A view across Portsmouth Harbour which would not be possible today – Nostalgia

It isn’t, of course, but a view across the north of the harbour to Fountain Lake Jetty. On the left is what looks like a floating dock with a couple of frigates west of that. Between the two  in the distance are the cranes of the slipways where great ships were once built. On the right is part of the reserve fleet tied up alongside Whale Island.

In the foreground are rotted wooden hulks, perhaps the remains of a well-known past ship. This area has disappeared under what became the Continental Ferry Port.

 – Regular correspondent Eddy Amey sent me the photograph which he says was printed in 1978 to mark the golden anniversary of Tom Parker’s Fareham business. Unfortunately there is no copyright acknowledgement. What a wonderful show it must have made when the horse-drawn floats left the dairy. It must have cost the same as a milkman’s wages to feed each horse per week, plus blacksmith’s fees. There are 17 horses, floats and milkmen on show but there must have been reserve horses stabled. Tom Parker is at the bottom right.

I can remember a horse-drawn milk float in Wisborough Road, Southsea, when I was a boy but nothing like this. Can anyone date the picture?

 – On March 19 I published a photo of Portsmouth civic gentlemen walking the newly-opened Eastern Road. On that day there was an unveiling ceremony on Eastern Road railway bridge by Sir Denis Daley. The plaque, believed to have been bronze, was stolen soon after and never replaced. The recess in the bridgework can be seen to this day.

Sir Denis’s son, who sent me the photograph, says the bridge was opened quickly after the Second World War started because the only way in and out of the city by road had been at Portsbridge. If that vital link had been bombed, the city would have been crippled.

Sir Denis served the city continuously for five terms as lord mayor, 1939 to 1943 and again in 1950. 

 – Another picture from Colin Greetham in which we see children from Harting Sunday School enjoying Christmas lunch.

Many featured in the Battersea evacuees’ photograph I published yesterday. Colin says the children’s parents visited their offspring and so liked  rural life they settled in the village after the war.

Indeed, his own father, a teacher who arrived with the children, later taught at Liss School and never returned to the capital.