ON Saturday Ray Cozins and Hazel Thorby will be exhibiting old photographs of Bournemouth at St Thomas Community Hall Strawberry Fair in Ensbury Park.
Hazel’s pictures cover Kinson and local families, whilst Ray’s display will concentrate on East Howe schools, youth club, day nursery and land farmed by his grandfather.
Ray’s grandfather, George Cozins, had a large house in Kingswell Road built in 1906.
In his spare time he started up a smallholding with a piggery at the rear of the house.
It expanded so fast that he had to give up working as a milkman at a Bournemouth dairy.
His seven children worked on the farm that included a large area of land in East Howe and Kinson, rented from the Lady Wimborne Estate.
The farm consisted of two homes, a dairy where his 30 herd of cattle were milked by hand by dairyman Charlie Foote who lived on the farm with his family, plus storage for cattle food and farm equipment.
His daughter Margaret ran the family milk rounds.
In the early days the milk was transported in buckets and measured out into the householder’s jugs.
By late 1930s hand filled glass bottles with sealed card stoppers were introduced.
After Ray’s father George Cozins Junior, pictured right, married in 1928, they lived at East Howe farm where Ray was born. Then they moved to a house he built in Kinson Road.
George Junior took charge of the piggery in Kingswell Road, where more than 200 pigs were reared, fed on kitchen waste collected from hotels in Bournemouth.
A slaughter house was built in the late 1930s and he became a licensed slaughter man, supplying pork and poultry to butchers shops in and around Bournemouth and Poole.
Hay and barley corn were harvested from the field off East Howe Lane and transported to Kingswell Road farm by horse and dray.
Hay was used as winter feed for dairy cows and barley corn was stored until September when the combined harvester arrived on its two day annual visit and family and friends gathered to produce barley corn.
The harvester, hauled by a steam engine, had behind it a wooden hut on wheels for the driver to sleep in as he travelled to the many farms in the area where the harvester was needed.
The exhibition starts at 2pm, admission is free. Cream teas and a raffle will be on offer.
Remembering East Howe Day Nursery
During the Second World War the government recommended councils set up day nurseries to cater for children from six months to five years old to enable young mothers to go to work to help the war effort.
East Howe Day Nursery, a prefabricated building in Hadow Road, East Howe, opened in 1943.
Joan Green, Ray Cozins’s late wife, was one of the first to be appointed, later gaining her Nursery Nurse diploma. Ray met Joan via his sister Ruby, who was also a nurse there.
Every day more than 300 children, split into three age groups, babies, ‘twennies’ and toddlers, attended the nursery. At five they transferred to the infants’ school.
The matron was Mrs Clare Walker, the nursery teacher Mrs Hilda Gould and the senior sister was Mary Stent.
In the kitchen Mrs Hutchins and Mrs Rose were the cooks, assisted by Mrs Dashwood, and Percy Frampton looked after the coal fired boiler that heated the nursery. In 1949 Ray and Joan got engaged, the same year she was made staff nurse.
They married in 1953 and the nursery closed the year later.
Photographs of East Howe Day Nursery will also be on display at the exhibition.
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