Published 6 September 2001

I WAS interested to read that Meresborough Books, who publish the popular local history monthly magazine, “Bygone Kent,” have brought out an inexpensive index to its 20 volumes published since the first introductory issue, in October 1979, up until the December 1999 journal, that’s 241 issues. This must be a good buy for researchers at £2.50 plus 50p postage from the Rainham Bookshop, 17-25 Station Road, Rainham, Kent ME8 7RS. You can Email them on shop@rainhambookshop.co.uk
Loan shark
he began to count out the money, he would place a heavy automatic gun on the table.

Ivy, known to friends as 'Mossy,' used to tell her nephew: "He made me go real cold when he said: 'I will lend you the money Miss Scowen -but remember, if it is not paid on time you will get this,' - pulling out the big automatic weapon!"

Ivy said "We were glad to get out of that house I can tell you, but we paid it back before Xmas -never again will I borrow money!"

She had needed the loan after her 1940s Xmas Club money, around £150, was stolen.

His aunt, he said, used to sell a lot of secondhand clothes and during the 1940s sold some good suits and clothing to the soldiers at Shorncliffe Camp. She had a Christmas Club for customers and kept the club money in an old copper kettle under the stairs.
Burglar strikes

But one night a burglar got in and made off with the kettle and the cash.

The police arrived the next day and looked around for clues and asked Ivy if she kept any money on the premises. She told them she didn't as it was put in the bank in Cheriton High Street each night, but she didn't tell them about the Christmas Club money.

Ivy, pictured left, was in a panic as to where she could get a loan to pay it off.

But Ivy and her life-long friend Minnie Crawley, used to visit the George public house in Elham every Saturday night, where Ivy used to play the piano for a bit of pocket money.

While there one night she asked an acquaintance if she knew a money-lender and the friend gave her an address in Hythe.

The following Saturday Ivy and Min caught the
CHERITON - A rural looking scene about 80 years ago at the junction of Cheriton High Street and Risborough Lane, with a carthorse stopped for a drink at the fountain on the corner on the right. The charming old postcard was shown to me by Folkestone-born Peter Hooper, of Dover Road.
but finally sold it as she remarked: "It was getting too bloody heavy for me to play, so I sold it!

The pair lived in a bungalow at the corner of Park Road, Cheriton a few years before they both passed on. Ivy had a sister Edie who was also very well known in the town.

Derrick Lawson told me Ivy and Minnie had once gone mushrooming on the land of a former farmer named Hermitage and one morning were caught red-handed on his land.

The farmer told them to keep the mushrooms - but then had them taken to court for trespassing and they were both fined a shilling each (5p), something they often laughed about!
Derrick Lawson, of Lynwood, Folkestone, loves to talk about the "characters" who used to live in the town and was telling me recently of an aunt's run-in with a local money-lender 60 years ago.

This sinister character was described by his Aunt, Ivy Marian Scowen, as looking like Edward G. Robinson, often seen in old gangster films."

When the money lender spelt out his terms, as
bus to Hythe to see him. When they arrived at the house they were shown into a rather pokey office where they were told to wait - and that is how they met the Edward G Robinson character.

Ivy and Win both worked for Scotts the cleaners in Cheriton High Street, which is now a kebab shop. Ivy was manageress for many years and Minnie the "delivery boy" who took out customers' orders to them by bicycle.

"Minnie used to tell me in the 1930s how much Scotts paid her for delivering - 3shillings and sixpence {17.5p), quite a lot in those days.

A real character. Aunt Ivy was quite a pianist, says Derrick, and also played piano-accordion.
 

Wood pave the streets to dampen noise - plea M q/\ *4 FOLKESTONE was enjoying a bit of a boom, certainly in the Guildhall Street area, but would you believe it, the shopkeepers were complaining of the noise of traffic which, they said, made it difficult to hear what their customers were saying! It was all due to the street being used by a growing volume of horse-drawn and motor traffic, including the buses, charabancs, wagonettes, for which it had become a stopping place, and other motors, from Cheriton, Hythe and elsewhere. Shopkeepers had to shout at customers to make them hear and, said, the traders, what was needed was for the road ta be paved with wood to deaden the sound. That was a comment that would be repeated a good many times as time went by. A greengrocer’s horse had to be shot after bolting down Sandgate Road, Rendezvous Street and Dover Road. It broke a leg smashing through Congregational Chapel railings, in Its mad dash it knocked down and seriously injured a woman cyclist and ran over PC Weller who grabbed the reins but the cart went over him, Miraculously no bones were broken.

Concern grows because of too few hospital beds Qc4 FIFTY years ago there was concern* JL«/OJLjust as there is today, over hospital waiting lists and the number of bods available. And, in the first report of the South East Kent Hospital Management Committee, for the period 194&-S1 it was stressed that there was no room for complacency with the waiting lists so high. The hospitals then administered, with the number of beds provided in brackets, were Folkestone RVH (151), Ashford (137), Wlllesborough (147), Dover RVH (60), Buckland, Dover (199), St Mary’s, Etchinghiil (352), Hothfield (133.) The report told how severely Folkestone’s Royal ‘Vic’ was damaged by enemy action in the Second World War. Reconstruction: was still In progress but It was stated that the X-Ray department was totally inadr equate in 1951 for the hospital’s needs, so a new unit was being built with the most powerful and modern equipment. A new physiotherapy department had been created in the former Ash-Eton gymnasium. Hell, It seems, is quite an agreeable place - that is if you visit Hell, in Norway, from which welt known county historian Miss Ann Roper, MBE, sent a postcard, with a Hell postmark (popular with stamp collectors) to the Herald's writer “The Roamer" In 1951.

Honours for dock workers who saved French airman ■I Qrt/J DOCK gate men were honoured aboard the JL9««0 steamer Biarritz, in the harbour, for rescuing French airman M. Sayaret who came down in the sea off Copt Point rocks in August 1924. Pictured in the Herald wearing the Medaille d’Honneur de Sauvetage, were Frederick Barton, of London Place, Frederick Arthur Foad, of North Street and Walter Walker, of Cambridge Terrace. Martello Tower No. 3, adjoining tennis courts at East Cliff, used the previous summer by the Council as a “tea house," was struck by lightning causing a large section of the outer layer of brickwork below a window to collapse and fall. The Herald published a list of 174 prizes worth £1,200 for a tombola organised by Folkestone charity group, the Brotherhood of Cheerful Sparrows, a fund raising effort for Royal Victoria Hospital funds. Events included a massive hospital fete spread over two days, for which a “canvas city” was erected on the West Leas sports ground, and a Children's Carnival. The top prize was a new Morris Oxford saloon given by Maltby’s Motors the local coach-builders and Morris agents. The: following week the Herald published the list again with names of the winners, occupying several columns of the paper. The previous year the fete made nearly £6,000.

Go for jobs and homes-not hotels urges trader of Q^/JA PROMINENT local citizen was protesting JmZf IO that the town’s amenities should not be judged on the number of day trippers it could attract, but on the quality of life of its residents. It was time, he said, that Shepway Council woke up to the fact that the tourist trade was dying. The town needed new homes, not hotels, he claimed, and should strive to attract light industry and commerce to boost the economy of the district. He said the “upmarket” crowd they used to cater for now preferred the Cote d’Azur. And he was very scathing about amusement arcades and souvenir shops "which were scarcely an amenity for residents." His comments appeared in a local parish magazine called "Rendezvous." The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway was out of the red for the first time in four years following the decision to “go public” and offer people a chance to buy shares in the business. Not only conkers but a memento of a Second World War collision of two Typhoons over the district, were recovered when local aviation enthusiast Leonard Green took his saw to a horse chestnut tree at Denton. He found an oxygen cylinder, from one of the planes, that had had been wedged among the branches for 30 years. It afterwards went on show in the Brenzett Aeronautical Museum. In a precautionary move against the risk of rabies, a ban was placed on dogs at the harbour.