The Scout Hall

The building

Owen Sayers

Originally, that building [the current Scout Hall] was owned by two sisters, the Gentles, and it was Jennie Gentle’s café for… no, Jennie Gentles’ tearoom for something ladies or something like that… they used to have little tea dances in the hall at the back and there was like a tearoom café downstairs. But, they had given it up and it had been taken over by a carpentry business and they’d used the front part as offices and the back part had all the machinery for the woodworking that they did. So, that was all away when we [the Scouts] were offered this. The house was used by the people building the bridge so the idea was that when the bridge was finished they would give us the house in payment for the land and the house that belonged to the Scout group. [It] wasn’t fit for purpose so they eventually agreed to demolish the hall and put up a Marley building for us which was fine but the Marley building wasn’t attached to the hall so I then negotiated with them to put a connecting part between the hall and the house which is still there.

The petrol station

Ken Miller

The Shell petrol station. It was their white suits/coats with the Shell motif on them. Most people don’t realise that the Scout Hall was a petrol station. Obviously there were a lot of cars passing back and forwards from the ferry and if the queues were long and people were running low on fuel, obviously the petrol station paid. After the bridge was opened, there wasn’t point in a petrol station being there.

Dropped kerb

Owen Sayers

When the carpenters moved out of the Scout Hall it was taken over by a small firm that had it as a petrol garage for cars going down to the ferry to fill up. And if you look at the land going down the road there you’ll see that the kerb was dropped in two places so cars could come in and out or if they were coming off the ferry they could come in and out.

Tablet and cakes

Owen Sayers

I remember it was a great source of income to the Scout Group when we moved in in 1968. I used to make tablet about two or three nights a week, all sorts of different tablet and ladies would bake cakes and we’d go down… because there were big queues for the ferry that used to stretch right through the village… and we used to go out and sell tablet and cakes to the waiting people, waiting to go on the ferry. It was a great source of income for many years.

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