I used to attend St Andrew’s Church on Ham Common, because that was tied up with our school because the local vicar used to come round the school quite often.  The lady who used to run the church outings was Mrs North and she lived in Lock Road, and we used to pay a weekly fee to her, whatever you could afford, and that would sort of build up a […]

I was very much involved with St Andrews and still am, there’s a small group of us there that used to .. Ernest Beard was the vicar there at that time and we used to spend quite a lot of time in the vicarage playing games like Monopoly and listening to records and so on.  He was very hospitable. It was informal and I became a server there with these […]

Did you attend church?  No, the children, because the local church, I think the choirboys were paid sixpence a week or something and so they heard about this from one of their friends who was a choir boy.  You’d both get a bit of pocket money for this so they all joined, they could all sing in tune, and at one point  I think the five of them constituted the […]

Yes, my grandfather was churchwarden over at St Andrews for many, many years and there was a youth club there, well I sang in the choir.  Let’s start from the age of 8 or 9, something like that I was in the church choir and when my voice broke I joined the Youth Club, well I was part of the Youth Club anyway, I suppose,  but I joined the Youth […]

That Mr Beard who used to be the Vicar at the Protestant Church, over the Common, St Andrews, he was the vicar there but for some reason as we were all Catholics he took to us and we used to go in the evening and play snooker.  He had a full-sized table on top of the table in his little bit, not in the church, in the vestry and it […]

Did you go to church at all, were your parents churchgoers?  Yes I did, specially in the younger part of my life when my mother thought she could exert some control and every Sunday I really resented it because every Sunday I went to church in the morning, St Andrews, walked over there with a group, attended the service and it wasn’t a children’s service, it was an adult service […]

Well, the vicar there, Mr. Beard, he was well-known, from what I recall, he was a very nice man.  I remember we all probably had a stint singing in the choir of a Sunday afternoon… don’t know quite why we did, but we all ended up doing it, I did it for a while. But Chris recalls playing snooker in the vestry?  Yeah, Chris really was… he knows the story […]

I was christened in St Andrew’s by Canon Beard who is commemorated in Beard Road in Ham. I didn’t go there to the Sunday School. Really, it was my husband who decided to leave Duke Street and we transferred to St Andrews.  Our children went to the Sunday school and my husband has been in the church choir for getting on for 40 years. He still is in the choir. […]

Mr Beard was the vicar at St Andrew’s Church at the time when we were at school, he was there for many years but we went to the Chapel across the road, the Evangelical Chapel that was run by a family and I quite liked it there.  You would sit in little groups and sing these little songs and have stories and that was my idea of it, yes so […]