Hermitage

REP: Tom Beels tom@beelsandco.com DISTRIBUTOR: Faith Hervey

History of a name

Many people have wondered at the name of our house – Coasters Cottage – as we are so far from the coast. My wife and I chose it when we started, in 1953, to purchase this cottage; in those far-off days we were working in the British colony in West Africa called the Gold Coast, before it became the independent country of Ghana. It seemed an appropriate name then, and we have kept it ever since. Our daughter was born in January 1954 in the Gold Coast, and I remember we were advised to pay ‘half a crown’ (1⁄8th of a pound) to register her birth at Somerset House, London.

In those days, malaria and other tropical diseases were common in West Africa, and we had annual leave to UK. As conditions improved, this became biennial leave, nine weeks in the UK every two years. For each leave, we returned to Coasters Cottage. In the intervening time we let various friends live in it at a reduced rent, with the proviso that if we were unexpectedly deported from Ghana we could return to Coasters at short notice. I remember the great kindness of David and Joyce Chutter who, in those days lived in the adjacent cottage, and whose two sons Mark and Andrew were contemporary with our two daughters Kristina and Sheena. The unusual spelling Kristina was from a famous Danish missionary because we worked in Denmark before going to West Africa.

Photo: Jeremy Cozens

Alan Ward

If you have an interesting tale about your house name or other village history, please send to Tom by email.

Tom Beels