Family Stories

Reigate

  These charming nineteenth or early twentieth century photographs were taken by the famous Francis Frith of Reigate for the brewers, White, Tomkins and Courage, and I would guess they were on a calendar. Reigate was the nearest large town to Bletchingley where the Colgates had lived since the middle of the nineteenth century; these places would have been very familiar to them!

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Dear Miss Eddy

I recently mentioned my old Latin teacher, Miss Eddy… old because she was old, she even taught my aunty at the same school nearly thirty years previously. She was a sweet old thing and rather hopeless, no doubt a brilliant Latin scholar but not very good as a teacher… but I don’t remember any trouble […]

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Reuben

  I didn’t ever know my granddad Reuben, he died the November before I was born in January. However, my dad Donald spoke of him so often and told me so many stories about him, as did his brother and sister, Sidney and Joan, that I feel as if I did know him. He was born in 1888, the third in a […]

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