This story was told to me by my Uncle Geoff Cooper, one of a series from my family’s local building and decorating firm W.J.Cooper & Son. “Just after the war when my Dad, your Granddad, was still running the firm, Harold Morris and I had to go down to Manor […]
Colin Cooper
By 1930, when my Dad Frederick Cooper was about 19 years old, he had become somewhat proficient in raking out and re-pointing brickwork. He was asked by Mr Brutton, a local bicycle shop owner in Tunbridge Road, to rake out and re-point three houses that he owned somewhere else in […]
Between 1900 and the 1950s our family of Coopers lived at 107 Milton Street, in a small Victorian terraced house in the seaside town of Southend-on-Sea. It was a dull day in the autumn of 1936 and my grandfather William John Cooper had just come into the back parlour. My […]
My grandfather Frederick Cooper told me the following story about his time working for our local family firm of builders and decorators, W.J. Cooper & Son. In the late 1930s, Geoff and I had to take out an old kitchen range and replace the range with a fireplace in Rebels […]
My father Frederick John Cooper, having just obtained his driving licence, purchased a secondhand, black Austin Seven saloon car. He must have been about 21 at the time. Luckily the Austin just passed through the gate at the rear of 107 Milton Street. Grandfather came out of the back door […]
In 1962 W.J. Cooper & Son, a local building and decorating firm run by my father Fred and his uncles Geoff, Fred and Bill, was given a building contract by Mr Lewis, an architect and the owner of an old cottage on the corner of West Street and North Road […]
My mechanical adventures from boyhood, when I was barely able to lift a spanner, to now when I can just about wield one. Let me start at the beginning of my mechanical adventures. Like most small boys I have always been interested in making and repairing things. I liked taking […]