What are they wrestling over?

Sue Bauman (formerly Lee Jeffs) has found the blog and sends this photo of her, Mark the Clerk and Kate Gilbert on a bench at Ullenwood in 1980. Sue thinks there may have been a hat involved that was being wrestled over. Either that or Kate is torturing Mark by tickling him.

Sue recalls: "I spent most of the summer of 1980 working as part of Frank Green’s scrunging team. We worked hard but also had a lot of fun! We did tend to get noisy and I remember that on more than one occasion the supervisor on the cutting on the other side of the hedge would complain and tell us that we were ruining his peace and quiet. I shan’t name him - maybe he remembers.

Young Mark was a teenager from Cheltenham who had ambitions to be a museum curator. He was bright and curious, but was sometimes a little clumsy on the cuttings, so he came to the scrunging team. He was awesome, a super kid, and he was also deaf: because the wind affected his hearing aids he would switch them off. That’s why we were noisy: we had to speak loud to Mark.

We soon discovered that Mark had a skill that none of the rest of us possessed: hand-writing - he became our clerk, recording all the information from Frank’s samples. If the books still exist from that summer you will see that all the legible writing was his! Mark taught me an important lesson about perseverance and not giving up on his dreams. I learnt a lot from him and I wonder whether he ever fulfilled his ambition. Does anyone know?"