The Nosepaper

SHOP TALK: NEWGATE STREET

Do you remember what shops used to be along Newgate Street? Do you remember Grandma's Pantry? Greenwoods Butchers? The wet fish shop? The dairy? Alan Hiller will be showing photographs of past and present shops in Newgate Street and hopes to gather more information on what used to be at each address.Come along if you are interested in Walton's History or if you have memories that can help him fill in the gaps.

We are collecting stories of people talking about Walton shops and shop owners from the recent and distant past. We will be recording tales for our Walton Talks YouTube Channel. Get in touch if you have a story to tell.

Kathleen Garnham: Walton’s female golf champion.

There was a Golf Course on the Naze in the period up to the outbreak of World War 2. The Links Golf Course was built on The Naze north of the iconic Naze Tower, and designed by one of the country’s leading golf designers: the 18-hole course was created by James Braid a five-times Open champion who created over 20 courses around Britain. The Naze golf club was officially inaugurated in 1928. Local newspapers reported in January 1925 that 120 acres of land had been purchased at the end of the Naze for a golf course.

The Links Golf Course was the home base of a World class Internationally competitive female golfer- Kathleen Garnham. In the 1920s Kathleen Garnham was a World Champion Golfer at a time when few women played the game or were even allowed in male-dominated golf clubs. Local writer Steven Walker has been researching the Links golf course and unearthing the story of Walton's forgotten golf champion.

Walton Talks

Remembering the 1953 North Sea Floods.

Jean Halls
I was 16 and I worked in Clacton, and I’d come home on the last bus. I lived in Churchfield Road, walking down Churchfield Road I could see water coming up. So, I got home and woke my parents up and we had to move upstairs and get as much furniture up as we could as it was going upstairs, it was very bad. It was about half eleven. It was coming from the Mill Lane end, from Titchmarsh’s, and it was coming up there from the backwaters. We lived on the back of the street and it was going into the houses and for years afterwards you could always smell salt water.

My husband was in the lifeboat crew then, and he always said that people now would never believe it, him and Jonas Oxley the coxswain took a rowing boat up to the church, launched it, rowed down Kirby Road, and took the people, Mr and Mrs Thornley that lived at a bungalow on Kirby Road, Bridge Cottage, by the carpark, they were sitting on the table and they took them out the window and rowed them up to the church.

You just couldn’t believe it, no one would ever believe it.

Mill Lane. Image from Putnams Archive. Taken on 1st February 1953.

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Walton Talks

Malcolm Hutchings "Hutch" takes his first wildfowl and describes creeping up on birds.

Hutch
'You hear the redshanks piping away, and this particular day I had been in the back of Marsh House. Early morning, low water. Lying there in the punt, waiting for one to come up. It’s deadly quiet. I set myself onto the boat, into this creek, straight. I had the sun behind me.I had wind behind me, what breeze there was, was behind me. And I’m waiting for the tide to take me into the creek slowly. And I lay there, hand over the side of the boat, holding her still, keeping her square. Didn’t know if there were any birds in there, although I approached It as though there was.'

Walton Talks

Walton Talks is a local YouTube channel. We are aiming to record and publish Walton folk talking about their lives. If you have a story to share, or you would like to be involved with the recordings, get in touch. Watch more Walton Talks on YouTube

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Just Another Day: The Seaside

‘Just Another Day: The Seaside’ was filmed in Walton-on-the-Naze and reflected a typical day in Walton in the 1980s. The Radio Times entry from April 1983 sets the scene: ‘It begins early in the morning when Eileen Fowler, the 'First Lady of Keep Fit' can be found on the beach, still practising what she started preaching back in the 50s. She-first visited there as a child in 1921 and returned to retire. We meet the Punch and Judy man, the family who run a Wild West show at the back of the car park and Brian and Charlie, resident entertainers, who love doing the season "because we get just as much enjoyment here as we would at the Palladium or Las Vegas”.

Ursula Bloom

Ursula Bloom was a novelist, biographer and journalist. She wrote over 560 books, which earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for many years as the world’s most prolific female writer. She was born in Springfield, Essex in 1892 and moved to Walton-on-the- Naze during the winter of 1914 living in Saville Street with her mother during the early years of WW1. She married her first husband in 1916 and moved to Frinton until his early death in 1918. Now on her own, she decided to earn a living as a writer and her first novel was published in 1924.