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Becoming a rock chick #18

...r another blog!  The guinea pigs were safely put back into their hutch -  not long after this we discovered that one of them was expecting babies!  Not sure what happened in the Library but they were both supposed to be girls when we bought them! After a couple of months at college I met a boy called Kev.  He was in a band and his chat up line was that they needed a singer and he was pretty sure he could get me an audition (it must have worked as we’re still together all these years later!). I agreed, even though I’d done very little singing, and I went along to their rehearsal room one afternoon and got the job.  So now I was fronting a rock band –...

Hoar Cross Hall - Life below stairs #20

...HOAR CROSS HALL – LIFE BELOW STAIRS:       This week I’ve done a history blog about the servants who lived at the Hall from the 1870s to the 1950s when the Hall became empty.  They were an essential part of keeping a big house running but were often not appreciated by the aristocracy as they went about their day to day duties. The life of a servant in Victorian times was a hard one.  They had to rise at 5am to clean and light all the fires and dust and polish the floors, then do a day’s work, often not getting to bed much before midnight.  No wonder they didn’t live to a great age in those days!  By the end of the 19th century there were nearly...

Midnight pool parties #22

...previous blogs that my brothers and I would walk along the window ledges when we were children (with perhaps smaller feet) but this was a fully grown man who’d had a few drinks and thought it was hilarious to stand outside the window jigging up and down at us!  We all ran to the window and tried to entice him in without scaring him too much – he had no idea that we were 3 floors up and there was a 30 foot drop to the dry moat below!  He finally came in and promptly passed out when he saw how high up we were!  What a carry on! Don’t miss next week’s blog:  Panto pranks If you would like to follow my story from the beginning, click here and please f...

The War Years and Beyond #38

...rought my blog full circle and if you would like to read it from the beginning (with new added stories, since remembered) please click here and feel free to share with your friends. I will also be writing a few more history blogs so keep a look out for those if that’s what grabs your interest plus I will be putting up more photos spanning the many decades at the Hall from the Victorian era right through to our time there in the seventies!  Enjoy!...

Ghostbusters! #8

...GHOSTBUSTERS!       People were always coming to Hoar Cross Hall to either hire the place or to have a look around.  In 1973, because of all the media interest in our ghosts, we had a couple of professional ghost hunters asking to stay over one night to try and find the source of the noises.  They brought cases full of recording equipment and set it all up in one of the attic rooms.  Rather them than me I thought!  Then I had a brilliant idea and went off to tell my brother Gavin all about it.  As mentioned in my first blog the attic and basement had a row of bells which the family used to summon the servants.  Before the three men arrived we spent all...

Motor Racing Days #9

...MOTOR RACING DAYS:     Although my blogs are about living at Hoar Cross Hall, I would just like to give a bit of background about my dad’s racing career in the years leading up to moving to the Hall as this will set the scene for later instalments of my story. As mentioned in my first blog my dad used to be a racing driver but he actually started off racing motor cycles in the 1930s.   Because of this he became a despatch rider during the Second World War and spent a lot of time in North Africa.  After the war he started racing motor bikes at nearby Donington Park and he raced there up to the beginning of the 1950s.  After that he moved onto cars and d...