John Wilson
If you go into the village playground, you will see a sign saying” Goose Green “nailed to the back fence. It looks old, and yes, it is, for it was put up in the first playground forty years ago by George Wilson, who lived in the village, at the time retaking of the Falklands Islands and marking the landing at “Goose Green” by British forces. He made the sign from an “offcut” of wood from a boat I was building at the time.
The writing has never been touched up nor the wood rotted.
Since then it has been at the back of two other playgrounds and “Goose Green “is now the registered name for the playground, on maps and in the parish records, as a tribute to those events.
If you had been in the village at that time you would have seen a large banner across the road saying “Nott Out”.
This was referring to the Defence Secretary John Nott who had been responsible for the scraping large amounts of the armed forces including many ships which nearly made it impossible for the Falklands to be retaken. So strong was the feeling at the time over cuts to the armed forces.
Now forty years on we would not be able to find sufficient numbers of British registered merchant ships needed to be taken up from trade to support such a venture.
We cannot even find British registered ferries to cross the channel to go on holiday as we have seen recently!
