Sutton Bonington Campus - University of Nottingham

The weekend of September 10/11 2016 was a special time for Claire and I as we had decided to attend the 40th anniversary event for Sutton Bonington campus graduates from 1976. Yes, amazingly, it is 40 years since we graduated from Nottingham University!

We had a couple of days staying in Ashby-de-la-Zouch before the event. We visited assorted churches and cemeteries and made some good finds. Ashby seems busier than it used to be and our first house seemed smaller than we remembered it to be.

It rained quite hard on the Saturday morning but luckily the afternoon turned dry.  There were about 30 of us, almost the same faces as 10 years ago.  Even DK turned up in his wheelchair - "I fell off a ladder", he said.  He seemed on good form and it was nice to see him.  We stayed in one of the newer hostels beyond the old Hostel 5: goodness me the rooms seemed small although comfortable enough with those little bathroom "pods". The number of aircraft flying over seems to have gone up and some planes seem to arrive in the middle of the night. 

I am second from the left

We were amazed at all the new buildings, and extremely impressed with the quality of the facilities for modern students.  There must have been many tens of millions of pounds spent on the site. Our jaws dropped at the (current) devastation where the JCR used to be.  It is gone!  A new mid-campus "Plaza" is being created: doubtless it will be wonderful when it is finished.  The old Hostel 5 pond was long since filled in on safety grounds, only for modern designers/architects to add multiple new "designer" ponds elsewhere!

We had a meal together in the new facility (The Barn), but Martin and I didn't really think it was £30-worth.  Sloppy pate starter with inadequate bread, and just carrots and mashed potato with the main course.  Not very imaginative. But Sunday was sunny, and after a snacky breakfast in a café in the Costcutter shop on campus we went a walk down to the River Soar.  Altogether a very enjoyable weekend.  We will certainly like to attend the 50th and final reunion event in 2026.

From the UK to the USA - grave hunting!

This 13 day holiday called America's Founding History was organised by Great Rail Journeys and as has always been the case with this company the holiday was well organised and highly enjoyable.

Holidays such as this are rather hostages to fortune with respect to the weather and the energy and enthusiasm of the tour guide. We were lucky in both respects. John Rayment was one of the best guides we have experienced and the weather, although hot and humid, was overwhelmingly dry.

We visited (in order) Washington DC, Jamestown/Williamsburg/Yorktown, Lexington, Monticello, Charlottesville, Gettysburg and, finally, Philadelphia and, of course, we did some serious grave hunting along the way!

Arlington National Cemetery - Joe Louis, World Heavyweight boxing champion.

Arlington National Cemetery - Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American combat soldiers of World War II.



The only minor glitches were due to Amtrak and British Airways. The rail trip from Washington DC to Williamsburg was - to be blunt - something of a fiasco. The train arrived 45 minutes late at Washington and then fell further and further behind the advertised arrival times at assorted intermediate stops before finally arriving at Williamsburg nearly 2 hours late.

The outwards trip from London Heathrow to Washington by British Airways was excellent but the over-night homewards trip from Philadelphia was spectacularly bad.

• The plane left Philadelphia nearly an hour late.
• The cabin was so cold that many people wore the supplied blanket over their head to mitigate the icy blasts coming from the overhead vents.
• The breakfast was both tiny and almost inedible. The croissant was so stale that it was solid and the Granola cereal fruit bar would not have been out of place as a surfacing material on a road.
• When we arrived at Heathrow there was nowhere for the plane to park and we just sat there for 20 minutes waiting for a slot to become vacant so that we could disembark. 

My Mother's diaries

For most of her married life my Mother kept a diary and these give an interesting insight into everyday life in English suburbia during the last third of the 20th century.

The first diary I have managed to locate is dated 1955. I was particularly pleased to find this one because I had been born in late 1954 so quite a few of the entries mention my early childhood. Sadly she stopped writing half way through the year and the next volume I have been able to locate is her Boots Diary for 1969. There is then an unbroken series of diaries covering her life right up to the time that vascular dementia kicked in - at which point she stopped writing regular entries.

The gradual decline of my paternal grand-parents is covered in poignant detail. They died aged 98 and 99 meaning that my father was 72, and so well into retirement, before he became an orphan. By contrast my wife reached this unhappy milestone when she was only 40. Both grand-parents said they were "ready to go" almost a decade before they actually died and the whole concept of them sitting around waiting to die is quite upsetting.

For many years my mother's closest friend was "Aunty" Chris. She lived in the same street as my parents and she and my mother had many interests in common - especially the Townswomen's Guild and its associated drama and poetry groups. The two of them would meet up two or three times a week and their respective lives were very much inter-twined.

Then Chris was taken ill and in a matter of a couple of months she was dead. My mother briefly mentioned going to her funeral and then nothing - she just put her sadness behind her and got on with her, rather more restricted, life. My mother was like that sometimes, some part of her emotional brain had been damaged by her very traumatic childhood and she was good at coping with sad events of this type.

It was noise that she couldn't stand. At various times in her daily dairy entries she would launch into a rant about the noise made by the boiler, the TV, the fridge or the school across the road. She would also worry about world events for a three week window just before the annual overseas holiday. Wherever in the world Mum and Dad were due to visit you could be almost certain that some related man-made or natural disaster would cause her to have sleepless nights.

If books had feelings some of mine would be crying today!

As my family will tell you I have lots of books. There are bookcases in my study (2), in the lounge, in the front hall and in the dining room (2) to say nothing of the many boxes of books that live in the utility room or in the walk-in wardrobe upstairs.

Once a book has been relegated to the boxes in the utility room they have little chance of every being read again. To slightly paraphrase my daughter, "I will store them there until I die, then somebody else will throw them away." Some of the boxes I looked at today had been sealed up for nearly 20 years which both amused and shocked me.

After many years of "living" in the dining room my set of Jennings books have been packed up and will probably not emerge into the daylight again in the foreseeable future. There are 23 novels in the series and it is a curious fact that although I have read some of the books many times there is one I have never seen, never mind read. Jennings at Large (#23) was an experiment by the author that didn't work according to many other enthusiasts and so I have never felt motivated to search for a copy.

The Jennings books are timeless in that the hero stays the same age throughout the series. This of course is a strength and a weakness but by the end of the 23 books all the best story lines have been used over and over again. Other series gradually allow the characters to age (The Lone Pine series does this) and the famous Chalet stories are spread out over many years and perhaps they benefit from this editorial decision.

I received my first posthumous email today.

My long-time friend Charles died on Monday 1st February 2016 - and how did I know this? Because he told me!

When Charles found out last June that he was suffering from cancer he arranged with his daughter that as soon as he died a final message would be sent out to his various on-line friends scattered around the world. In practice Charles had so many different hobbies that he had to create four different messages and four different mailing lists that reflected the different aspects of his busy life!

I first came across Charles through our shared interest in amateur astronomy. He and I were part of a small group who used to exchange news and views a couple of times a month. But as the years went by our numbers gradually reduced. Hannah died, far too young, and we were down to four and then in 2013 two other members gave up practical astronomy as advancing years and retreating finances took their toll. Eventually Charles, my friend and sounding board in the USA, also decided to retire from the wonderful world of science to take up golf and fossil hunting and after a long and amusing "do you remember when" email he and I went our separate ways.

And now he is gone. None of my close family knew Charles, except perhaps as a name I mentioned occasionally, so there is nobody to share my loss. I suspect that many of us have E-pals or Internet Friends and sometimes, if you are anything like me, one of them will suddenly vanish from your in box and you will be left wondering what happened to them. I think the idea of a posthumous email is both considerate and quite poignant and it certainly something that members of this group might want to consider creating. 

The War-Graves of the Western Front 1914-1918

The Arras War Graves and Memorials

Published June 2015 and now available from Amazon.

UK readers click here for more details

US readers click here for more details





The Menin Gate Memorial

Published June 2015 and now available from Amazon.

UK readers click here for more details

US readers click here for more details







The Thiepval War Graves and Memorials

Published June 2015 and now available from Amazon.

UK readers click here for more details

US readers click here for more details





 The Tyne Cot War Graves and Memorials

Published June 2015 and now available from Amazon.

UK readers click here for more details

US readers click here for more details





The Cambridge American Cemetery

 

The Cambridge American Cemetery

by

Martin Nicholson

This book was published in October 2015 and is now available from Amazon 

 

About the author - Martin Nicholson and his wife Claire Nicholson own one of the largest archives of grave related photographs in the world. A selection of their work appears in the blog "Grave Mistakes" that has had over 400,000 hits since it was launched in 2013. Other examples appear in the Facebook group "Social History" where Martin acts as the group administrator.

 

This book is compiled from the records maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) of servicemen and women killed or missing since April 6th 1917. The ABMC lists over 218,000 names of dead and missing service personnel. Of these just over 8,900 (4.1%) are to be found at the Cambridge American Cemetery. The book is divided into sections that contain details of the location within the cemetery of the service personnel who were one of two or less of their particular service rank or were only members of a unit who lost their lives. Every life lost as a result of military service is a tragedy for the family and friends of the individual, and this book does not seek to imply that those listed here are any more deserving of memory than those not selected.

 



 

 

The Honolulu Memorial - An explorers guide

The Honolulu Memorial - An explorers guide

 

 

Published January 2016 and now available from Amazon.

 

This book is compiled from the records maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) of servicemen and women killed or missing since April 6th 1917.

 

The ABMC lists over 218,000 names of dead and missing service personnel. Of these just over 28,780 (13.2%) are to be found at the Honolulu Memorial which is located within the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

 

The book is divided into sections that contain details of the location within the site where service personnel who were one of five or less of their particular service rank to lose their lives are commemorated.

 

Every life lost as a result of military service is a tragedy for the family and friends of the individual, and this book does not seek to imply that those listed here are any more deserving of memory than those not selected.

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Martin Nicholson - Ticklerton Barn, Ticklerton, Church Stretton, Shropshire, UK

 

Email contact

 

Unique Commonwealth War Graves - a new 6 volume worldwide survey

Unique United Kingdom War Graves and Memorials Worldwide

 

 

Published December 2015 and now available from Amazon.

 

This book is compiled from the records maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of servicemen and women killed or missing since the start of the First World War in 1914.

 

The book is subdivided into three separate sections. The first contains details of the location of the grave or memorial that is the only one in a particular country. The second and third sections contain details of the locations of the graves or memorials naming United Kingdom servicemen or women who were the only representative of their rank or unit anywhere in the world to lose their lives.

 

The other books in this series, for the war graves of other Commonwealth nationalities, also include a section listing those cemeteries worldwide that include only one grave or name on a memorial of a serviceman or woman of that nationality. This has proved impractical for United Kingdom service personnel because of the huge number of such sites, both in the UK and worldwide. However this additional list is available via e-mail for any reader who requires it, on request to the author.

 

Every life lost as a result of military service is a tragedy for the family and friends of the individual, and this book does not seek to imply that those listed here are any more deserving of memory than those not selected.

 

The CWGC lists over 1,282,000 names of dead or missing United Kingdom service personnel who are remembered at locations worldwide. Of these 559,808 (43.7%) were Privates but only one was a Nursing Assistant.

 

In the same series

 

 

Unique Australian War Graves and Memorials Worldwide

 

 

Unique Canadian War Graves and Memorials Worldwide

 

Unique Indian War Graves and Memorials Worldwide

 

Unique New Zealand War Graves and Memorials Worldwide

  Unique South African War Graves and Memorials Worldwide

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Martin Nicholson - Ticklerton Barn, Ticklerton, Church Stretton, Shropshire

 

Email contact