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FAREWELL BERNIE – BUT JUST TILL NOVEMBER
 At the end of July, URC Minister Bernie Collins begins a three month sabbatical, which he and his wife Gwen, Minister at Trinity URC High Wycombe, will spend back in Papua New Guinea, where they lived and worked for 16 years until 1990. We wish them well, and send Ickenham’s greetings with them on their journey.
Note the revised contact details top left on the masthead on page 1. In Bernie’s absence, any messages left with administrator Shellie D’Arcy or on the church number’s voicemail service, will be passed to an appropriate member of the Elder Team.
We look forward to hearing about Gwen’s and Bernie’s travels in future editions of ICN.
DONATIONS
This month, receipt is acknowledged, with grateful thanks, for the donation from:
Rosa Kaye of The Buntings
Please note that the ICN team now take a short break and there is no separate August edition of the newsletter. Copy for the next issue, the September one, should be with the team by 12 noon on 13th August.
THE MEMORIAL HALL – OR ELSIE BAKER DANCING SCHOOL
If you lived in Ickenham before 1979, then you may remember the old building pictured here. It was built before World War I on Ickenham High Road as a Reading Room, supplying newspapers “to give the men of Ickenham the opportunity of knowing what was going on in the world around them”. When the library later provided that function, the hall was renamed the Men’s Institute, and became the centre of social activities locally.
Extended to accommodate a full size snooker table after the war, it was dedicated to those who did not return from battle, and officially renamed again as ‘The Ickenham Institute and War Memorial Hall’ – quite a mouthful; but from 1946 onwards, it was known to most Ickenham residents simply as the ‘Elsie Baker Dancing School’.
Elsie, now aged 84, moved to Ickenham when she was 16. Her father taught woodwork and handicraft and her mother was an excellent pianist. Elsie took up dancing at the age of 5 and after school landed a “smashing” job as a Civil Servant with the Air Ministry where she met her husband, Wallace (known as Tim) Martin. However, the call of dancing was too strong and, after gaining her professional qualifications, in 1946 she started the dance-teaching career in Ickenham which was to last fifty years. Initially her mother played piano for the classes, and in later years a number of other talented pianists took over, including Mrs Houghton, Mrs Ruthven, Mrs Cook and Mrs Anthony.
During this time Elsie taught hundreds of Ickenham children from the age of three to eighteen, including her own two daughters. She guided most of her pupils through ballet exams and produced many colourful shows which were performed in the URC Hall.
The Memorial Hall was used for the classes because it had a good floor. But it was constructed from corrugated iron, including the roof, so that, “It was red hot in the summer and too noisy to hear yourself speak when it rained!”
Despite much controversy, the hall was demolished in 1979. In its place two years later came a small office block, known as ‘Lynx House’ but still officially the Ickenham Institute War Memorial Hall. Elsie’s classes continued there until her retirement, but on the first floor. (The piano had to be taken to pieces and carried upstairs!)
Lynx House remains to this day the home of the Ickenham Institute Snooker Club. And Elsie, who continued to live in Ickenham after her retirement, remembers her teaching days fondly, and told us, “I have enjoyed a very happy and lucky life.”
AFN
Sadly, soon after ICN’s Alan Noad visited Elsie to research and prepare this article, we learned that she had passed away. We extend our sympathies to her relatives and friends.
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