Please refer to the description accompanying the next-earlier shot, showing Wolvercote bridge. This is the westernmost edge of the ancient Port Meadow, of Oxford, the jealously-protected (and rightly-so) charge of the Oxford Freemen (of whom I really ought to number myself, but cannot do so, for reasons to be explained in due course). In 1948 on 12th August, and indeed for the whole of that summer, and many a subsequent and some preceding (WWII-permitting) this very scene was absolutely alive with children and young people enjoying the river’s facilities. Simple pleasures have been superseded by others, which now keep them indoors, I suppose. Well, well. Times change, but there was some merit in those days, but you can’t go back. This deserted scene (but for two swans) in 2009 shows the bases of the two huts out of which the ‘administration’ operated in those days, I suppose. I really remember only one, but we used the hut(s) hardly at all, with our fishing and bathing preoccupations! The picnic benches would have been very welcome in 1948, but were certainly not there.
And on the other side of Port Meadow, the eastern side, ran the railway line to Worcester, Banbury and the Midlands, from which the branch line to Fairford also forked-off at some point now forgotten by me. And ‘Castles’ and ‘Halls’ and other wonders of the former GWR (including the Fariford branch’s classic 0-6-0 pannier tanks) made their impressive way across that vast open grass-bound stage-set, with occasional whistles and always their characteristic ‘Great Western sound’, though not quite visible from the Wolvercote bathing place due to the Wolvercote houses getting in the way. But they were very much on view when we moved downstream to fish and bath from Port Meadow-proper, nearer to Godstow weir and lock. And litle did I know in those days of my youth (and not until family-history research revealed it to me somewhere around 2005) that our family had a real link with the great man of GWR history: no less than G.J. Churchward himself. Those engines embodied much of his work as GWR’s chief-engineer between 1902 and 1922, and he was ‘cousin-by-marriage' of my grandpa-William’s mother, Olive Emma Reed.