This booklet is an edited transcription of a series of reminiscences handwritten by Albert William Moore (universally known as Bert) in 1993, as a retirement gift for his GP, Dr Boddington. The original is a blue A5 hard-backed notebook, filed as CC28/DD53 in the Bromyard & District Local History Society archives. Also included is a story from another handwritten booklet, given to his daughter Jennifer shortly before he died, and tantalisingly left unfinished.Bert Moore was born in 1914, the oldest child of Alfred and Alice, who lived on Bromyard Downs. Alfred was an Estate Worker for William Theodore Barneby, at Saltmarshe Castle. They had three younger children, Alfred George (Alf), Arthur Victor (Vic), and a daughter, Rosamund Alice.
Hugh Farey, of the BDLHS, who edited and transcribed the reminiscences tells us:
Although Bert married Elsie in 1941, and had a daughter, Jennifer, in 1943, they do not feature in his reminiscences, which concentrate very much on his childhood on the Downs. They are written in a very fair hand, with no crossings-out or amendments, so seem to be copied from other sources. However, they are chronologically confused, as if jotted down more or less as they occurred to him, sometimes covering periods of time and at others referring to specific events.
For this publication, I have rearranged them into roughly chronological order.
Some minor alteration to the text has been made. Bert’s spelling was excellent and his grammar mostly reasonable (although he frequently uses “was” for “were”), but he punctuates almost every phrase, let alone sentence, with a full stop or semi-colon, somewhat at random. My version is a best guess at what he was aiming at!
Published in 2025