Nan whitcomb biography of william hill

I lived in a bungalow at Sixty Acres and remember the night of the flood very well. I had measles and was sleeping with my Mum and Dad. I woke up and asked for a drink, the bedside table floated away when my dad put his hand out to reach for it.

I lived with my Mum Phyllis, Dad Albert, brothers Victor and Geoff and my nan Jane Parker. Dad got us up into the loft, the water was rising all the time. We could hear the children in the bungalow across from us screaming. The baby died!

We were eventually rescued in a rowing boat, it already had some people in it that had been picked up. We had to climb on the roof from the loft window and jump into the boat. There wasn’t enough room for mum, me and the boys (Dad had to stay at the bungalow with nan, she was too old and infirm to climb out and jump) in the first rowing boat, but it was towing another boat and my brothers had to get in that. The tow rope broke as the boys jumped in and the boat started to drift away. My eldest brother (12 years old) had to grab a piece of wood floating by and paddle back to our boat.

When we got to to the path soldiers lifted us out of the boat, one gave me his jumper as I only had a nightie on and it had got ripped (I was 5 years old). We were then taken to a school in Benfleet.

I went for a walk by the golf course today and was filled with memories.

Author

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Inventor of basketball (1861–1939)

For the chemical biologist, see James Naismith (chemist).

James Naismith (NAY-smith; November 6, 1861 – November 28, 1939) was a Canadian-American physical educator, physician, Christian chaplain, and sports coach, best known as the inventor of the game of basketball.

After moving to the United States, he wrote the original basketball rule book and founded the University of Kansas basketball program in 1898. Naismith lived to see basketball adopted as an Olympic demonstration sport in 1904 and as an official event at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, as well as the birth of the National Invitation Tournament (1938) and the NCAA Tournament (1939).

Naismith studied and taught physical education at McGill University in Montreal until 1890, before moving to Springfield, Massachusetts, United States later that year, where in 1891 he designed the game of basketball while he was teaching at the International YMCA Training School. Seven years after inventing basketball, Naismith received his medical degree in Denver in 1898. He then arrived at the University of Kansas, later becoming the Kansas Jayhawks' athletic director and coach.

While a coach at Kansas, Naismith coached Phog Allen, who later became the coach at Kansas for 39 seasons, beginning a lengthy and prestigious coaching tree. Allen then went on to coach legends including Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith, among others, who themselves coached many notable players and future coaches.

Early years

Naismith was born on November 6, 1861, in Almonte, Canada West, Province of Canada (now part of Mississippi Mills, Ontario, Canada) to Scottish parents. Despite some sources to the contrary Naismith never had a middle name and never signed his name with an "A" initial. The "A" was added by someone in administration at the University of Kans

Kirkdale occupies an area of flat land on the banks of the Mersey, formerly consisting of sand hills, for which this part of the Sefton coast is still well known. It is one of the oldest coastal settlements, pre-dating Liverpool itself, and containing evidence for centuries of human occupation.

Origins of the name: from Norse kirk (church), and dale (valley / ‘road to’); therefore the name may mean “the road to the church”, referring to the road from Liverpool to its mother church at Walton-on-the-Hill.

This would help explain the fact that there are no traces of an ancient church in the area, and only scant sign of an original village. Kirkdale Road was an important route into Liverpool too, once the emerging town became a market destination for traders and producers across Lancashire.

[J.A. Picton recorded that in 1699, when a case was being made for Liverpool becoming a parish in its own right, separate from Walton, one of the reasons was that parishioners were being distracted on their way to church by the ale house in Kirkdale! In that sense the place name referred to a village sitting on the road between Liverpool and Walton, namely Kirkdale Road, which becomes Walton Road at the suggested old centre of Kirkdale itself.]

Morley Street (on a site now occupied by football pitches) can be considered the next best thing to a founding village: it was the place where settlement existed before Liverpool engulfed the area, and can be seen on the early Ordnance Surveys. Kirkdale Marsh lay to the north of here, while Beacon Gutter, a small stream running to the south of Blackfield House, formed the southerly boundary with Liverpool.

Kirkdale c.1900

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Landscape

James Picton, historian and architect, could write in the 19th century that Kirkdale consisted of two hills, with a road (the ‘dale’) running between. The Blackfield Terrace area was one hill, whilst the