November 5, 1960 at St Mary’s Church, Burnham on Crouch
There is no telling where things go after the camera clicks, one thing is certain though: the happy photo stays taken, an image crosses time, sometimes it gathers even more meaning. Pictures that are stories from living, growing up, beingThere.
This story behind this picture starts halfway up Providence, on the right side of a road a bit past the pub where the gas street lantern is not lit: it is 1940s war-time. Nightime brings a blackout over the barbed-wire ringed Dengie peninsula riverside town of Burnham on Crouch. Militarily known as HMS St Mathew, a town on guard.
Imagine nervously living there, especially if you were the family Martin already bombed out of house and home in one a hell of a blitz on London Docklands. They’d escaped with their lives, father Les is now an engineer working on naval vessels at Crouch boatbuilding shipyards. Quite some change from engine rooms on sea-going liners sailing to New York and other ports, from the Thames.
Let’s move to November 5, 1960: a wedding with photos that family members treasures for being already something special: now, even more so. The wartime marine engineer Les Martin and his Doris Sadler wife have the one son: he’s called Les too. Time on, in his father’s way the younger Martin become an exceptional engineer. First at Stebbings, boat builders, then in the nuclear industry.
His bride is Kathleen Robinson, from the other side of Essex, daughter of an electric marine engineer who in wartime defuses mines dropped on the Thames. Something he never talked about, he just got home later than usual sometimes. Often people noticed he wasn’t at work with mates.
If it looks there is something of a thread developing here, see it as the story of two fathers who in a couple or so years get to change the talking shop together: now are happy grandfathers. First the daughter, then two sons for Kath and Les.
Martin lads destined to be third generation engineers: didn’t those boys do just good.
Andrew would turn the leaves of media pages after moving from engineering training into sales: then follow a career in marketing goodies for outdoors activities. He’d open his own specialist independent retail shop in Morpeth. His younger brother Paul follows a long career at Nissan where the Leaf in his project assignments wasn’t simply a spring, probably came with a battery of problems that he got solved .
This special locket then, it’s not just holding photo from the Essex wedding day of the family who’d make North East England their home: it’s a loved beingThere treasure of many parts. Little yet priceless, it will remain timeless for me, perhaps others too: yet always will be a Burnham boy’s slice from a time that’s more than memory. Prl.
