Roger Lines, my father, went on to travel the world as a Research Forester, but this letter finds him in January 1953, right at the start of his career. The previous letter in my possession, written by him at the end of his first week in the office has him about to move into 27, Dalrymple Crescent, and this letter is written from there.
27, Dalrymple Crescent
29th Jan
Dear M&D,
I have been able to make enquiries in the Scottish Banks. They have no bank charges in the accepted sense, but charge 6d per cheque. With a current account you have to pay at least £2 per year, however few cheques you draw, but you can draw 40 per year without paying anything above £2. If I had £100 the bank charge would be less that £2. This has to be thought out however on a parallel with the Savings Certificate scheme whereby £100 means £3 per year interest. Thus the Lloyds system is fantastically expensive if you draw few cheques (as I would). According to your letter they first of all want to charge £2-7-0 per 50 cheques and then they expect you to have £100 in a credit account so that altogether they are getting £5-7-0 per year for doing practically nothing. Perhaps you would like to confront them with this.
I have today opened an account with the Edinburgh Trustee Savings bank so I won’t be short of ready money again. Whilst on financial matters, you wouldn’t care to be Dependents would you ? There is Civil Service scheme whereby aged parents can be helped out of a contributory pension scheme.
It isn’t one of these “something-for-nothing” schemes though. There is a more or less compulsory scheme for Widows and Children through which means a deduction of 1 1/2 % from salary which you pay even before you have a wife let alone a widow. I shall have to propose by saying “Will you join my Widows and Children’s scheme ?”
Can someone with great strength (Jennifer) and mechanical aptitude (Daddy) get my bike down from the attic and see what Tim has pinched from it and whether the tyres still hold up. I know the electrics don’t work but only I think there aren’t any lamp. It would certainly be very useful up here, especially at lunch time but I don’t know how much it would cost to send it up. Could you find out and let me have a report on its condition ? (This sounds like one of my Memos to foresters)
The glasses don’t fit very well so I am having them bent a bit by a local optician. When I’ve done this I’ll send this pair down to have the lenses changed.
Much love
Roger
p.s. What was in the Sunday Express ?
In the meantime will banks are sorted out I will get John Spears to pay a cheque that he owes me into your account.
Notes
Proposal
As far as I am aware, my father did not use the Widows and Orphans scheme as part of his proposal to my mother, indeed I do not think they had met at that stage, although my mother was already friends with my Aunt, Jennifer, of the great strength – as they had met at Froebel College in about 1946.
I believe my parents first met at Lockley Lodge, near the Dale Fort field study centre in Pembrokeshire, although I am not sure exactly when – it had to have been after this letter in January 1953 and November 1955, when my father announced his intention to propose. It was his work for the Forestry Commission which took him to Pembrokeshire to study wind blow, and being in the area he went to his sister, Jennifer. She was staying at the Lockley Lodge with my mother, and Eleanor Grey – a friend of the Lockley family. Lockley Lodge is now the owned by The Wildlife Trust of West and South Wales, and is the place where you buy boat tickets to get to the island of Skomer, but in those days was probably owned by Ronald Lockley, a pioneering naturalist, who farmed on the island of Skokholm, and wrote many books – including ‘The private life of the rabbit’, used by Richard Adams to provide background for Watership Down.
My father and my mother went for a walk around the Deer Park at Wooltack point and discovered their common interests in nature. My father lured my mother to Scotland with a promise of ‘A buzzard on very telegraph pole’, which caused our car journeys round Scotland to be enlivened by shouts of ‘There it is’ when we spotted a buzzard on a telegraph pole.