Views of Pinchbeck

Growing up in the village in the 1950s and 1960s, I traversed this road countless times. My father remembers the road being made up and surfaced round about the early 1920s. The boys in the village, including him, used to run behind the steam wagons delivering stone for the work and jump on for a free ride. (pre Health and Safety!) The first house in the photo was the home of my uncle Allen and family in the 40s and 50s. The row of white cottages next to it had been demolished and was his front garden, with a Nissen hut behind. The single cottage next door with a steeply pitched roof belong to a Mrs Tansley.
In the area beyond, four semi detached houses were built in the 1930s and I remember the Bennet, Hayes, Marriott and Porter families living there. Mr Bennet was a dental mechanic and Ross Porter ran a motor cycle garage in Spalding and competed in the Manx TT. Beyond that you can just see the roof of two cottages, occupied by Billy Parkinson, a farm foreman, and his family, and brother and sister Bob and RoseEllen Dowse. The latter were quite old when I remember them. Behind was a small orchard of apple and other fruit trees, which my father bought in the mid 1960s from Tommy Holmes, who was a butcher and farmer. Part of his house and shop can just be seen on the extreme left of the photo, next to my uncle’s house.
Slightly right of centre is a large tree, a horse chestnut, which was one of a line of four which my grandfather planted in 1910 on acquiring our farm, which is to the left. I inherited the orchard in 2002 on my mother’s death, relinquishing it in 2024 as looking after it remotely from Scotland finally proved too difficult.