James G. Adams

James G. Adams (1908-1996)
(written by his son, Robert Adams)

James George Adams was born in Winchester, Hampshire, on 13 December 1908 and during his early years lived in a cottage on Front Street, St Cross. He talked of being related to a Canon Broderick of St Cross and, through his ancestor with the family name Long, being from the last members of the estate of William of Wykeham to have farmed on the Wykeham land. William Cobbett in one of his Rural Rides in the early nineteenth century writes of having visited a dirty farm run by a Mr Long, which would be an embarrassment to us now. Dad spoke of a relative becoming Postmaster General in Victorian times but we haven’t managed to trace this person. He also said Mr Long gambled and drank the land away in the nineteenth century, leaving nothing.

During World War One, Dad moved to a West Sussex cottage in the tiny hamlet of Woodhorn near Oving, between Chichester and Bognor Regis (see his book Growing up through the Great War) and later to Colden Common and then Alton where he completed his schooling, leaving at 14 without qualifications. His father worked at Lord Mayor Treloar hospital and dad worked in the steward’s department there. Later, having found he had high natural immunity to tuberculosis, dad went on to work at the King Edward VII Sanatorium at Midhurst. He remembered visits there by many well-known patrons, including the King and the author Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men in a Boat.

In the 1930s, dad courted Winifred Mary Brown of Lane End near Winchester. They married in 1938. Dad obtained a job at Dungay and Lee estate agency in Farnborough, Hampshire where he worked as surveyor, valuer, estate agent and (once a month at the auction rooms Netley Street and later Camp Road in North Camp) auctioneer until his retirement in the early 1970s. He was refused military service on medical grounds. Whilst working in Farnborough, he lived at Green’s School Lane before moving to Cove Road, Cove, in Farnborough. Mum brought up three children, Patricia, born 1939 and died in 1989, Godfrey, born in 1947 and Robert, born in 1944. Mum disregarded her chronic and serious asthma problems, seeking voluntary work and apart from running the disabled club at the Red Cross in Farnborough and working as an auxiliary at the Farnborough Hospital, enjoyed membership of the Women’s Institute. In evenings she enjoyed working part time in the YMCA canteen at the Royal Engineers Southwood Barracks, catering for newly arrived recruits, many of whom were away from home for the first time, and in later years serving and washing up in the kitchen at the Farnborough Hill Convent school for girls. This originated as the huge house the Empress Eugénie (1826-1920) from Granada, Spain lived in much of her life (1881 onwards), adjacent to St Michael’s Abbey, the monastery she had built where she and her son lie in the Imperial Crypt, alongside the tomb of her husband Napoleon the Third.

Mum and dad were comfortably off in retirement, but mum continued to work. While dad dreamt of buying a caravan and touring after retirement, Mum was horrified at this and talked of her dream of moving to the A6 between Penrith and Scotland and running a transport café where she could serve monster meals to passing lorry drivers. It didn’t work out that way. After retirement in the early 1970s, they moved to Broughton, Cheshire to make it easier to visit Godfrey and Robert, who lived in the north. Mum worked for a while as cleaner at a working men’s club near Chester and died suddenly of leukaemia on 20 April 1979. Dad talked of loneliness, a decade later remarrying in his late 70s. He died on 16 May 1996, his second wife Rosa, a former secretary from Newfoundland working all her career for the Canadian High Commission, dying nine months later.

During his long life dad was a keen stamp collector and in his younger days played the violin in a dance band, which entertained in dance halls round Alton and south Hampshire. In Farnborough, he became a sidesman at St Christopher’s Church for many years. He was energetic in other ways, growing most of the family’s vegetables, plus growing and curing his own tobacco, on his allotment, and in the evenings acquiring qualifications in book-keeping, accountancy and valuations (Fellow of the Society of Commercial Accountants; Fellow of the Association of Secretaries in Commerce; Associate of the Corporation of Secretaries; Associate of the Incorporated Society of Valuers and Auctioneers; Associate of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries). He also learned shorthand and typing, teaching these and book-keeping at evening classes at Farnborough Technical College for more than twenty years.

Dad took up painting in retirement and exhibited and sold his work, financing many holidays from the proceeds. He began writing and published many articles in Hampshire, the County Magazine and the Alton Gazette. After his death, we put together many of these articles with permission of the editors of these publications, together with a tiny proportion of his writing, poetry and drawings we found piled in a wardrobe after his death, and published six books of his writing.

Another book of dad’s writing is due for publication on the centenary of his birth.