... A Waterside miscellany ...

A Waterside miscellany is a development of ideas from Digging up the past and Digging deeper; while writing those two books, I've come across a wide range of other stories, more complex, more extensive, and less open to summarising, which still give an interesting flavour of the history of the Waterside. Some of these have been previously published as books, or at least booklets, in their own right (such as John R. Wise's "The New Forest: its History and its Scenery", and Mary Gould's "Three Hundred Years in a New Forest Parish"), others are newspaper reports, articles from magazines, and stories from my own family records.

They are a disparate bunch, though there are three things that link them; one is that the events and people they describe took place in, or lived on, the Waterside, another is that they deserve a far longer treatment than a brief article can supply, and the third is that unless one is lucky enough to have a copy of the original, or is determined to go digging through the reference section of the library, or archives from 100 years and more ago, the stories lie unread, and in danger of being lost altogether. I think that would be a pity; hence the idea of the book.

So far, the running order goes:
Chapter 1 - Remarks On Forest Scenery, And Other Woodland Views (Rev. William Gilpin, 1791)
Chapter 2 - Rural Rides (William Cobbett, 1830)
Chapter 3 - A Fatal Encounter Between Gamekeepers and Poachers (Hampshire Independent, 1848)
Chapter 4 - The New Forest: its History and its Scenery (John R. Wise, 1863)
Chapter 5 - Harvest Home at Cadland (Hampshire Advertiser, 1863)
Chapter 6 - History of the Lepe and Exbury railway (1870s)
Chapter 7 - Hampshire Days (W. H. Hudson, 1903)
Chapter 8 - The New Forest (Elizabeth Godfrey & E. W. Haslehust, 1912)
Chapter 9 - The Fatal Collision in Southampton Water (Hampshire Independent, 1912)
Chapter 10 - Three Hundred Years in a New Forest Parish (Mary Gould, 1920)
Chapter 11 - The History of Victoria Quay at Ashlett (1897 - 1921)
Chapter 12 - The auction of effects at Stanswood House (1950)
Chapter 13 - The Fawley Coronation programme (1953)
Chapter 14 - It Happened in Hampshire (Winifred G Bennington, 1977)
Chapter 15 - The Local Seaborne Trade (R.J. Hansford, 1979)
Chapter 16 - Miscellaneous news items (1750 - 1920)

It's very much a work in progress, but I hope to update ideas here, as I go along.