I wonder how many English immigrants to these shores have bought English and Irish products from Pasadena’s Rose Tree Cottage, either by mail-order, or with a visit accompanied by a spot of afternoon tea, served with traditional elegance by my friend Edmund Fry, looking for all the world like a properly dressed movie butler (think
A SPACE FOR NOSTALGIA
For British Expatriates
Hello fellow ex Brits, want to see a really excellent website of a splendid little ancient farmland village where I was brought up, just Northwest of London and not far from Hemel Hempstead, the scene of the recent explosions?
Here my first impressions of life were formed, during the War (which one, you say, the…
VE Day, Memories of Long Ago
It was the night of May 4, 1945. I was twelve years old.
I’d recently ended a run at London’s Victoria Palace as one of Will Hay’s 3 schoolboy stooges in his famous classroom sketch (for those Americans who never heard of Will Hay, he was, perhaps, England’s equivalent of Jack Benny, only funnier, to…
ADVICE FOR LIVING IN AMERICA
It was early 1960. First England, then Canada, and now an attempt to make a new beginning in America.
A member of American Actors Equity, I planned to attend my first Annual General Meeting which was being held in the Grand Ballroom of the Astor Hotel on West 45th Street.
A free-for-all shouting match it…
SILVER LINE
In November 1950, eager to leave England’s shores and escape the notoriety of child star actorhood, I joined the Merchant Navy as a cadet, anonymous and unrecognizable to all, then being the day of the faceless radio actor. I talked my way past the Personnel obstruction, and then the reason I got in so easily,…
https://www.johnclarkprose.com/a-space-for-nostalgia/166.html
WORLD WAR II
A sleepy little village called Chipperfield, in the farmland of Hertfordshire, England, was where I grew up, and got “discovered” by a BBC radio producer, on a bus. I noticed that they were now running a not so sleepy website, and I couldn’t resist offering my twopenny worth of wartime memories under…