house in 1947 that I discovered that the roof had got shifted during one of these raids.


The practice had grown a lot and our fourth child was arriving, so we needed bigger premises. I bought 238 Corbets Tey Road from McGregor the builder for just £5,000. It was a big five bedroom house and it had been a school during the war. The front garden was paved and it was a lovely house; it is still there. From there on we stayed.


My Introduction to Rotary


I will now come on to Rotary because my great friends all through the war were Doctor and Mrs. Patterson, whom Jean had worked for as a dispenser before the war. They had been wonderful friends to Jean and me all through the war. Pat worked terribly hard and died young, in my view, because of all the work that he did at the time.


Anyway, I was with him one day when he asked me if I would like to go with him to a meeting at the Railway Hotel. He suggested that it would be very interesting, as he and others were trying to form a Rotary Club. “What is Rotary?”, I asked, as I didn’t know anything about it. “You soon will, when you have been a few times”, he replied. He added, by way of warning me, that there was one snag: there would only be sandwiches for lunch (we always had lunch in those days).


I went, and the first impression was that they were a lot older than I was. However, I knew quite a number of them because they were Upminster business friends and shopkeepers whom I had met during the previous few years, and they were a very friendly lot. We had our sandwiches and I quickly learned what Rotary was about and how it had been formed.


Hornchurch Rotary Club – How It Began


It appears it had started in 1944 when Romford and District got in touch with the Romford Club to cede part of their territory to form a Rotary Club in Upminster and Hornchurch. The Romford Club had meetings and they eventually agreed. They contacted the Rotary Extension Committee of London District 13 who then met with President Rees of Romford Rotary Club (the Manager of the Romford Waterworks) in his office. From then on they contacted Francis Turner, who was the Bank Manager at Lloyds, and


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