My appeal of a few weeks ago for more personal memories of working or holidaying on the Broads has already had some positive responses. A couple of people have contacted me to say that they are going to try to write something down for me and earlier this week I received a very lovely account of a sailing holiday taken by two young lads in 1954.
As I was working on a collection of photographs from the 1950s this week I decided that it would be nice to get the new holiday memories on at the same time. As there were no accompanying photographs with the tale, it was a fairly straightforward process to get it laid out in the web design software I use and it only took a couple of hours of my time at most. “Memories of my First Broads Holiday in 1954” was submitted by Alan Clarke and is an account of his week on the yacht Bright which was hired from J.Loynes & Sons Ltd. of Wroxham. Accompanied by his school friend Bernard Burns, the pair (who were huge Arthur Ransome fans) set out on their own “Coot Club” adventure having had no previous experience of sailing. It is a lovely addition to the archive and I look forward to receiving more personal recollections of Broadland holidays. As I mentioned in that previous post, I would also dearly love to have some memories from people who actually lived and worked on the Broads too.
Along with uploading Alan’s memories this morning, the Aylott family collection of photos of holidays taken on the Broads during the 1950s were also added to the website. I still have photographs from the 1960s, 70s and 80s to work on over the coming months from the Aylott family, along with several other collections of images from the same eras which have been submitted over the last year. Last week I also updated the article on the history of the pleasure wherry Dragon after recieving some memories of her from the early 60s and a new photograph from Vaughan Ashby. I’m now continuing to work on the set of 1936 photographs, from which I posted a couple of sneak previews a while ago – those should hopefully be uploaded to the website next week. I will then be moving on to the 1960s!
Work on rebuilding my computer is progressing well and I hope to have it back soon. It’s been a little bit awkward having to work on two computers over the last month, collecting website emails on my netbook but working on the website on the loaned PC, but hopefully I have managed to keep up! I am so grateful to have been able to continue uploading new additions to the main website but it will be nice to have everything back on one computer again. Unfortunately, it will result in a brief hiatus where the website is concerned whilst I get everything loaded back on and up and running again, but I’ll try to get it done as quickly as I can.
