Blandford Memories

From Clive & Angela Bishop - 8th May 2008
We are back in Wimborne again after a lifetime in London (since 1987): visited my mother Dorothy at Whitecliffe House this afternoon, had no idea that Fr. Pedrick had actually died there.  My father George Bishop used to bring my two young sisters over to Blandford for rides on the model railway in Father's garden.  (Anne (61) is over here at the present from Australia en route to Quebec: Elizabeth Porter has met my youngest sister Liz (57) from Bryanston Village
And does anyone remember Lord Ventry and his choir?  He was a cousin of King Haakon and a Scout all his life and a friend of Lord  Baden-Powell.  Lord V often sang Compline for Benediction here at St. Catherine's and also at Blandford of course with all the servers and choirs from both parishes.
In the 60's we started to holiday at Place Manor, Cornwall, where we discovered that the lady of the manor, the Hon. Valencia Grant-Dalton was Lord Ventry's neice.  We met them at Mass at Our Lady Star of the Sea at St. Mawes.  The PP then was Jack Pack who had been at Poole in his young days, followed later by Canon Chapple who had married us at St. Bernadette's Ensbury Park in 1959.
My wife Angela's father was Arthur Lindsay Clegg MA, BCL, DPA, organist at St. Catherine's and Town Clerk of Bournemouth.
We often wonder what became of Fr. Pedrick's railway. 
Sorry its all Wimborne history overlapping Blandford's.