Royal Navy veteran from King's funeral in 1952 | Nostalgia
Last Friday I published a photograph of the gun carriage crew at the funeral of King George VI outside St George’s Chapel, Windsor.I am glad to say I have heard from one of the surviving members of the crew.
Second from the right (with a small X marked above his gaiter) is 18-year-old Alan Anderson. He served for 40 years and retired as a chief petty officer.
A few months after the funeral the entire company was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the King’s daughter, the current Queen, to be presented with Royal Victorian Medals, which reward personal services given to the monarch.
Alan said that they arrived at the palace and passed through the courtyard where a staircase took them up to meet the Queen. She was ‘absolutely beautifu’, he recalls.
Alan joined the navy at HMS St Vincent in Gosport to which, strangely enough, he returned some 10 years later as an instructor.
• As we know, there have been three South Parade Piers at Southsea, two of them being burnt out.
The first, which was privately-owned, was opened on July 26, 1879, by Princess Edward of Saxe-Weimar, the then wife of the Lieutenant-General of the Portsmouth Garrison, Prince Edward.
It was a superb occasion attended by most of the principal townspeople.
Waverley Road in Southsea was at one time called Saxe-Weimar Road but was re-named in 1916, the middle of the First World War, because of its German connections.
• And finally… Remember When regular Mike Mcbride tells of the time the 1970s’ band Jigsaw performed in HMS Vernon.
Petty Officer Roger Singleton managed the Vernon Club and Mike, a committee member, helped Roger with the club and occasionally calming over-exuberance among its patrons.
Jigsaw were a British group who had success in the mid-1970s with some prominent singles, most notably Sky High.
Theirs was a high-energy live show in which drum kits were set on fire and explosions set off.
The band’s finale was a rendition of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s Fire; all hell would break loose on the stage with a cocktail of explosions and fire and smoke, recalls Mike.
He adds: ‘The Vernon Club could be seen from the Main Gate. The officer of the day and maybe the Master at Arms or one of his ‘crushers’ (if you were unlucky) will have kept a close eye on the revellers as they left the club, steadying themselves as they approached the gate.
‘Of course if you were too inebriated, you weren’t permitted to proceed ashore and risk bringing the Royal Navy into disrepute.’