Tag Archives: Yarmouth Common

Mary Henderson, Margery Henderson: Thorley 1940s

Yarmouth Common

Yarmouth Common

Margery Henderson, my Aunt Marge, Dad’s sister, has lived in Canada since she married a Canadian soldier in WWII and went out as a War Bride. She’s in her nineties now and has children and grandchildren there.

Recently she told me she wished she’d never gone out. She can remember going across the Common in an Army wagon with her husband and couple more of the Canadian soldiers who were over here, and thinking, ‘What have I done?’  But she said in those days, you didn’t admit it. Her mum would have been horrified.
Her father, Vic Henderson, my grandfather, came off his bike through Wilmingham one frosty morning, coming back from coastguard duties. They thought he’d cracked his ribs, had this terrible pain, and Marge was sent for in Canada. Her husband worked for Canadian Pacific, up in the logging camps right up north. It took her two days to get to a train to take her to get a boat and they were becalmed coming across. It took her two or three weeks to get home.  When her mum met her at Liverpool she thought, ‘Why’s Mum meeting me?’  By that time he’d died, but her mum, my Gran Henderson, didn’t tell her till they’d travelled back to the Island.
Mary Henderson b 1954

Patrick Hall: Charabancs 1930s

Charabancs generally speaking had a canvas hood.
There was a chap from Shanklin who had his own charabanc and it didn’t have a hood. On one trip he had a party of nuns and apparently it came on to rain. One of the nuns said:
‘Driver, can you put the hood up?’  and he said – yes – and he walked to the back of the coach. He said, ‘Well, where’s it gone? What have you done with it?’
They didn’t know and he said, ‘Well, it was on there when we left’.
Patrick Hall b 1945

charabanc Saunders yellow Yarmouth Commonscan0054