SNOPPER`S CLAIMS TO FAME - PART ONE

For the first in what may prove to be a limited series, I want to take you back quite a few years - to the development of the Hovercraft and to a cottage by the sea.

When my father returned home in 1945 from spending five years in a German Prisoner of War camp, he got a job with the then BOAC, later to become British Airways. At the time, BOAC ran a fleet of flying boats and they had their maintenance base at Hythe on the western shore of Southampton Water.

The job had a cottage which went with it - one of a pair of semi-detached cottages named Grove Cottages, originally built in 1735. In the interests of brevity, I will not bore you with the quaintness of the cottage layout, but it did have a rear garden which reached down to the sea wall, where the waves of the twice-a-day Solent tides would lap in a language all their own. Sadly, the BOAC flying boat service was withdrawn in the early 1950s and with it went my father`s job and with it went our cottage.

Circumstances forced us to move from that `village by the sea` and start life elsewhere.....but it`s what happened to the cottage that gives rise to this particular `claim to fame.` Some time after we left, the site was taken over, the cottages were demolished and the site was used to construct the test tanks for Sir Christopher Cockerill`s development of his hovercraft invention. The development work was, of course, highly successful and led to the growth and spread of the hovercraft industry world-wide.

Some years later, the site of Grove Cottages was redeveloped once more, this time by the construction of a small, rather pleasant residential development, which was quite properly named Sir Christopher Court. Due to an odd configuration of the layout and, I suspect, the land ownership, not all of the site of our old back garden was included in the housing development and it is still possible to walk through a little public park, where there is a memorial to Sir Christopher, down to the same sea wall and look out across Southampton Water to the Weston shore (see photo at top and click on photo for enlarged image to read the inscription on the memorial.)

The big difference for me is that whereas when I was a boy, spending hours gazing in fascination at the huge liners - Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, the Union Castle liners - as they eased their way towards Southampton Docks from behind the flying boat maintenance hangars, nowadays the liners are fewer in number, superceded by cruise liners and container ships heading for Millbrook Container Terminal, and the view is not one of maintenance hangars any more, but of yet more housing development which has taken place on the site of that maintenance base from all those years ago.