WE are very fortunate with our readership and contributors who keep the memories and pictures coming.

But it does sometimes mean it takes a few weeks for pictures to get in the paper.

So although we are past the actual anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation Christine Legg’s (nee Newman) pictures of the St Michael’s street party to celebrate the event are far too good and numerous to waste.

Mrs Newman was seven at the time these pictures of the street party were taken and she and her brother Keith, who sadly died about 20 years ago, both enjoyed all the fun.

She said: “It was a fancy dress street party for the children of St Michael’s Lane.

“I am in one of the pictures in a tutu and glasses and my brother was dressed as a drummer boy.

“There are some people I can remember but a lot that I can’t.”

The picture of the line-up of adults is the organising committee with her dad Fred Newman on the far left, on the far right is his cousin Fred Hawkins and she thinks Charlie Newton is fourth from the left.

She thinks Mrs Sibley is on the far left of the front row, but doesn’t know the lady next to her but then it’s a Mr Coombes, Mrs Ward and her daughter Mrs Goddard.

Mrs Newman, 67, added: “I remember a lot about the party.

“There were a lot of children in St Michael’s Lane in those days.

“They had a cake for the party and on the cake they had a Coronation coach which was given to the youngest child in the street who was Karen Wadham who was just a baby and I thought that was most unfair.”

She also thought it was most unfair that the child who won the fancy dress competition was the girl who’d gone dressed as a TV with a cardboard box on her head.

But then TVs in those days were a rarity, she remembers. Her own family bought a set specially for the occasion but the young Christine preferred to watch it at her friend’s house as her father had the only TV shop in the town – Bannister and House in South Street, next to the cinema.

Mrs Newman says there was a real sense of community in those days with cottages where the Waitrose car park is now.

Her dad Fred Newman ran a little grocer’s shop on the corner opposite where the Hope and Anchor and it was frequented by all the employees from the different net companies.

She said: “We used to get rope from the factories and skip in the road because there were no vehicles about then.

“Lots of people remember my dad’s shop. A friend of mine said if it hadn’t been for him her family would have starved as he gave her stuff on tick.

“It’s a good job my mother never knew.”

Her mother Joyce only passed away last year, aged 93, and it was when looking through her things on the anniversary of her death that Mrs Newman found these photographs. She also had a great aunt Hilda Burwood who was foreman in one of the netting rooms who married on her retirement at 60 and became Mrs Battrick.