal together. It was the same day that an Air France Concorde caught fire and crashed near Paris with tragic loss of life.
We went along to the Tilbrook Village Fete where I spotted a 100E Ford Anglia just like the one I’d owned in 1969. It was great fun to see one again after all this time. I remembered the three-speed gearbox and the windscreen wipers using a partial vacuum from the engine. They were not the best wipers in the world!
World events: The Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden was opened; and Air France Concorde Flight 4590 crashed into a hotel outside Paris.
July 1995 (30 years)
Judy’s health was definitely declining slightly and she continued to lose weight slowly. But apart from that she was doing quite well and was not in pain at the start of the month. By the end of July, though, she needed some paracetamol now and then, especially when travelling in the car.
My Mum and Dad came down on my birthday and we were able to sit outside on the patio in the evening. Debbie and Beth were with us and Nick joined us as well.
We continued meeting regularly with our friends Tony and Faith, and Paul and Jenny for the most amazing times of spiritual experiences, feeling very close to one another and very close to Jesus too. They were such special occasions, not prayer sessions and not about physical healing, but they were about spiritual revelation and growth for all of us. Dad sometimes jokingly referred to them as ‘The Gang of Four’ or all six of us as ‘The Crazy Gang’.
World events: The Srebrenica massacre took place; and China fired missiles into the sea north of Taiwan.
July 1990 (35 years)
Dad retired from Country Gardens this month where he’d worked to ease the handover of the old family business as a going concern to the new owners. His nephew Tim had worked with him on this, and being younger Tim continued with them after Dad left. Mum was pleased to have Dad at home and with time to walk into town or go out for daytrips, and even on longer holidays.
Cindy, Paul and little Sebastian visited us in Yatton. Seb was unable to walk without some support, but with his walker to aid him he was already bombing along really confidently – and fast!
We visited Mum and Dad on my birthday, we spent some time chatting in the garden as it was a lovely summer’s day. The photo shows Mum and Judy, with Dinah the Siamese cat sitting on Judy’s lap for a relaxing stroke.
World events: East and West Germany merged their economies; and Belarus declared sovereignty in a move towards independence.
July 1985 (40 years)
I was at the RMS Microscopy Conference at York University on 12th, this was to help me get to grips with some new techniques, including electron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy. At this point I was still attempting to localise the plant hormones known as gibberellins in frozen plant tissue for Long Ashton’s Plant Sciences Group.
Judy continued teaching Biology GCSE and A Level at Cotham Grammar School in Bristol. Debbie (10) was studying at Backwell School, and Beth (7) was at Yatton Junior. We were living at 22 Rectory Drive in Yatton west of Bristol; the photo was taken in our front garden.
World events: The Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk; and P. W. Botha declared a state of emergency in South Africa.
July 1980 (45 years)
The new Jefferies garden centre at Kingsmeadow was doing a good trade during the summer months after opening to customers in April. The Tower Street garden centre continued operating, as well as the shop in the Market Place (now Vodafone). And although the nurseries were still in use, they were beginning to fade away in terms of the value they added to the business. It was becoming cheaper to buy in nursery stock than to employ staff to raise plants locally.
We travelled up to Frank and Kathy’s home for the Christening of their new daughter, Joanne, almost certainly in the car with Judy’s parents.
World events: Ronald Reagan was nominated to run for the US presidency; and the 1980 Summer Olympics were held in Moscow and widely boycotted.
July 1975 (50 years)
This was the last full month that we lived in our flat (upper flat in the photo) in Belmont Road, Bristol before moving to Yatton on 2nd August. The flat was very cluttered at the end of July, everything was piled up or packed in boxes ready for the move. This was at once exciting and very inconvenient.
Debbie was four months old on 12th and was dedicated at Zetland Road Fellowship on 27th according to a note in my Dad’s photo notebook. So a lot was happening in July 1975!
World events: Cape Verde gained independence after 500 years of Portuguese rule; and the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project docked American and Soviet crewed spacecraft in orbit.
July 1970 (55 years)
My degree ceremony at Bath was a little earlier than Judy’s at Aberystwyth (or it might have been the other way around), but we both had our hired robes for the period between the two and the photos were taken at her parent’s house in Cheltenham during that week.
I travelled to Aber with Judy’s parents and brother and crept into the hall at the back to watch and listen as there were insufficient tickets for Judy’s family and for me as well. Then at Bath Judy came along with my parents. The next big occasion for us would be our wedding in October, and planning for that was pretty much done and everything arranged apart from little jobs like writing name cards for the tables at the reception and so forth.
World events: France tested a hydrogen bomb on Mururoa Atoll; and the Aswan High Dam in Egypt was completed.
July 1965 (60 years)
At the beginning of July we visited Oxford for the day, Günter Klauß who was staying with us on a school exchange came too and very much enjoyed the trip. Mum sent an Oxford postcard to Granny in Northern Ireland reporting that Ruth had learned to swim a few days earlier.
On 10th, Günter returned home to West Germany, we took him to Kemble Station to see him off on the train to London. This was also the end of my first year in the Sixth Form at Cirencester Grammar School and Mum’s 37th birthday was on the 5th.
World events: Mariner 4 flew by Mars, becoming the first spacecraft to return images of the planet; and Edward Heath became Conservative Leader in the UK.
July 1960 (65 years)
The Cotswold Roses would have been flowering freely on the London Road Nursery (now Partridge Way and Pheasant Way on the eastern side of Cirencester). The photo of the catalogue for the following season gives some idea of what they would have looked like.
The school holidays were always a time to look forward to, the freedom to do whatever I liked was great and we would certainly have some family days out to enjoy and a summer holiday away somewhere.
Mum’s birthday was on 5th, she was 32; mine was on 31st, my twelfth; Dad’s birthday was in June and he was now 34; Cindy was 8-years-old and about half way through her time at Querns School (juniors); while Ruth and Rachael had not yet started school at all being just four and three.
World events: Kwame Nkrumah became the first President of Ghana; and Francis Chichester won the first Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race aboard Gypsy Moth III taking 40 days.
July 1955 (70 years)
My seventh birthday was the 31st of July in 1955. Mum and Dad gave me a somewhat faded red bike that was almost too big for me to ride, even with the saddle and handlebars set as low as possible. I found it quite daunting at first, but once I’d learned to ride it, I loved that bike. One thing you could do was fix a piece of flexible card to the rear frame so that it made contact with the spokes of the back wheel. Then it made a marvellous noise that rose in pitch the faster you went. Before long I was riding my bike to Querns School, though Dad came with me to make sure I was safe in all the town traffic. The photo shows our back garden at 17 Queen Anne’s Road where we lived at the time. It was taken in September 1960, but wouldn’t have changed very much since June 1955.
World events: Bertrand Russell highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons; and Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California.
July 1950 (75 years)
Mummy was 22-years-old on 5th July and I was two at the end of the month. I was admitted to Cirencester’s Memorial Hospital as a one-year-old (date unknown, so probably not July) and was apparently very taken with a large teddy bear they had on the ward. I was suffering from a serious bout of diarrhoea and, presumably, dehydration and was kept in for a week. The photo shows the hospital in 1950 (from the Facebook group, Old Ciren).
World events: North Korea’s Air Force was largely destroyed by anti-communist forces; and Uruguay beat Brazil 2–1, to win the 1950 World Cup.
July 1945 (80 years)
(Wikimedia)
A three watch system was started, and Mike spent a good deal of time writing and reading letters to and from Lilias, his family, old school friends, and RAF friends now at other stations. In one of her letters Lilias mentioned a problem with serious period pains, a cause of concern for them both.
Generally, RAF duties were rather light during July with the war in Europe now over. Mike mentions activities like cricket, softball, swimming and tennis as well as lectures on topics like returning to civilian life.
On 16th he was off to Staxton Wold radar station near Scarborough where there was rifle, machine gun, and hand grenade practice. Mike had a B+ Pass from the course at Staxton Wold. On 26th he was disappointed to learn that Labour had won a landslide victory in the General Election.
He spent Friday 27th travelling to Cirencester, Saturday with family and friends, and Sunday 29th travelling back to Skendleby and normal duties again with some new radar equipment. The picture shows a Midland Railway engine, probably still in use by the London, Midland, and Scottish (LMS) when Mike made his journey to Cirencester.
World events: Germany was divided between the Allied occupation forces; and the first atomic bomb test (Trinity), used 6 kg of plutonium to explode with the force of 22 million kg of TNT.
July 1940 (85 years)
There’s not enough information to write something for every month in the 1940s. Dad’s diaries start in January 1943, so for January 1940 to December 1942 I’ll write about things I know, or draw on dated photos and documents. Sometimes I might use a photo or document with a guessed date.
For July 1940 I thought I’d write about the London Road Rose Nursery. This was a large field with a north facing slope, typical of hilly ground in the Cotswolds generally; it was limestone brash overlain by a shallow, stony subsoil and thin topsoil, by no means the most promising site for rose growing. Today it is an area of housing, Pheasant Way and Partridge Way. The field was owned by John Jefferies & Son and must have been bought by the company quite early.
To help keep the poor soil in reasonable condition a rotation was employed. It included a cereal crop, and roses the following year. I don’t know, but it’s possible (even likely) that a crop of mustard or some other nitrogen fixing choice would have been grown in a third year and ploughed in during the autumn to fertilise the soil and add organic matter. From the 1960s I recall stooks of corn (wheat or barley most likely) and the use of a threshing machine to separate and clean the seed for bagging and to produce straw. In 1940 it might have been done the same way or perhaps in those days there would have been more hand labour involved.
Corn seed would have gone to the Jefferies warehouse in Tower Street for further processing, cleaning and bagging for onward sale to local farmers for delivery in the autumn and sowing in the field in the autumn or the spring for early or later harvest. Straw was useful for packing plant orders for despatch in the winter months, and excess quantities could be sold to farmers and horse owners for bedding, or if long enough and of the right quality, sold for thatching.
See July 1960 above for more on the Jefferies roses. Wikipedia has a good background article on roses. The bloom in the image is a cultivar named Peace, the photo is taken from that article. It’s a hybrid tea rose with a good fragrance, presumably named shortly after the end of World War II. My father had two rose beds in the front garden at 17 Queen Anne’s Road, and the one nearest the front door was Peace.
World events: The Royal Navy sank or seized ships of the French fleet in Algerian ports; and the Battle of Britain began.
1930-1939 (95 to 86 years ago)
Anything that appears in this section will be material that I believe belongs in this decade. Items will not be in sequence within the decade, but where I can make a good guess of the date I will do so.
When Tigger (my father) was about six or seven (a guess) his father, my Grandpa, wrote a little story for him. His mother (Nor) had a hand in this too for the book is machine stitched. I well remember her treadle sewing-machine from the 1950s when I was a child, clearly he had asked her to use it to stitch along the central fold of the sheets of paper making up the book.
The book has the title ‘Mr Fizwig, his monkey, and their adventures’ and was ‘Written for Tigger’. The illustrations have been coloured, mostly by a child of Tigger’s age, and a list of page numbers added along with the word ‘chapter’. Taken as a whole this provides a touching insight into family life around 1932 at ‘Churnside’, 37 Victoria Road, Cirencester.
You can read the book if you want to, it will open in a new browser tab. I’ve assumed a date of Christmas Day 1932, but it might have been written at any time and was not necessarily a birthday or Christmas gift. After a few years it was most likely forgotten, but never discarded. But now it’s here for anyone to read.
World events (July 1932): The Dow Jones reached its lowest level of the Great Depression, at 41.22; and Norway annexed northern Greenland.
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