In these days of helicopters I wonder if transferring sailors from ship to ship still carries on in the Royal Navy? In the old days the man would be secured in a bosun’s chair attached to a cable slung between ships.
Traffic had to be diverted and London train services stopped short at Portsmouth & Southsea station while a new railway bridge was swung into position over Anglesea Road.
As promised, here’s another scene from Gosport and a different view along High Street. On the right is the Old Northumberland public house with the Gosport camera shop next door.
Of all the remembrance services that took place during the past week perhaps one of the most poignant was the one that took place in the Portsmouth Room at the Guildhall last Friday beginning at 11am with two minutes’ silence.
At the bottom of this photograph is what remains of Portsmouth’s old General Post Office with its sorting office along Stanhope Road. This office closed in 1977 when the new modernised building opened in Slindon Street which you can see in the top left of the picture.
Sailors being drafted abroad these days usually fly but in 1936 Ernest Fox was sent by sea from Portsmouth to China to serve in the river gunboat HMS Ladybird.
One of the Roman Catholic Church’s leading administrators – Cardinal Maurice Roy, Archbishop of Quebec – made a nostalgic whistle-stop tour to the Portsmouth area to revisit wartime haunts.
Up and coming artist Neil Marshall has produced another marvellous portrait of Portsmouth in time for the Christmas market. It is of the Hard, Portsea, on a crisp night in 1936.
