I was born on the 19th March 1943 at the Alexandra Nursing Home at Devon port so I can legitimately claim to be a Devon port boy. As we were a Catholic family and the 19th March is St Joseph’s Day the name of Joseph was going to be in the name somewhere.So I was named John,Joseph Ingham named after my paternal grandad and St Joseph himself life for “JJ” at the latter stages of WW2 looked promising.
My sister Maureen 10 years my senior has always maintained that I was a War accident that was never meant to happen and I think she’s probably right. Speaking to my cousin in York recently, who is also called John Ingham, he reckons that his family thought the same of him as we were born four months apart.Neither of us knew our paternal grandfather Frank John Ingham who along with his brother Alf had had a distinguished Naval career. Uniquely they had served together at postings almost the whole of their Naval careers Alf reaching Warrant Officer and Grandad retiring only to go back in at Lt Commander to oversee the mining of the south coast at the outbreak of war.It was doing this work that he caught pneumonia and died from it.
He had before retiring bought 25 Vanguard Villas and it was here after his death that Mum and Dad and Maureen lived with Grandma in the upstairs flat.Now renamed as Saltash Rd Vanguard Villas disappeared many years ago.My earliest and most conscious memory is of us living at 55 Admiralty At,Keyham a large house which Dad rented so my claim to fame is not just a Devon port boy but a Keyham one to boot. I don’t think that Vanguard Villas had been a happy time for Mum in later life and in Maureen’s conversations they both indicated that Grandma was not an easy person to live with consistently. So many years later on grandma’s death Mum was very reluctant to go there to live,there were clearly memories for her before my arrival,of some unhappiness.
Keyham was a remarkable place to grow up in, largely two up two down with outside loo it had taken a toll of bombing during the war, being so close to H.M.S.Drake and the Dockyard the near misses of bombing fell here so pockets of gaps appeared. At the top of Admiralty St there was a gap of about six houses on each side which as a result of a huge land mine going off in Royal Navy AVE devastated the area and it would be long after I left Keyham that homes were built. It did however provide us as children with a playground of wasteland next to the main railway line which was very handy for bonfire night.
More exciting for us was the bombed out school at the rear of the houses in Total Navy AVE on the opposite side of the railway line.We had hours of fun playing “Three Musketeers” and Cowboys and Indians although the venue didn’t really match the prairies on the film’s we were beginning to see.I seem to remember Roy Rogers and others figuring in westerns.But with substantial basements and loads of classroom walls we could easily play most of a day quite happily in the spring and summer.