The Reepham Life 2024 Calendar image for June (below) shows Walter Ford (left) with his brother Richard and sister Dolly, possibly taken in the early 1950s after their father William’s death. The boy’s name is not known.

Walter (1905–1980) was the youngest child of William John Ford and his second wife Eliza Holt. With his brother and sister he ran Ford’s bakery in Reepham Market Place. He was a bellringer for 60 years and Reepham Tower Captain from 1944.

He is also remembered as a great handbell ringer. People who were children when he was an old man remember calling him “Buns” and he was an extra (a bellringer) in the 1971 film The Go-Between.

Above: Ford bakery van, probably photographed when it was new.

Walter’s father William came from Topsham in Devon and was born in 1863. He married his first wife Ellen Fuller Clarke in Portsea, Hampshire. Three of their four children were born there, but by 1894 when their fourth child Gladys was born they were resident in Reepham and running the bakery in the Market Place. Ellen came from Aylsham and her father, Alfred Fuller Clarke, ran a bakery in Red Lion Street and later in Cromer Hill.

So far there are no clues as to how William and Ellen, growing up in different parts of the country, could have met. Ellen died in 1896, two years after Gladys was born. William married his second wife Eliza the following year and had five more children.

The eldest child of the second marriage, Elsie Mary Ford, also poses a similar mystery. Her husband Isaac Gale came from Lyndhurst in Hampshire which is where Elsie and Isaac lived after being married in the Aylsham registration district in 1921.

By 1929 the house in Lyndhurst where they were living had been named Reepham House. They were still living there in 1939 but when they both died in the 1950s they were buried in Reepham with their address given as the Market Place.

Until a few years ago, Reepham House on Romsey Road, Lyndhurst, had been run as a hotel and B&B.

Janet Archer

The Reepham Archive is open to the public on the first Wednesday and Saturday of the month from 10 am – 12 noon (or by appointment), upstairs in the Bircham Centre, Market Place, Reepham.