Browse Items (469 total)

Rowley Young

Rowley Young comes from a local family. He left school at 13 and went into the stick factory before starting to learn cabinet making at night school.…

Reflections on Matthew Gardner's account book for work, 1851

If you don't believe in the Archers, try the Gardners; for one thing, they're true. An Oakridge Lynch resident, Mrs Nurding, has unearthed a real—life…

Recollections of Oakridge School in the Time of Mr Allen

Extracts from an interview with Kathleen Hunt & Eileen Minchin. When I was a child at Oakridge School the most I can remember were about 125 or…

Queenie Pearman Poem - 'Sunday School in Days Gone By'

'Sunday School in Days Gone By' Each Sunday morn by 10 am to Sunday School we scurried. With well brushed hair and faces bright, Shoes we polished the…

Oakridge Orchestra - An interview with Mr Austin Gardiner

I used to play the cornet in the Oakridge Orchestra. But I lost my front teeth in a motorbike accident and turned to the violin which my father and…

Oakridge Memories - Wilf Merrett, 1/2/2000

Back in the 1930s an aunt of mine occasionally visited a friend in Oakridge who lived in a primitive cottage with no amenities and an outside loo.…

Miss Berta Gardiner

It is rare these days to come across the old-fashioned family retainer. Such was Bertha Gardiner of the Old Mill, Oakridge Lynch, whose death at the…

Memories of the Past - The Late Mr Couldrey

When I was working at Little Hattons (the Cottage next to Hattons, near Maker's Mill) in the late sixties when Mrs. Sutton was in the big house I came…

Memories of Frank Finch

Most people in Oakridge knew Frank, and many people much further away, too. He was born into the well-known farming family in the hamlet of Tunley, in…

Memories of Convivial Evenings at "The Crown," Waterlane

I well remember my father, Edgar, telling me of the time when the then Landlord, Charlie Ewer, had difficulty in getting his customers to leave, long…