Category Archives: Updates

What was in Rosemary Tonks house during her thirty years there? Very few people, if any, entered her home at the top of Bath Hill where she lived in seculsion. She was a famous poet who had disappeared and no … Continue reading →

Today, Saturday 10 October 2015, is the 150th anniversary of Cardinal Raphael Merry del Val’s birth. He was secretary of state to Pope Pius X and and is thought to have nearly became Pope himself when present at a conclave. His … Continue reading →

A blue plaque has been unveiled on Boscombe’s Old Schoolhouse in Gladstone Road to recall Frederick Moser and Sir Percy Shelley. Sir Percy is known as the poet’s son who live at Boscombe Manor which we now call Shelley Park. But … Continue reading →

A memorial stone to Pilot Cecil Hight has been placed at the Walsford Road, Benellen Avenue and Leven Avenue junction on the west side of Meyrick Park. He was shot down during the battle of Britain and died on this … Continue reading →

Bishop Simon Burrows has died aged 86. For twenty years he was Bishop of Buckingham and at his death he was honorary Assistant Bishop of his home diocese Winchester. His grandfathers were both bishops. Simon Burrows was aged 8 when … Continue reading →

Today Thursday 23 April 2015 is the 100th anniversary of Rupert Brooke’s death. He discovered a love of poetry whilst staying with his aunts in Bournemouth at their house called, by chance, Grantchester Dene. Brooke had yet to live at … Continue reading →

Boscombe has a Wollstonecraft Street named after Sir Percy Shelley’s grandmother, early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Now a new street in London is to be called Wollstonecraft Street. The location is behind King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations. The pioneer feminist … Continue reading →

The John Singer Sargent exhibition opening today (12 Feb) at the National Portrait Gallery brings together his two surviving Bournemouth paintings. Both depict author Robert Louis Stevenson at home in Westbourne. Sargent visited first in 1884 but the painting made … Continue reading →

Fr Gerard W Hughes SJ,  who died this week at Boscombe aged 90, will be buried  at St Beuno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre in North Wales where he was once based. In 1985, just three years after leaving Wales, his best seller … Continue reading →

Fr Gerard Hughes, Jesuit priest and author of God of Surprises, died this afternoon in Boscombe. He had retired to the house attached to Corpus Christi Church. He died hours after All Souls Day and a week after the publication of … Continue reading →