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Hallowe’en Nights (4) Three ghosts from my past

My father was called Fred Knifton. He lived from 1922-2003, for the most part in Hartshorne Road, Woodville, which is to the south of Derby and Nottingham, in the East Midlands.

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Woodville at the time was a village of some 5,000 people. It was exactly on the edge of  a geological fault line, so to the west, coarse, heavy clay was mined in opencast quarries, and sewer pipes and drainpipes were manufactured. To the east there was no clay, but instead there were open green fields with Friesian cattle and tall hedges of hawthorn.

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Although as far as I know he never experienced any of the RAF’s many ghostly occurrences, Fred once told me that there was a well-known haunted hangar somewhere out there in East Anglia, possibly in Norfolk, where mechanics as they repaired aircraft late at night, would often hear dance music, even though of course, there was no orchestra within miles.

A modern day equivalent may well have been the occasion when I stood at the bathroom sink one summer’s morning, a good few years after Fred’s death, looking out over the roof tops of Nottingham. I was listening to “American Patrol” being played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra on a CD.

This moment suddenly gave me probably the most distinctive feeling of “déjà vu” I have ever had. I have wondered ever since whether my father had perhaps done exactly the same thing on some airbase in Lincolnshire on a long forgotten day some sixty or so years previously.

Strangely enough, for a man who always had so many tales to tell, ghosts and phantoms did not feature particularly highly in Fred’s repertoire, and I would struggle to think of any direct reference he ever made about the afterlife, although I am sure that he was aware of the alleged haunted house down near the Bull’s Head Inn in Hartshorne.

As a native of nearby Woodville, Fred would certainly have heard all the tales of the phantom attached to this large black and white timber framed Elizabethan house which stood between the old Georgian coaching inn and the Anglo-Saxon church in the middle of Hartshorne.

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Apparently, the story was often told of how….

“A brave group of people, made curious by the many ghostly accounts of bumps in the night, had gone up into the attic, unvisited through many decades of neglect, and found furniture piled up across the entire room. On the inaccessible far wall of the room, there was a delicate but obvious print in the centuries old dust, the unmistakeable impression of a ghostly human hand. Nobody could possibly have penetrated the great mass of tables, chairs and rubbish stacked across the floor. It could only have been the work of a phantom. ”

In 1970, I experienced an extremely strange happening when I accompanied my father, Fred, down to his parents’ house at number 39, Hartshorne Road. Fred’s parents, Will and Fanny, had both recently died recently within a few months of each other in hospital at Burton-on-Trent, with Fanny remaining mercifully unaware of Will’s demise after more than sixty years of marriage.

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Fred was paying regular visits to the property, presumably attempting little by little to clear the house out so that it could be resold. At the time, as a teenager of some sixteen  years of age, I was unaware of this, although, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had been, and I could perhaps have stopped Fred from throwing away so many of his father Will’s Great War souvenirs, such as his complete Canadian Army uniform, his German soldier’s leather belt and his extensive collection of German guns and ammunition.

We entered the deserted house through the front door, and as I walked along the hallway towards the kitchen, I distinctly heard the upstairs toilet flush. I turned round and asked Fred, who had been following me into the hall, how this could have happened, and who it could have been, given that we both knew that the house was locked up and empty.

Fred gave me some non-committal answer at the time, but afterwards, perhaps when he had regained his composure a little, he told me that, as he was some way behind me, he had been able to look up the stairs when he heard the sudden noise of the toilet being flushed. He had distinctly seen his recently deceased father, Will, walk out of the bathroom, across the landing and into the front bedroom.

My father Fred certainly knew the story about how an aging Mrs.Edwards had sadly passed away. This old lady had lived in the village a hundred yards further down Hartshorne Road from Fred’s own house, in a Victorian house next to the entrance of a factory making drainpipes.

Her old  friend, and our own family friend, Gertrude Betteridge, went down to Mrs.Edwards’  house to pay her respects and offer her condolences to her daughter, Margaret Edwards. The latter greeted Gertrude and showed her into the front room. Margaret then invited her guest to sit down on the settee while she went into the kitchen to make “a nice cup of tea”.

After a couple of minutes, as Gertrude sat there quietly and politely with the sunlight streaming brightly through the front windows, the door opened. It was not, however, Margaret with the expected tray of tea and biscuits, but Mrs.Edwards herself, exactly as she had been in life, who came in. She walked across the room to Gertrude completely normally, and quietly and calmly said to her, “Tell Margaret not to worry. I’m all right.” Then she turned and walked away, opened the front room door and disappeared back out into the hall, never to be seen again.

 

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Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, Personal

Boots the Chemist

Boots are one of the most familiar names in High Streets across the United Kingdom and beyond. Very few people, however, would realise that this gigantic pharmaceutical corporation started from just one tiny shop in Nottingham.

The founder of this vast retail empire, Jesse Boot, was born in the city on June 2nd 1850. His father was a farm labourer called John, and his mother was originally named Mary Wells. The family lived in an area of the town called Hockley, which at that time was extremely poor and overcrowded. John Boot opened a herbal remedy shop locally in 1849, but unfortunately he passed away in early 1860. His mother, by now the Widow Mary Boot, decided to enrol their son, Jesse, in the Nottingham Free School. On Thursday, July 19th, of that year, at the age of eleven years and one month, Jessy (sic) Boot was included on the register as a pupil at the Free School.

He first attended the School in July of 1861, and was to remain in Mr Field’s English Department until his departure in August 1863, a period of just over two years.

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While her son learnt high standards of reading, writing and arithmetic, Mrs Boot continued with the shop, helped out by her family and friends, and, from 1863, when he left the Free School, by her son Jesse. By 1871, Jesse was a co-partner with his mother in the imaginatively named “M & J Boot”.

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In 1883 the shop became “Boot and Company Limited”. The horse was delighted…

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The business then expanded to Sheffield in 1884.

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By 1900 there were Boots’ shops over the whole country, reaching their peak with 560 branches in 1913. This particular one was in Glasgow.

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The business was eventually sold by Sir Jesse Boot, who became 1st Baron Trent in 1917. It was bought by the Americans for £2.25 million,

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In 1933, however, during the Great Depression, the company was re-acquired by a British syndicate. Its head was the grandson of the founder, John Boot, who had inherited the title of Baron Trent from his father, who had recently died in Jersey in 1931.

Nowadays, Boots is a familiar High Street brand name…

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Their staff are deliberately clad in quasi-medical uniforms to look more professional

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But they are lovely, caring people…

They sell makeup

and love to dress up at Christmas…

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Filed under History, Nottingham, Science, The High School