WßD Chapter 30 ~ An Introduction to the 2023 Revised Edition
Windsor Street Days
Chapter 30
An Introduction to the 2023 Revised Edition
GREETINGS TO ALL and thank you, again, for your encouragement from all parts of the globe.
Yes, you’re right. The Windsor Street Days manuscript is currently being revised.
My aim is to leave behind a partial record for our descendants. With family archiving, I have in mind my nieces, my nephew, and my four great-nephews; when they’re around fifty or sixty, just as my sisters and I have done and our parents before us, we start to look back and reconstruct.
Well, look at this! Look what’s written here! That was fifty years ago. But I was there on that day!! Uncle’s even mentioned me!!! It looks like I pleased him more than I realised.
Family life trundles along.
My younger sister (the babe in arms eyeing up the lens) has sent me some photographs of Warwick Castle and touched the rudder for generations, for which I’m most grateful. My elder sister (the one standing behind me in the last photograph) has reminded me of the huge responsibility to be entrusted with the family archive. I certainly agree. A writer I might like to think I am. Archivist, I am not. And I will be candid. I don’t like the job.
The gallery is the generation of we three, and I’ve added the Two Ken Webbs at the end - Senior in 1942, Junior in 1962. Shoes I could never quite fill. But I also like this photograph because it momentarily captures a similar smile. By the time I received my wings as a 16-year-old glider pilot with the No. 625 Volunteer Gliding School Air Training Corps at Royal Air Force South Cerney, Gloucestershire in 1969 my smile was becoming that of Ken’s younger brother, Des, my Dad. How wonderful to note these changes down the ages, as each year rolls by.
I’m equally proud of the airfield’s long military history.
Now the Duke of Gloucester Barracks, and home to our 29 Regiment, Royal Logistics Corps, it is, nevertheless, good, when I drive by on the A 417, to see that our World War II control tower and “centre of ops plus tea urn” that it became for 625 VGS, still stands sentinel on the old airfield!
I have to be careful, as we all do, with the online information we find on any subject. I have read somewhere that Heavy Bombers flew from South Cerney during the Second World War. Its primary function has always been flying training and advanced flying training. It’s quite possible that heavy bombers might have landed in an emergency, but I found no note of four-engine aircraft being stationed there. It also has two short runways. Nevertheless, it was a marvellous airfield for me, and not without its risks.
If you read this link on my aviation website, yep, that really did happen! One born every minute!!
Our World War II Control Tower
and “centre of ops plus tea urn” that it became for 625 VGS, still stands sentinel on the old airfield!
This striking image from yesteryear is from the Wikipedia entry for RAF South Cerney and with all rights and ownership reserved to the Photographer
Writing Windsor Street Days currently runs consecutively by using the website’s calendar ~ May 2022. A great deal of information has come to light over the eighteen months. My IT Consultant Armin Braunsberger of Braunsberger GmbH Denmark, and my wingman, quietly reminded me that whilst I can happily change the chapter numbers, it is best if I leave the URL untouched, otherwise for those who are following by using a saved URL they will suddenly receive that pesky Error 403 or 503! God forbid!
I will, therefore, feature a new chapter when it runs, for seven days. I’ll then adjust the website date so that it slots neatly into line within the manuscript.
In December last year a DNA test reported that whilst I might be an Englishman, the ancestral line my ancestry starts off somewhere in Scandinavia, the percentage probability suggesting Norway, then a high percentage of ancestors in Scotland and then, and this did surprise me, a sizeable Germanic ancestry.
We gradually move down to Northumbria in England where we seem to spend several hundred years either side of the border, in Northumberland, and the Scottish Borders. This really was a turn up for the books, as I have always felt a natural affinity with the Scots People. My maternal Grandmother, Martha Isabella Marshall née Hope was born in Scotland and the family had moved to South Shields and Whiltey bay by the time my maternal Grandfather Frank Ewart Marshall is dating Grandma shortly after the end of the First World War.
The wonderful thing is that my niece, born in Winchester, Hampshire, is engaged to her fiancée who is from Tyneside, South Shields and Whitley Bay. How this would have delighted my parents and grandparents!
13 May 2023
All Rights Reserved
© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023
First written 1 October 2021
Last run 10 February 2023
Where it starts. Grandma Webb ~ Mrs Isabel Alice Webb nee Budd at the Christening of Grandma and Grandad’s Firstborn - Arthur Horace James Webb (1914-2006). The banner photo is Uncle Arthur’s wife, Aunt Bette (1916-2008) with our youngest sister, Vanessa (Ness) at Ness’s Christening in the garden at Orchard Terrace in December 1958-January 1959
Archive is always a journey of surprise. It was only when I looked at an enlarged image, did I realise that the lady on the left is Grandma Webb. So what? Simply this. I much prefer finding photographs that are not posed, not contrived for the lens; but instead, seeing the real person as they really are in their natural state, as I remember them.
…and on the same day, Uncle Arthur. ‘We Three’ and our cousin Jenny whose parents went on to become Mayor and Mayoress of Cheltenham in the 1980s.
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
