Haggbridge.com – Never let truth get in the way of a good family story!

William Thompson & The Mounted Home Guard

Our Great Grandfather, William THOMPSON (1891-1964), led the charge! “England’s only mounted section of the Home Guard, which nightly patrols 100 square miles of the North Riding,” read the caption in the Yorkshire Evening Press. Well, that might have been a slight exaggeration, as there were at least three other mounted units in Devon, Glamorgan, & Warwickshire. It was the...

Thompson Comments: 2

H Robert Thompson & Vickers Wellington

Sergeant H Robert Thompson, Royal Canadian Air Force, was serving with 14 OTU at RAF Market Harborough, training as a navigator on Vickers Wellington medium bombers, having left his new wife, May, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Prior to enlistment, Robert worked on his father’s farm and completed two years studying medicine at Victoria College. He intended to continue studies after...

Thompson Comments: 2

Robert Thompson & SS Empire Spring

Leading Signalman Robert Thompson, aged 24, served as one of six Royal Navy staff aboard the CAM Ship, SS Empire Spring. Robert had completed naval training in London, met his wife on weekend leave in Southend on Sea, married in her hometown of Sunderland, and started a family. They were going to settle down in his hometown of York. The...

Thompson Comment: 1

Thomas Hill & Raindale Mill

In 1966 Raindale Mill was relocated from Raindale, near Pickering, to York and reconstructed stone by stone at the Castle Museum. The mill was gifted to the museum’s founder in 1935 by the last owner of the now derelict building. As a child we visited the museum countless times and I’m sure I walked past the mill, entirely unappreciative of...

Baker/Hill/Nichols/Pindar Comments: 0

Gilbert Hardacre & West African Cocoa Trade

Gilbert Clapham Hardacre (1889-1959), Great Grand Uncle on the Hudson side of the family, was our first ancestor to reach West Africa in his role a cocoa trader for a York-based firm. Gilbert’s travels were the inspiration for members of successive generations of our family to reach beyond the north of England and ponder the great yonder. In each generation...

Hardacre/Hudson Comment: 1

Geoff Bainbridge & The Cuban Missile Crisis

Flight Lieutenant Geoff Bainbridge (1924-2022) served with the RAF from 1942 and ultimately pursued a successful career with the RAF. By 1962 Geoff was stationed with the new V-Force, having completed flights tests on the new Avro Vulcan, served as a test pilot, flight instructor, and demonstrated the airplane for royalty and dignitaries at many airshows. The RAF medium bomber...

Bainbridge Comments: 0

Justus Morris & The Sickly Shoat

The New York Times recorded the death of 3rd Great Grandfather, Justus MORRIS (1821-1899), with a humorous obituary, acknowledging his history as a practical joker. In order to win a bet with a friend, Justus spent ten times the value of the bet fattening up a sickly shoat (recently weaned pig) to reach 300lbs before slaughter! This was not the...

Morris/Reeve Comment: 1

Henry Limberger & The Hessians

Johann Heinrich (Henry) LIMBERGER (1755-1835), 5th Great Grandfather on the Morris line, arrived Staten Island, New York, 1776. Henry had been press ganged (forcibly conscripted) from his family home, actually hiding in the garden, and sent to America as a Hessian soldier. Hessians were German soldiers who served as auxiliaries to the British Army during the American Revolutionary War, making...

Limberger/Weed Comments: 0

Ken Bainbridge & The Half Way Sign

“200 hundred miles from London, 200 hundred miles from Edinburgh” announced my grandfather as we drove past the sign in his new Ford Orion, on route to our next Swinsty Reservoir fly fishing adventure. It must have been 1987 or thereabout when Reg BAINBRIDGE showed me his brother’s handiwork on the Great North Eastern Railway line. However my memory is...

Bainbridge/Onions Comment: 1

Ford Mustang Versus Shuttle Atlantis!

We had never experienced a rocket launch. It was the summer of 2011 and purely by coincidence we had flown from England to visit family in Florida in the same week STS-135 was scheduled to launch. This was the 135th and final mission for NASA’s Space Shuttle program. The NASA shuttle program had been the space program of my life....

Clark/Marchetti Comments: 0