16th - 22nd March 2026 E3 S11 Derek Tucker, Greg Fergusson, Starfest

🎙️ Derek Tucker – Tisbury nonagenarian recalls wartime pub life, working locally and his love of vintage cars  

👮➡️💪 Greg Fergusson - former Tisbury bobby, on policing in the village and starting afresh as a personal trainer at the Nadder Centre

⭐ Starfest Spotlight and all What’s On 

🐦 Birdsong from a dunnock in Wardour

TisTalk is a community podcast from Tisbury, Wiltshire, and the Cranborne Chase, with Mary Myers and guests.  

Transcript

Derek Tucker TisTalk Episode 3 Season 11 16th March 2026

Transcription                     

AM = Anne Martin     DT = Derek Tucker

AM: Hello, everyone. I'm with Derek Tucker today who gave a wonderful talk to the History Society recently about growing up in Tisbury. So Derek, you were born in Tisbury, weren't you?

DT: I was born in the Crown Inn, which is a public house in Church Street in 1935. 

AM: Oh right, and what did your parents do? 

DT: My parents were the Landlord and Landlady of the public house, they had it from 1928 to’ 61, thirty-three years.

AM: A long time then

DT: Yeah. I was born in bedroom above the archway at The Crown. We didn't have any garden, we had just a concrete patch in the middle because the houses go round it, all the way around to the houses

AM: And where did you go to school? 

DT: I went to school at the Infant School which is opposite the Bennett Arms halfway up the High Street. 

AM: Right okay

DT: That was the Infant School, big school was the Hinton, now the Hinton Hall. 

AM: Okay and how long did you go to school for, when did you leave school? 

DT: I left school at 15. 

AM: Right

DT: And I started to work at Gurds Garage which is just below The Crown in the fields there because there was no houses at that time. Harold Gurd came out after the war and um, he opened up this garage in 1948 and I went to work there at 15 in 1950. I got 26 shillings a week and I gave my mother a pound and I had six shillings. 

AM: What did you spend your six shillings on?

DT: I could go to Salisbury on the bus because the bus went from The Square every hour each way to ten o'clock at night. I could go to the cinema in Salisbury and pay for the bus fare and the cinema and have a cup of coffee on six shillings in 1950. 

AM: Didn't your father run a taxi company at one time? 

DT: Yeah, he did run a taxi, yeah he had a taxi service. Because he had a taxi service before the war he could get petrol where everybody else's cars were laid up and he used to pick up the domestic staff from Pyt House and Hatch House and Wardour Castle, take them to the station on their days off. Then the war started in 1940, so, um, we were full of soldiers then, we had soldiers billeted in The Crown and they used to wash outside of our back door. So...

AM: Where were the soldiers from that you had billeted? 

DT: Well, they were British soldiers 

AM: British soldiers, right, did you have any American soldiers here? 

DT: Yeh there was American soldiers in the South Western, in the stables there because The Crown had a function room and stables underneath so they used to use both those. And there was the workhouse, which is where we are now had British soldiers, plus, they moved out and we had American soldiers there in 1943 and the same at Fonthill camp. At Dunkirk, the Irish Guards came to Fonthill camp from Dunkirk and reassembled there. But they moved out in '43 so the Americans could come and go to Salisbury Plain and Imber village to practice house-to-house fighting, door-to-door fighting because they didn't know how to do that.

AM: And you mentioned the workhouse, we're now in Tuckingmill and this was the site roughly where the workhouse was, where your house is now?

DT: Yeah the wall’s still there and I've still got the wall there. 

AM: Oh, I can see the wall of the workhouse outside your house.

DT: Yeah, yeah this is the bottom half of that, this is the orchard, this part. 

AM: Right and so, afterwards where was the workhouse after here?

DT: It was knocked down in '69, I think. 

AM: Oh, right, quite late on yeah

DT: Yeah and then there was some, it was derelict for some year and it was built, these houses was built in 1984 when I moved here. 

Am: You moved here when it was a new house, okay.

DT: Yeah

AM: And how did Tisbury cope with having an influx of soldiers, British and American soldiers? 

DT: Oh well because we had 1100 white Americans at Fonthill lake, then by you know, you'd go to the Beckford and down to the lake

AM: Yes, yes. 

DT: Well that was all Nissan huts there, there was 1100 Americans there, after the Irish Guards, and 400 black Americans, er coloured Americans here. So, er they used to fight as they do, so they used to have to come out alternate nights.

AM: Oh really?

DT: Yeah

AM: Okay because that was quite a big influx of people on a small place?

DT: There was more Americans than there was locals, this was about 1200 at the time because there was no housing estates at all.

AM: Yes, yes.

DT: There was no Churchill's estate was built after the war, because people were squatting Nissan huts out at Fonthill lake. So that’s why Churchill's estate was the first estate built after the war.

AM: Right, and you were too young, of course, to go to war in the Second World War?

DT: Yeah, I was nine at D-Day

AM: Right, right, okay and your father was running the pub and his taxi service?

DT: Yeah, well, he had a motorcycle accident and he had a steel plate in his shin so he couldn't go, so he was an Air Raid Warden

AM: A bit like Dad's army then?

DT: Well, yeah, yeah, there was a Home Guard.

AM: Great and so after the war, when they all left, Tisbury then went back to being a small village again?

DT: Yeah, because we had six public houses and a club at that time so all the pubs were filled, as you can imagine, you know, through the war and that, yeah.

AM: And did they survive then after the war, when all the soldiers left, those six public houses?

DT: Oh yeah the pubs were really busy in the 50s and 60s yeah

AM: And there were more shops, weren't there right up the High Street, I believe, at that time?

DT: Yeah, there was Howells shop, which was opposite the Victoria Hall that was a high-class shop, you know, for vegetables and they had a van and that.  And where the pottery shop is, down at the bottom um that was the International Stores. So, yeah, we had two chemists where the bookshop is now that was Gulliver's the chemist, and Idris’ shop Kirby’s was the Boots the Chemist and we had two butchers where the takeaway now is, that was a butcher’s shop, but the hairdressers next door was still a hairdressers. 

AM: Yeah, so quite, quite different.  So, talking about your working life then, where did you, did you work in the same place your whole working life or did you change?

DT: No, I started working the garage in 1950 and I stayed there until I got my call-up papers for National Service in '53. And I did National Service for two years in the REME and then when I came out, I worked for United Dairies for five or six years. And Harold Gurd from the garage came and asked me to come back to the garage so, I went back to the garage in '62. I stayed at the garage until '72 and we were earning 23 pounds a week. And the Parmiters were paying 25 pounds a week plus ten hours over time and I had two growing sons, so I went to Parmiters on the maintenance and I stayed there for 27 years until I retired. 

AM: And you were showing me earlier some pictures of some army vehicles that you restored, can you tell us a bit about them?

DT: Yeh Roger Staddon who ran the sawmills, he had these army vehicles and we decided to do them up so we could go to the Dorset Steam Fair and it took us ten years. 

AM: Thank you so much, that's really interesting. I just want to ask you, if you were castaway to a desert island, what music would you take with you? Can you tell us one piece of music you'd love to have?

DT: Well, when I lost my wife, it was her funeral, I asked him to play "We’ll Meet Again",

Glenn Miller, "We’ll Meet Again".

AM: That's great, we'll play that for you, thank you so much