Staunton Notebook – March 2018

Call for the Experts Uncle Fred was a gruff Yorkshireman, with a healthy dislike for ’experts’. He used to say ‘X is an unknown factor, and ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure’.  A skilled welder, he worked mainly in the shipyards, during and after the Second World War....

Staunton Notebook- February 2018

ROAD REPAIRS There are approximately three miles of drives leading into Staunton Harold, and all but a short section fall to be maintained by the Staunton Estate.  The two main drives by which traffic comes to us are known as the Coach Road and the Heathend Drive....

Staunton Notebook – January 2018

Then and Now  Many of the matters which concern us today are the problems of affluence; – obesity, road congestion, plastic disposal.  How different to how things were when I was growing up, at the end of the Second World War. There were no plastics, of the sort...

Staunton Notebook – December 2017

The Naming of Parts  If you had met Leonard Cheshire, as I did a couple of times, you wouldn’t suspect his extraordinary achievements.  Quiet and unassuming, he led by example.  Awarded a VC for his work as a bomber pilot at the end of the war against  Germany, he was...

Staunton Notebook – November 2017

We were on Loughborough station last week when the through train to London roared past.  It always strikes me as ill-mannered, like a drunken lout barging through a bus queue.  Those Edwardian glass canopies over our heads speak on a gentler time. The week before...

Staunton Notebook – Sept 2017

Sometime back in the 1960s the government dreamt up a scheme to pay farmers to plant trees on their land.  Thousands of trees, mainly conifers, were planted and then forgotten.  Twenty five years on they survived as spindly poles with a tuft of green on top, useless...