Shirley
Our family moved to Kingston during the war when our home and dad’s business were bombed out in London.
When I was 21, I started work at the Hawker aircraft factory in Ham in 1955. It was a huge site which is now all houses and playing fields for the Hawker YMCA. But back then they built thousands of aircraft. It’s where I met my husband Tony. He was an engineer who was working on the development of a new aircraft called the Harrier Jump Jet. Its code name then was the 1127.
I worked in the testing facility, and I had to check metal samples from the Harrier for strength using a huge ‘denison’ machine. I had to draw graphs using a slide rule and micrometer to record the measurements. - quite funny really, as I was bad at maths at school. It was a really interesting job, and well paid - we worked long hours but you knew you were working on something which was really important.
Tony and others that worked on the aircraft were taken to Dunsfold airfield for the Harrier’s maiden flight and it bowed to them as it hovered in the air. There wasn’t a dry eye.
After we got married, Tony and I moved to Teddington in 1957.We eventually bought a lovely house, but it needed quite a bit of work doing to it, we moved there in 1963 when our daughter Sarah was 6. I’ve lived here ever since. The house was built on land once owned by the author R D Blackmore - who wrote the novel Lorna Doone.
