36 Elmfield Road

Frank Ewart Marshall

Grandad circa 1975 ~ a Family Photograph only recently found in the Archive.

WINDSOR STREET & ELMFIELD ROAD DAYS

Introduction

Gently Touching the Rudder

March 2026

Part I

Writing the family story relies upon subjective perspective, and awareness that individual memories of the same event are often divergent. Time marches briskly, gone is that youthful narrow view that I have side-stepped die Finite.

Last Year I concentrated on my story through the perspective of Windsor Street Days, my first home.

Over the summer, the ancestry com website has thrown up hints that finally enable me to write of my maternal grandfather’s eldest brother, Frederick Marshall. Suddenly Vine Cottage and 36 Elmfield Road open up. Whilst 25 and 20 Windsor Street both played the leading role in my first thirteen years, from then on until 1978-79 the emphasis shifted to the maternal family home 36 Elmfield Road and my grandparents Frank and Martha Marshall.

At last I can write with equanimity.

It enables me to neatly divide my story into two parts, Windsor Street Days and Elmfield Road Days.

Both are inextricably linked. Each coexist and are mutually supportive. Each home is the foundation of each of my parents. Their marriage in April 1949 and arrival of their first of three children in March 1950 are at 36 Elmfield Road.

Their second - me - finds my birth certificate announcing that I started life at 20 Windsor Street in March 1953.

Our formative years - without memory - are exactly that. A child’s character and personality is formed unknowingly from the cot. We are like sponges. We absorb everything around us.

Part II

I had many conversations with Grandad, because Number 36 was just 450 paces away from the Waterloo Road Police Station where, despite my youth, I was the Area Constable for the St Paul’s Parish, Cheltenham.

That was quite something in 1975. I remember the day Temporary General Orders (TGOs) [a] were posted, there was much muttering by constables far senior to me who rightly expected that the illustrious sought-after post of Area Constable would be theirs, especially as St Paul’s Parish was not, say, like Area Four Leckhampton and Area Five Charlton Kings ~ the posh end of Cheltenham. Area One St Paul’s required a Constable who knew how to deal with the robust St Paul’s Parish.

I was thrilled, nonplussed and also overawed. Fortunately, our father (Desmond Budd Webb) was also a serving police officer at Cheltenham Central, as both a station sergeant and then as the Leckhampton Area Sergeant interspersed with periods of acting inspector at Cheltenham.

Then came promotion to the substantive rank of Inspector of Police, initially at the Force Operations in County Police Headquarters, (then known as the Force Information Room) and then, for Dad, the plum posting as a fully operational Traffic Inspector at the newly formed Bamfurlong Traffic Division. I thus benefitted greatly from Dad’s wise counsel throughout my time as Area Constable Area One and in the years that followed as a junior lawyer.

Where I can draw upon independent perspective, as with our father’s short autobiographical account written for his granddaughters Suzie and Caroline, then I do so. Likewise, the large family correspondence that stretches back over two centuries to around 1780.

Here, I follow our father’s example.

I use the tools available to me to write a small part of our family history, ongoing, of no interest beyond the family, but centred upon MY STORY. I have no desire to publish; it will merely sit on the website. Owning this website enables me to create a platform that the future family might hold on to or close down. That decision is not mine to make.

Part III

Last year my brother-in-law asked me why I attached importance to Windsor Street.

That’s where I started life along with my elder sister. Successive house moves did not break the bond with Windsor Street because, for me, it was safe haven, it was also where I spent much of my time from the age of eight until a month before my thirteenth birthday.

In Part IX below I recall vividly Grandad Webb bringing me a cup of tea in the mornings, having firstly taken a cup of tea to Grandma.

I recall life in great detail with Grandma, after Grandad departed unexpectedly in September 1961 after an operation to deal with a strangulated hernia at Cheltenham General Hospital. An unexpected complication was sudden. But these are the things that happen to every family, so there is no need to write further. I do know this though. Grandad Webb’s influence continues to this day; this is so with all four grandparents, a fact borne out by how frequently my sisters and I naturally chat about them all. They live on even though they all departed in 1961, 1966, 1978 and 1980 respectively.

Fast forward to this unpleasant century.

In Liverpool in 2009 my passport had expired.

I had only the flimsy piece of paper issued in 1953 confirming my birth ~ a certificate of the registration of birth. The flimsy is not, however, a birth certificate. It gives only the briefest detail. My business had collapsed following the 2008 financial crash and I learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of bailiffs.

In legal practice, many times I have tactfully explained to clients, yes, that is a certificate confirming that your [relative’s] birth has been entered in the Register of Births. But it does not have any weight with, for example, a life assurance company. If you’re sure you do not have a full birth certificate, almost identical to your [relative’s] death certificate, then we must apply for this.

Looking at my folder, I giggled. I too must now obtain my full birth certificate!

It came within a week and I had a legal document proving my identity and nationality. In 2009 that last point was of no concern.

How detestable that in 2026 there are people in these islands bouncing about like bloated Benadormers shouting out I’m white British and bedecked with Union Jacks or the Cross of St George.

Ah, good!
I’m a person again.
I have an identity.

Part IV

I then just sat there. Silent. For quite a while.

I could hear the pilot boats going up and down as the large tankers were entering or leaving the Port of Liverpool.

Born in Pittville Circus Road, my first home is 20 Windsor Street. This was akin to the final pin in a complicated mechanism engaging and releasing the lock to life’s door.

The Webbs lived in 20 Windsor Street and across the road in 25 Windsor Street.

Everything began to fall beautifully into place. Looking back, I can also see that it was on that morning, at that point, despite my love for my adopted city Liverpool and which I still hold close to me, that I realised that I would in time return to my home county ~ Gloucestershire.

In short from city boy and back to shire lad.

Part V

This is my story, then, across a lifetime counting seven decades, centred upon the two grand-parental homes in two roads a mile and a half apart in Cheltenham ~ Windsor Street and Elmfield Road.

The old Windsor Street Days is now very correctly Windsor Street & Elmfield Road Days.

The book is in six parts.

Each chapter shows which location applies.

In short, everything relating to Marshall is Elmfield Road Days and Webb to Windsor Street Days.

Portrait by James 2020

Kenneth Thomas Webb 209246
Leckhampton
Gloucestershire

Portrait by Hicks 1941

Kenneth Ernest Webb 1315766 at RAF Babbacombe just outside Torquay, Devon just prior to embarkation by troop ship to Canada and onward to Alabama, America for pilot training

I was very aware that my name was somehow linked to the portrait on the wall of my father’s brother painted by Hicks in 1941, and I knew much about all the RAF photographs on the mantel piece in the front room.

Regularly visiting my Grandma and Grandad across town at 36 Elmfield Road, the identical scene played out, with my mother’s brother’s portrait and a similar line of RAF and RCAF photographs on the mantel piece.

Leave Pass 1944

Flight Sergeant (temporary) Flight Engineer, Harry Alfred Marshall 1337884, Pathfinder, on leave November 1944.

Part VI

So! My life started in Windsor street at Numbers 20 and 25 Windsor Street across the street from each other.

20 Windsor Street was the home of my Aunt and Uncle, Bette and Arthur Webb. Home life started up in the top of the house, in the attic.

Even now, I recall its layout. Some will say I could not possibly remember anything now that happened before I was aged 3 years; and that what in fact the brain is doing is to recall an account about which I later heard and learned, and over the years the brain quietly causes me to perceive that as a memory.

I know the difference between both. I can differentiate between both, or as I might say to myself, oh that’s not real memory that’s muscle memory. When I see a ceiling above descending stairs, the lines and marks in the mortar, I sense a pleasant sensation. If I think back, I clearly remember how our mum used to pick me up and lie my back on top of her head and thick hair, chuckling as we descended the stairs and me of course running tiny fingers over what I now would liken to a rough-hewn moonscape.

All of us have these memories. Freedom arrives when we break free of the generational conventions that inhibit us.

My sisters and I have three different start points.

Carol               1950   36 Elmfield Road, Cheltenham
Kenneth          1953   20 Windsor street, Cheltenham
Vanessa           1957   32 Libertus Road Cheltenham

32 Libertus Road was formerly 8 Orchard Terrace, and I always loved, even before school age, living at Orchard Terrace.

Orchard Terrace sat upon a piece of land along which Libertus Road ran. St Mark’s estate was developed in the late 1930s and then resumed immediately post-war.

8 Orchard Terrace was owned by the Gloucestershire Constabulary and that was our address when Carol and I moved there ~ Mum and Dad’s first of four police houses before they put down the deposit on their home of fifty years on Pittville Mount Park.

To me, a toddler, Orchard Terrace was grand, huge in comparison to the attic flat when seen through an infant’s eyes, as too was its large back garden with several apple trees.

Four houses, four moves, disrupted schooling.

The move signified that our parents were making steady progress. I've always loved the sound of those five syllables ~ eight orchard terrace. Sixty-five years later a gentle warmth enwraps, standing or sitting within the orchard, newly planted, within a property on the Old Stow Road in North Gloucestershire, Cotswold.

A silent nod to very happy times ~ Eight Orchard Terrace.

By the time Vanessa arrived on 10 December 1957, the terrace had been incorporated into Libertus Road, now number thirty-two opposite the junction with Devon Avenue. Of course, I’d have been unaware apart from the excitement that we lived in a police house except that I clearly asked why our address was changing. In decades to come I would encounter this many times in Land Law.

Thus, already life’s blueprint was beginning to show the course I would take. But we only ever see any blueprint in retrospect, in hindsight.

Part VII

I fast-forward to this present century. I am driving on the motorway, M6 northbound for the City of Liverpool in May 2003 to commence a three-month locum attachment with a firm of solicitors in Southport.

I had been booked into a pleasant hotel near the Pier, and I had no idea that my whole life was about to change. I remember meeting the senior partner and learning that whilst I would attend the Southport office regularly - it is the firm’s head office - I would actually work 12 miles down the coast road in Waterloo, a large district on the edge of the Port of Liverpool, adjoining the upmarket village of Crosby ~ we are not a town Mr Webb ~ and the beautiful Blundellsands. And we are not a village Mr Webb. We are Blun-dell-sands!

Goodness! From Waterloo Street in 1973 to Waterloo, Liverpool in 2003 and then as if to emphasise the point, Waterloo Warehouse in July 2005. And even though it is simply coincidence, I liked the apartment numbers ~ 110, as my police staff number is 1104. On this website ~ the logo of the clock set to the time 11.04 am or 11.04pm take your fancy, the point being that time is time is time. Time is as everything, created. Slight pause… therefore I deduce that there must be a place that is literally outside time.

A most curious blueprint that seems to have a sense of humour.

Three months metamorphosed into fourteen years.

Liverpool is thus part and parcel of me. I am indelibly linked with Liverpool and Merseyside. Liverpool gave me the freedom that I did not have in Cheltenham and Gloucester in the last century, nor in this century. And I would not have this any other way.

I have, though, very happily returned to my roots for the reason stated. Liverpool is still a central part. I have Liverpool friends. Liverpool gave me the sense of freedom, independence and safety that even today, twenty years on, Gloucestershire simply cannot achieve ~ BUT… I am from the Shires. My last post was practising law in the stunning County of Lancashire. I often return there, too. As too, Manchester.

Summer 2008 Old Hall Street Liverpool

*2008 ~ as MD just before the Financial Crash*

Part VIII

Liverpool allowed me to live in plain sight with many friends like me.

To my surprise my regular returns to the city witnessed a city’s transition, and the wide open spaces of the Liverpool Waterfront are still pleasant, but the signature space too for architects in fierce competition with each other. Obviously, this happens in every decade, every century.

The beat of the city is now too fast for me, simply because I am seventy-three, whereas when I arrived at age fifty-two, I still felt as I did a decade and two decades earlier.

Part IX

Elizabethan Serenade

In reviewing Windsor Street Days, I can balance the books. I’m returning our father’s chapters, and adding images and a video. We both have different writing styles. It is not right for me to change that, but I can illustrate them.

We all, in the family, wish to hear the voice of our father and grandfather ~ Desmond Webb. I am not rushing any of this. I go at my pace.

I add, too, Elizabethan Serenade. Whenever I hear this, I recapture in a millisecond 25 Windsor Street.

Grandma’s reply…

“yes Ken, dear, turn it up just a little. ”

— Grandma Webb ~ Isabel Alice Webb neé Budd 1949

And how incredible. Every chord, every rise, every fall, every note, every trill, captures afresh every room of that lovely childhood home, the winding staircase, the double-turn at the top of the stairs to the master bedroom ~ my Alladin’s cave, to the creaking floorboard in the corridor watching Grandad walk along to the bathroom, then hearing it again, and then a third time. Muffled voices and thanks for the cup of tea which meant that any moment Grandad would reappear … Good morning, Ken… (beaming) and YOUR cup of tea!

And another wonderful day would begin.

Elizabethan Serenade performed by the London Orchestra

Footnotes and Citations

[a] In the Gloucestershire Constabulary Force General Orders were issued weekly, these being Temporary and Permanent. TGOs and PGOs. TGOs were the tabloid press. Movements, Promotions, Postings and such like ~ gossipy. Have you seen TGOs? He’s being posted pronto to Temple Guiting, back of beyond. Wots ee done rong!! I noo ee were a wrong-un! Permanent General Orders were part of the fabric of the Constabulary’s administration and organisation. A declaration with the status of a PGO (black print on light blue) meant that it was akin to an act of parliament or a military directive. It was in force until rescinded or amended. A TGO (black print on yellow) was just that. Temporary, until such time as a situation or a person’s position changed. That is my definition from memory. The source in much greater detail is The History of the Gloucestershire Constabulary by Harry Thomas 1839-1985

[b] The History of the Gloucestershire Constabulary by Harry Thomas 1839-1985 gifted, and dedicated, to my nephew Jack Marshall Martin, when I gratefully hand over the baton on that final lap to the gentle hand that is the Hand of Time.

[c] My author name, my mother’s maternal name, and I remember with affection the day I asked my parents if I could use the name Marshall. Mum was tough. I had to argue my case, much to my father’s pleasure, and we celebrated with a pot of tea and many laughs.

[d] I then published Idle Thoughts An Anthology of Poetry and Prose through Spiderwize Publishing in September 2009 upon return to Liverpool. The Cover is the Portrait of my Aunt, Mrs Florence Emily Bette Webb ~ Aunt Bette (pronounced as one syllable) the wife of Dad’s eldest brother, Arthur.