Then and Now: Stretton on Dunsmore's Village Life

Two residents remember 45 years of life in the village.

The Shop, the Pub, the Farm

The pub’s just round the corner, the Oak and Black Dog to the left of the shop. This was really the heart of the village. In the “games room” there would be quite a crush of people playing “cheeses” (a variety of skittles on a table) and darts. A lady and a man played an accordion in one of the rooms on Saturdays, it used to be quite a knees-up, a bit of a sing-song. You know, a bit of a boozer, but everyone had set places to sit in, if you sat in someone else’s seat they stared at you… and you moved!

The old man in the pub

What about when we met that man in the pub, he must have been about 90 then! When he told us there had been a fire in our house in 1898, when they were a block of barns. There’s a farm opposite there too, then. The centre of the village then was very different. It was rural, people had to walk everywhere didn’t they. You could hear the cows mooing from our house because the farmer got up late on a Sunday and they needed milking!

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