Carole Cooper Part 3
Carole Cooper CH3 Duration: 5:52
Images: Carole Cooper, copyright reserved. For any rights requests, please contact the New Forest Heritage Centre in the first instance.
Carole: (CC008) This, this is [name withheld] on – what’s the name of the bridge…umm, cause we’ve taken it out of the album….What’s the name of the bridge down to Woodfiddley Pound?
Voice: Oh… I don’t know.
Carole: This is [name withheld] standing on Bishops Dyke Bridge just be -, he was chairman of the CDA at this time and just before this was taken, they removed the bridge completely, so there was no access from Lovelyhill up here, down to Woodfiddley Pound. So there was no access normally for anybody, but on drift day it was also going to make a huge difference because we couldn’t drive the ponies down. So there was a lot of fuss and palaver in the papers and everything about this, and Commoners Defence worked really hard, um, and one day a dead foal was found in there where it tried to cross and had fallen in to this…because this is a very deep bog either side…and it had fallen in and drowned; and after that they built us a new bridge, so that’s the story behind that one.
And that’s [name withheld] looking victorious. (An inaudible exchange of comments)
CB: We are now going to move on to Carole’s photos that she has on her ipad that she is going to email over to me later. The first one is of?
(CC009digital)
Carole: This is a group of us when we were children on our ponies, in what is now Lyndhurst car park, which was then open forest; and the group left to right is me, Carole Cooper – I was Carole Trimm then; [name withheld], he became a saddler in Lyndhurst; Terry Jones who grew up to be a New Forest Agister; and [name withheld] she was then, I can’t remember what her name ended up as, but she became whipper-in to the buckhounds later on. And I think the interesting thing, there’s two interesting things about this photo: This open forest is now the carpark and it is a corner; if you could see the whole area you’d realise it’s a corner. And there was no organised drifts in those days so they used – often a couple of commoners would drive a mare and foal down into this corner, catch the foal and light a fire and brand it. It was ‘cause I lived just here it was interesting to watch. I think the other thing about this photo, that pony’s name is Dandini. Well Buffy Mansbridge in those days used to go all around to various sales buying ponies; used to go to Wimborne and Salisbury buying ponies and some of those ponies came in by train to Lyndhurst Road Station. (Now known as Ashurst Station.) And that pony did, and I can remember walking up from Lyndhurst – I mean, you can see I wasn’t very old, walking up from Lyndhurst with a rope halter to Lyndhurst Road and the train, he’d have a whole carriage to himself with a deep straw bed and they would open the door and I walked in and put a rope halter on him and led him out, jumped on his back and rode him back to Lyndhurst and that was how we did collect some of the ponies that Buffy bought. I know that that’s not strictly commoning but Buffy was a commoner and the other, some of the other ponies he bought, his son [name withheld] used to have to ride home, so [name withheld] would have to ride a pony home from Wimborne or Salisbury or –
CB: Golly
Carole: And that’s what he did. His father would buy a pony and he would say, “Right, take that pony home”, and ‘course that wasn’t to Ashurst, don’t forget, that would be to Longdown in those days –
CB: Of course
Carole: So it would be nothing for [name withheld] to bring a pony home from Wimborne or Salisbury to Longdown, but that one came in by train.
CB: How old do you think you were then?
Carole: I think, I was about – I reckon I was about ten or eleven, so that would have been about nineteen fifty-eight.
CB: And what were you doing that day. Why were you all there?
Carole: My dad took this photo, we were going for a ride but dad wanted to take a photo and so he just said, “Oh, I’ll just take a photo”. There was no particular reason, it was just before we went out on our ride, and off we all went.
CB: All beautifully turned out in your hacking jackets.
Carole: Well, yes, we were. That’s how it was in those days. (Laughs) Baggy jodhpurs, but Terry he was always so smart and so quiet; [name withheld] has never changed, you can see her there, she was always the naughty one.
CB: Ah, that’s lovely.
Carole: Yeah, her name was – that pony’s name was Honey. A forest stallion jumped in the field and got that pony in foal one day! Yeah, she wasn’t very happy.
CB: Okay, the second digital image we have got. (CC010digital) Could you tell me about that one?
Carole: That’s Brian Ingram when he was retiring as Head Agister, after I think it was forty years, wasn’t it? And it was 25th May 2009; and that’s Crabhat Pound which is his local pound, and they had a plaque done for him which was unveiled and there he is looking at that plaque. I think his face says it all really: very, quite sad and very thoughtful, isn’t it, his face.
CB: Yes, it is.
Carole: Yes. Yeah, it was the end of an era, wasn’t it, when Brian retired, you know.
CB: It was.
Carole: And that’s really all I can say about that one.
(CC011digital) Digital image of children and cattle on Lepe Beach.