Molesey Matters

Forget the Christmas turkey or ham. For many Japanese, traditional Christmas dinner is Kentucky Fried Chicken. Due to a combination of tiny Japanese ovens and a clever marketing campaign convincing locals that fried chicken is a traditional American Yuletide feast, reservations must be made to eat at a KFC on Christmas Day.

The real development of West Molesey only really began in the third decade of the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it did include, however, many nationally known characters amongst its inhabitants.

Elizabeth and Philip were distant cousins, and first met at a wedding! They were both in attendance at another royal wedding – Philip’s cousin, Princess Marina of Greece to The Duke of Kent, who was an uncle of the then Princess Elizabeth, in 1934.

“The idea of a social club for returning men and women of the Forces after the Second World War, as well as ex-members of Molesey Youth Club and any other young person over the age of 18, was originally conceived by Terry Curtis, Ivor Pooley, Bill Dawson-Marsh and Mr.

Edward Jesse (1780-1868) was a writer and naturalist. He became clerk in a government office in 1798, and for a time was secretary to Lord Dartmouth, when president of the Board of Control.

The London and South-Western Railway (L&SWR) opened its line to Hampton Court in 1849, as a branch of the main line from Nine Elms to Woking. For some ten or eleven years previously passengers from Molesey wishing to travel to London had to first make their way to Surbiton Station (now Kingston Station).

The idea of summer time or daylight-saving time was first suggested in a whimsical article by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, But it arrived in the UK after Coldplay singer Chris Martin’s great-great-grandfather, a builder called William Willett, thought it was a good idea too.

On 30th Oct 1942 Royal Navy Officer, Lt. Tony Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier and canteen assistant Tommy Brown from HMS Petard boarded the German U Boat, U-559, retrieving material which would lead to the decryption of the German Enigma code.

Our lock was first proposed in 1802 because of the shallows upstream but nothing came of the suggestion. During droughts, the Thames was liable to become too shallow for river craft to pass through. The heavily laden barges were held up, sometimes for weeks at a time while the bargemen waited for the weather to turn.

In the 1790s, the Board of Agriculture commissioned two qualified surveyors, Thomas Baird (1793) and John Middleton (1797) to report on the state of agriculture in Middlesex.

The title is a bit cheeky. This is not a piece about flooding (we will follow up on this aspect of dredging at a later stage.). But it is indeed about the value and benefit of dredging it.

They say our school days are the happiest days of our lives. For most of us, it’s not as simple as that. We remember the headteacher we feared and the teacher we adored, the lifelong friends we made and the bullies we despised, the subjects we loved and those we hated…

The name of the island is derived from Platt of Molesey who used it for growing withers. Until the 1880s osiers were grown on the eyot, a species of willow used for basket-making but it was also used for dumping spoil from excavation of the Stain Hill Reservoirs, creating the large hill on the island’s western end.

Seal numbers in the Greater Thames Estuary have increased almost back to their natural rates thanks to a conservation project, after being hunted for fur and meat.