Kilchoan Holidays

In 1992 Elizabeth attended a dinner at Magdalen College at which she met a fellow Cambridge student who was due to do her teaching practice at The Plume school and was looking for lodgings in Maldon. On the strength of what we earned from Susan staying with us, our 1993 summer holiday was the most ambitious holiday yet, the location - a small village on the west coast of Scotland called Kilchoan - chosen by David. Although Katy had left home we invited everyone and, somewhat to our surprise, the whole family came.

We took a croft house - Mull View, above - for a week and travelled up by train to Inverness, where we hired a Discovery to take us to Kilchoan. The weather was surprisingly good for August, though....

....as happens on the west coast, there were a few duller days - this is the beach near Mingary Castle.

This holiday changed the course of our lives for we fell in love with Ardnamurchan and, as a result, came back....

....as often as we possibly could, even buying a car, a lovely white Volvo 240 automatic estate, that enabled us to do the run north from Essex in just under 12 hours.

Lizzie was still based at home so she sometimes came up with us, David came during his holidays, and we also took a cottage on two occasions with our long-time friends, the Hizzards.

This is beach cricket at Sanna with David, Rachael and the Hizzards. By this time we were seriously thinking of moving up to the west coast. Then, on one of our visits to Sanna, I fell into conversation with a woman who told us that the shop in Kilchoan was for sale. We took a look at it but found it in very poor condition so decided not to show any further interest, looking instead at a number of other businesses locally, none of which suited us.

The Summers of 1992 - 1994

My children will have to correct me if I have some of my dates wrong but it seems to me that a great deal happened in the summers of 1992-4. For a start, Elizabeth graduated from Cambridge having read architecture at Sidney Sussex - the picture shows her at the graduation ceremony which took place in beautiful weather.

Katy took her A levels in 1992 and, although she had the option of going up to university, chose to go into industry, accepting a job at the French chemical company Rhone-Poulenc. Picture shows her in 1994.

David, who had followed Katy to our local comprehensive, The Plume, won an assisted place at Felsted, a public school in north Essex.

Rachael continued to demonstrate how a modern young lady dressed both formally and....

....informally.

The headmaster at The Plume had asked me to introduce geology at 'A' level so at the end of the 1993 summer holidays Gill and I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in Swanage while I collected fossils for the new geology collection.

1992

Many of the relatively few pictures we have from the early 1990s don't have dates on them but I think this is 1992. It shows the extended family in the conservatory at Lodge Road, with my mother at left, Gill's mother Bea next to her, and Gill's father Don at the back on the right, with Lizzie's Tom at the back.

Rachael was already being trained to play soccer and cricket, with David her coach. While she never pursued cricket, she continued to play football for many years, and I'm quite sure that David's encouragement set her on the road to the enjoyment she still has of all kinds of sports.

A Day at the Races

Elizabeth's chosen sport while she was an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex college in Cambridge was rowing, so in the summer of 1991 we drove up to watch her ladies eight participate in the annual 'bumps'. It was a miserable day with rain hammering down so the first thing we had to do was buy waterproofs - wax coats which we finally disposed of in 2017.

The idea of the 'bumps' seems to be that the boat behind you has to try to catch you up and touch your boat. Despite the weather it was all taken very seriously but great fun to watch.

However, for some people it seemed that the rowing wasn't the highlight of the day.

The Family 1990

This post is little more than an excuse to put up a few pictures of the family in 1990. By this time Lizzie was at Cambridge, Katy at The Plume, David at All Saints Primary, and we'd just put Rachael down for Eton. Katy looks as if she's recovering from a heavy night but....

 ....this is a lovely picture of our three girls in the new conservatory.

Rachael is seen here with her two grandmothers, my mother Helen on the left and Gill's mother Bea on the right, while Gill seems to have dyed her hair a rather startling copper colour.

While this is a happy picture of me with Rachael it's here to remind me of the amount of work we put in to the back garden. As well as the flowers we had a thriving vegetable garden with a small greenhouse - just visible at right - which was packed full of tomatoes.

Lodge Road was a very happy house but, with so many responsibilities, little wonder my hair was turning grey.

Rachael

This is the first picture of Rachael Louise, taken in St Peter's, a pleasant little cottage hospital in Maldon just a short walk from our house, which had a maternity unit.

However, Rachael wasn't born there. She arrived on All Hallow's Eve 1989 in Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, this because Gill was an 'old mum' so, when Rachael's arrival was imminent, she was taken in an ambulance to Broomfield. At the time we didn't have a car - Gill had sold the Sunflower van to a gypsy and had bought a Ford Escort estate but we hadn't picked it up - so I had to borrow the Caddicks, our next-door neighbour's VW beetle to be at the birth.

Conditions in the maternity unit at Broomfield were almost as bad as at Rochford Hospital where David was born, so it was good to get the two to St Peter's and then, when they were ready, home, where....

....Rachael far preferred to be.

Fortunately she cheered up a bit in the company of her two sisters who, along with David, were very good with her. In fact, I think that Rachael had the best early childhood of all our children because she had older siblings of various ages who helped look after her and, in particular, played with her.

Baby technology had moved on so Rachael also benefitted from all sorts of modern machines including this aluminium-framed back-pack which meant she could come on walks with us, for example down the muddy paths to Beeleigh.

Rachael was, like all her siblings, an exceptionally happy baby who was a joy to have around - she's pictured here in the new conservatory. Unlike the others, however, there are far more photos of her as camera technology had also moved on.

Stainers & Rogers Celebrate

Some events - or perhaps it was the weather - seemed to cause my camera to come out and get some serious exercise. In this case it was both, a beautiful summer's day in 1989 and two anniversaries, Gill's sister Pauline and her husband Gareth's 25th wedding anniversary and....

....Gill's parents Bea and Don's golden wedding anniversary.

The celebration took place in the garden of Pauline and Gareth's house at Great Easton near Great Dunmow, Essex.

Their four children, from left Dickon, Giselle, Ben and Simon, were there, as were....

....our three, the two girls dressed in their best. Not sure about David.

1989

At some point in 1989, perhaps Easter, Gill, David and I travelled up to the Welsh borders to stay with our old friends Tony and Hilary Hizzard and their daughter Catherine. We always loved staying with them - at this time they were living at Little Hereford - but it also gave us the chance to spend time in a truly beautiful part of England. 

Perhaps someone can correct me but I think this day trip was to the Wrekin in Shropshire.

We had already reorganised the kitchen and re-lain the roof, so the construction of a conservatory on the back of the house was our third improvement to 4 Lodge Road, and....

....it was a huge success. Not only did it provide a warm place in the winter months - we found we could sit in it very comfortably on a sunny day in January - but it also helped to insulate the sitting room. This photo also illustrates a clash between David and my hobbies. He is busy wrecking the back garden by playing football in it, a practice which threatened my bird feeders.

This is in the back garden and is another example of how Katy seems to have escaped from family groupings but it was taken on the same day as....

....this picture, which introduces a slight expansion to the family.

Richard's Family Visits

In August 1988 my brother Richard and his family came across from Australia for a visit. While they were in Maldon my mother invited Samantha, Richard's daughter by his first marriage, over for the day so this picture shows all the cousins along with Stefan, in red, Nancy's son by her first marriage.

My mother was very keen that, while they were here, the younger children should be christened, so Gypsy, Romney and David were christened by Canon Dunlop in All Saints church.

Tim and Liza Donaldson (at right) were David's godparents, and Katy's exchange, Kristel, was also at the ceremony.

By this time my father was very frail and this may have been one of the reasons why Richard came across.

We didn't see Gypsy again until 2006 when, after attending David's wedding in Edmonton, we drove to see my brother and Nancy in Seattle, and we haven't seen Romney since.

The Hurricane

By 1987 we were able to afford to have the roof of our house felted, which involved lifting all the heavy 11" clay tiles, removing the mortar between them, laying felt, and replacing the tiles. The job was done by one rather old man and he had just removed most of the tiles and stacked them in rather precarious-looking piles on the roof when....

....the southeast of England was hit by the infamous Great Storm of the night of 15th October, the one that weather forecaster Michael Fish said wouldn't happen. We lay in bed listening to objects sliding off the roof and had visions of all our tiles destroyed but what we heard were the bits of mortar on the move - not one tile was lost.

The wind was still gusting in the morning when we rose to survey the wreckage but nothing deterred Gill from....

....the day's normal routines.

The worst damage was to the local trees. Many came down all over Maldon, several in the grounds of The Plume, which meant the school was closed for three days while the wreckage was removed. Roofs, including that of my parents' house, lost slates and tiles, and many fence panels were destroyed - one is visible missing beyond Gill in this photograph.

Dorset Holiday

In the summer of 1987 we had a holiday in Dorset, taking a caravan at Eype near Bridport. We drove down in the Sunflower van with....

....Lizzie and David rattling around on cushions in the back, Katy being on a water sports holiday in the south of France.

I knew this part of Dorset from my geology days as a spectacular stretch of coastline. It is formed of Jurassic rocks, the hill in the middle distance, Golden Cap, being Jurassic oolites.

We walked miles along the coast paths....

....and sat in the sunshine enjoying super views, with remarkably few other people around.

It must have been exceptionally hot as it takes a lot to get me into a British sea. However, we did spend a fair amount of time looking for fossils, particularly ammonites, along the beach, some of which I still have.