Comments on: Accountants, orchestras and Stella Ashley https://rediffusion.london/accountants-orchestras-and-stella-ashley Associated-Rediffusion and Rediffusion London, your weekday ITV in London 1955-1968 Tue, 06 Oct 2020 13:38:11 +0000 hourly 1 By: Hazel https://rediffusion.london/accountants-orchestras-and-stella-ashley#comment-11 Mon, 27 Aug 2018 18:51:46 +0000 http://rediffusion.london/?p=193#comment-11 I have her suit case Stella Ashley 203 Drake House Dolphin Square London S W 1

]]> By: Christopher Taylor https://rediffusion.london/accountants-orchestras-and-stella-ashley#comment-3 Tue, 03 Jan 2017 20:23:39 +0000 http://rediffusion.london/?p=193#comment-3 Stella Ashley was my father’s cousin. Her mother, my grandmother’s sister, Lilian, had married one Richard Ashley, who had been in Concert Party after the First World War, so there was show business of a sort in the family. In the inter-war years ‘Uncle Dick’, as he was known, had also been a travelling salesman in (amongst other places) Pembrokeshire, and my father spent a number of school summer holidays with him there. This was a rare and precious treat for a poor little lad in the 1920s, especially as Uncle Dick had a motor car, almost unheard of then. As a result my father was close to his uncle and Aunt Lilian and, of course, his cousin Stella. All these people are long gone now, but I can remember vividly Aunt Lilian and Stella’s occasional visits to my father and their (to me and my sisters, anyway) grand bearing and speech – not to mention the fine tailoring they both wore. Stella was very kindly and even as a young boy I could sense her affectionate manner with my father, and the way she always called him by his given name, Norman, which nobody else ever did. What memories this article has brought back to me, and I think the piece captures well Cousin Stella’s charm. And the photograph; my father never kept a picture of her and I suppose it is now well over fifty years since I saw her last, but that is exactly Stella as I remember her. I am in my late sixties and I still live in Brighton, but the family that remembered Stella is sadly mostly passed away now. Stella was an only child and had no children of her own, so there are few who would remember her. This piece has evoked far off, but nevertheless warm and fond, memories from my boyhood. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, so the corny saying goes, but this time I think it was.

Christopher Taylor

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