By Janet Archer
We assume that the Reepham Life 2022 Calendar picture for January (below) was taken in Gibbs’ yard, now known as Merchants Yard.
One of the men in the cart is Stanley Watson, younger son of Frederick Watson, licensee of the Sun Inn in the early 1900s. The photograph below shows Stanley on Gibbs’ cart driving up Ollands Road.
Stanley was apprenticed to Gibbs’ ironmongery business by the time he was 16 and worked for the Gibbs family for many years.
His older brother Clifford became licensee of the Sun Inn in 1922 and in the same year Stanley married Grace Fanny Dewing at St Mary, Aldborough.
Her father had grown up in Reepham Moor and was a younger brother of Martin Luther Dewing.
Grace, before her marriage to Stanley, had already begun teaching at Hackford and Whitwell Primary School.
Wesley Piercy remembers that, in the 1930s Grace was teaching the pupils of Standards 1 and 2.
After Stanley’s death in 1930 Grace continued teaching and four years later married Walter Lawn, also a teacher.
The 1939 register shows they were living in Reepham and working for Norfolk County Council.
Walter is registered as a head schoolmaster, but this would not have been at Hackford and Whitwell Primary School since Chute Thompson was still the head at that time.
Both Grace and Walter served as ARP wardens during the Second World War, and both were active in the Reepham detachment of the British Red Cross.
The photograph below from 1966 shows them with Ben Stimpson and Mr and Mrs Harold Rump loading boxes ready for a meals on wheels delivery. Can anyone identify the people in this photo (from left to right)? Please email the Archive.
The Reepham Archive is open to the public on the first Wednesday and Saturday of the month from 10 am – 12 noon (or by appointment), upstairs in the Bircham Centre, Market Place, Reepham. For more information about opening times and current services, please email