Jill Sparrow

We're doing the same with a trip to Berridge in March. Good luck with your project!

Yes, Loppy. I agree. Mine is a multi fuel stove but the heat is much longer lasting than central heating, gas fires, etc. This morning is freezing cold, ice everywhere but just tipped a couple of logs and a bit of smokeless fuel onto Clara the Clearview, as she's known, and off we go from last night's slumbering warmth. Moggies love it. We'll soon be told we can't have em any more though. Bad for the environment or some such tripe!

Many years ago, I asked to see the admissions book for The Gordon Boys' Home in Nottingham. The archivist said it was locked until some date in the far distant future but she could search for me. That was free. However, I had to prove I was related to Thomas William Sparrow, my great uncle, who was admitted there as a child. The information was retrieved from the bowels of the earth and was worth having.

Staddons was part of my childhood. Linen, beds, furniture. I still have 2 bedside cabinets that came from there many years ago.

Mine too. Excellent piece of kit, especially this weather.

My great grandparents lived at 24 Suez Street in the Little Egypt area of Basford. I remember going there in my pushchair but the house was destroyed in the early to mid 80s. However, some of the original street remains. This area was our old friend Newbasfordlad's point of origin. I've never seen an image of Suez Street as it originally was either.

Drifting back in time, as we tend to do on this site, I was thinking about my earliest experiences of visiting a hairdresser. Her name was Olive Wibberley and she lived at the first 3 storey Victorian villa on Radford Boulevard, roughly opposite Wordsworth Road. Olive was a single lady who lived with her mother and the front bay windowed sitting room served as her salon. She displayed an oval glass sign in the window: Olive, Ladies' Hairdresser. My mother liked Olive because she was scrupulously clean and all the combs, brushes, etc were meticulously placed in a steril

But you're still driving the ladies wild, Ben!

Whatever happened to free speech?

I don't know whether she still drives but I think she's given up changing wheels and fan belts as per her ATS days. One's robes get dirty!

30 day ban? Yikes, good thing our Ben's got a sense of humour or else I'd have been frogmarched off NS for pulling his leg!

That's probably Philip's rationale. Too stubborn to ask HMQ to run him about! Well, that's me in The Tower for the foreseeable future!

Doesn't that feature Mr Carton? I expect he's been recycled by now!

In the mid 70s, there was a fashion shop called Jean Jeannie in that, rebuilt, block. I bought several nice trouser suits in their closing down sale.

I suspect Anthony is too young to have attended Berridge Senior Boys. I thought he may have attended there as a primary school.

Georgian architecture is hard to beat for aesthetics, unless it's Tudor of course!

A highlight of my friend's training at Harlow Wood occurred after the admission to her ward of an elderly tramp. Confined to bed and encased in a two part plaster cast, he confided that he hadn't had a bowel movement for some weeks. The rather officious sister informed him that he would be given laxative tablets to bring about rectification of this condition. After a further two weeks, still no bowel movement had occurred and, whilst administering a bed bath...first removing the front of the cast, then turning the patient and removing the back of the cast...my friend di

At some point, she moved to Scotland, where she met her husband. Later, they returned to the Mansfield area and again she worked at Harlow Wood, I think until it closed. She was encouraged to study for her sister's qualification and, I'm sure, would have been successful but she preferred to remain at the coal face, as it were, because she enjoyed caring for the patients.

Secondary Moderns for the Hyson Green area tended to be Peveril, Ellis Guilford or William Crane. As a resident of Hyson Green, you didn't attend Berridge did you?

There is indeed a plethora of information and memories on this establishment but the photos don't seem to cover the period she was there in the mid 50s. She returned to work there later on, after nursing at Mansfield General, a place she disliked intensely. Ended her career at King's Mill. She does have some photos. I'll ask her to look them out.

Student nurses, apparently, were rarely favoured with a Saturday night off. Pauline and her colleagues were mad keen on dancing but the opportunity didn't often present itself. Even if they weren't on duty, the nurses in the home were expected to be in bed and lights out at a riduculously early hour and all exterior doors were locked after the sister in charge had made her rounds. The age of majority in 1955 was 21 and the student nurses were in the care of their superiors who acted in loco parentis. None of this kept the girls in although a sympathetic ally was needed

I've been listening to some amusing tales from a friend of mine who is 81 this week. Aged 17, she was training to be a nurse at Harlow Wood Hospital. Margie H will recall how strict were the rules and regulations governing the nurses home. Pauline Jackson, as she was in those days, got up to some mischief during her time there. One Friday 13th, she had been teasing the patients on her ward with the tale of how, on that night of the year, Bessie Shepherd whose murder is commemorated on a nearby stone, walked through the hospital wards at midnight. "So, if you see her to

Don't you make your private correspondence available for the world to read, Phil? Everyone's desperately interested in other people's business aren't they? Isn't that what the internet is for? Or have I got it wrong?

My parents met at the Victoria Ballroom in February 1947. Mum had arranged to meet one of her female friends from the office at the Victoria but she didn't turn up. She met dad that evening instead. The rest is history!

My parents were both keen ballroom dancers in the 40s and 50s. They frequented Colman's up until the mid 60s and knew Enid Colman well. They had their wedding reception at the Palais in June 1949 and I've heard them refer to the fountain there. They would be 94 and 93 now, so possibly glided around the dance floors of those establishments along with your neighbour.