SEVERAL readers contacted the Echo with their memories in response to the Southbourne Grove postcard printed on October 11.

Bob Hewitt of Broadstone said his father-in-law Fred Shepherd moved from Palmerston Road newsagents to Grand Avenue News in Southbourne, near the Grove in the 1950s. They collected daily newspapers from the railway station before the newsagents opened at 6.30am.

Fred and his wife Lydia and their twin daughters Barbara and Kathleen, Bob's future wife, shared a property in Castlemain Avenue with Fred's sister Evelyn, her husband and father 'Pops' Shepherd. The family moved to Bournemouth from Manchester a year after the war ended.

Kathleen did a pre-nursing course at the Lansdowne, later training at Boscombe, Bournemouth West and Gladstone Road. She left nursing where her take home pay was only a few pence an hour to be employed in the grocery trade on an improved salary where she was able to save up to get married.

She worked at the Sainsbury's store on Southbourne Grove, one of the first supermarkets in Bournemouth.

Before Fred retired in 1974 he managed the Thunder and Clayden warehouse near Southbourne Grove, including delivering the Echo around Bournemouth and often brought home small toys and sweets from the warehouse for his granddaughter.

Miss H.K. Bright-Chard of London often visited her parents in Southbourne in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the north side of the Grove she recalls Loyd's Bank, Boots the chemist, Mac Fisheries, Dewhurst, Woolworth's, The Home Baker and Covent Garden Fruit Market. On the south side were the Fashion and Fabric, a gift shop, Barclays Bank, Harris' Linen House, Margery Daw drapers, the Post Office, Gott the chemist and a wool and needlework shop owned by Frederick Ralph Pimm.