Dear Mr Browning,
Thankyou for your letter. I am indeed interested in your book of Cowbridge House, and I enclose a cheque for a copy. I believe my Grandfather George Woodward, worked there for a short while before his retirement after the Malmesbury Railway, closed.
Certainly he had fountain pen engraved for me when I passed for Grammar School, in 1950, with my name.
My late husband Roy Clarke, trained there in the 1950s, having come down from the Shetland Isles, as an electronic engineer. Also our dear evacuee Mr Conrad, from Southsea, worked on Radar, during the war, when I was a child.
We were proud of Malmesbury's contribution to WWII, though we had no grudge against the German people. Indeed my parents counted German P.O.W.s, amongst their friends.
I have a vague memory of a party at the end of WWII, when I was 7. And again, at work, as a teenager when Miss Aylett, the Town's librarian obtained tickets for us both for a session of "Any Questions,".
I am afraid I remember little of the House. Only that we were told when to clap, possibly a board was held up! And that the compere was Freddie Grisewood.
It saddens me that so many Malmesbury buildings are to be demolished - Verona House,- surely my old Grammar School, Headmaster's house? The Grammar School itself went long ago. The Suffolk Arms,, where my cousin Sandra once worked as a barmaid and which I passed many times to my music lessons with Mrs. Adye,(at which I was hopeless! though I love to listen to music).
Just one other item in the Wilts and Glos. Standard last week was an item on your finding a heast on the wall of Cowbridge House. It was inscribed by Margaret Sutton, and her future husband. I was at Grammar School with the same Margaret? Left in 1954. I was a Woodward, then but doubt she remembers me - better things to do!
Yours sincerely,
Patricia Clarke. (P.A. Clarke)
