大象传媒

My name's Kathleen Harding and I married Clifford Ernest Organ on April 15th 1944. He was in an office in the army in Essex, I was in the Timber Corps (Land Army)(we were called Lumber Jills and used to cut pit props and peel telegraph poles and load them onto railway trucks) in Shirley Hills, Surrey. At night we would play darts with the lads from the sawmills, some of them had lost fingers at the mill! To get married, I went to Westminster to get a special licence dressed in hobnail boots, dungarees & land army overcoat, because Clifford was about to go overseas (he landed on D-day). We had 48 hours leave, I lived in Wimbledon, he lived in Bristol (we'd met in suffolk, in the land army) so we stayed in Peabody buildings in Clerkenwell Road at a friend's house in London. On the morning of the wedding, my brother came home from Bovington Camp just as we were leaving to go on the underground, we ate sandwiches on the train going to the wedding and my husband's family came to the church (St James's, Clerkenwell Rd) from Woolwich. There were nine of us at the wedding, and after my father said, you'd better feed them, there ws no cafes open so we walked from Clerkenwell Road to Lyons Corner House at tottenham court rd, huge room, about 2000 people, my father asked the manager if he could find a corner for us, he did. as i walked in my suit and hat, it had been raining, they played, here comes the bride and my sister-in-law had brought a wedding cake up in a hatbox from Bristol and my father asked the manager if he could find us a plate. Instead of a plate he brought a silver salver as big as a card table to put this 7 inch cake on and a knife about 2 ft long. After that we spent a night in a hotel in the Haymarket. He was holding my hotel in the hotel and the manager came up and said, please don't do that! Clifford's family ran Pets Paradise on Redcliffe Hill for 125 years and until it was redeveloped, it was still there. (Kathleen sent her Timber Girls book and other records to be used in a university thesis, it's now held in Reading University Archives).

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