At one time, Prospect House (near the bottom of the south side of Grove Road), provided regular rooms for the YWCA, the Young Women’s Christian Association. It appears, ostensibly, to have been a boarding house, but its specific use may also have included being a hostel and club for working women. In the Ventnor Red… read more »
It Used To Be Like This is a classic memoir of life in Niton Undercliff in the early 1900s, written by George Roland Haynes (1906-1984). In his words: Already the lifestyle of my childhood is beyond the grasp of the young people of today . . . so I have written all that I thought should be… read more »
Charles Hibberd’s mineral water business was started at the rear of the butcher’s shop of his uncle, Moses Hibberd, 86 High Street, in the early 1860s. On the double doors to the side archway, the signage read ‘C. Hibberd’s Soda Water, Ginger Beer and Lemonade Manufactory’. The mineral water business thrived and manufacture was soon… read more »
Ventnor and District Local History Society 2022 Annual General Meeting The 2022 Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held on Monday 4 April 2022 from 7:30 to 9:00 pm in the Masonic Hall on Grove Road, Ventnor. The meeting will be followed by a short slide show about the history of the Cascade… read more »
Over the last 170 years there have been various different businesses located at 86 High Street in Ventnor. By the early 1900s the premises had become Joe Newnham’s Dairy. Joe first worked in Ventnor as a wine merchant’s cellarman, but later went into business as a dairyman. He seems to have set up at 86… read more »
Over the last 170 years there have been various different businesses located at 86 High Street in Ventnor. Around the 1890s, Robert Tolman, a native of Seaton in South Devon who had originally come to Ventnor in 1866 from Bristol, established a confectionery, bakery and dining business there. Later he had a shop at 105… read more »
Over the last 170 years there have been various different businesses located at 86 High Street in Ventnor. In the early 1850s, Moses Hibberd opened a shop there as a pork butcher, poulterer and fruiterer. One of fifteen children, he had started in Ventnor in 1845 as a steward at Steephill Castle where he was… read more »
There was a long history of piggeries in the grounds of the Royal National Hospital in Ventnor, with the animals being fed on the abundance of hospital food waste. Along with the considerable supplies of vegetables and fruit produced in the grounds, it proved vital in the later years of the Great War when food… read more »
Henry Milligan, invariably known as Donkey Milligan, was probably the most prominent of the donkey-chair proprietors who operated in Ventnor around the turn of the last century, regularly taking nursing home patients and other invalids on outings. He had taken over the business founded by his father in 1894. A carpenter by trade, Henry had worked… read more »
In 1959, members of the Blake family, longshoremen at Ventnor over several generations, dismanted Britannia’s Hut, the wooden structure on tall stilts that over many years formed the home of Miss Olivia Parkes (locally known as Britannia). The hut had originally been built for the Undercliff Swimming Club in the 1880s, was bought by the… read more »