Last house for the Regent In Amersham-on-the-Hill, 59 years ago this week, 100s of people could be seen queueing down Sycamore Road. They were waiting in line for the Regent box office to buy tickets for the Audrey Hepburn film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Although a popular movie, the high demand for tickets was because the final show, on Saturday 10 March 1962, was to be the last ever screening at the cinema and everyone in the town wanted to be there. The fate of the cinema had been sealed the previous year when Amersham Council sanctioned the application by British Land for its change of use. The owners of the Regent, Shipman & King, held only a lease on the premises and this had now expired.
The new MPs included Harold Wilson, Michael Foot and Barbara Castle. Elected to Coventry West, one of the youngest MPs, 34-year-old Maurice Edelman, was a tall, urbane, well‐dressed writer who lived in Chesham Bois. As a novelist he joined Benjamin Disraeli and Jeffry Archer in the exclusive club of British MPs who were also best-selling authors.
The Edelman Family Israel Maurice Edelman was born in Cardiff, the son of a Jewish photographer, who had emigrated from Germany in 1904. It was a cultured, musical household and, at Cardiff High School, Edelman gained a state scholarship to study modern and medieval languages at Trinity College, Cambridge.
THE article written by Mark Page about the alternative form of cash currency known as Trade Tokens (Nostalgia January 29) has elicited a fair amount of response. The Trade Token, valued at one half-penny, issued by “Richard Lucas of Wickham, 1670”, bearing a lion rampant and the inscription “Rather dead than disloyal” was first unearthed at Bowerdean, High Wycombe in 1940. Until the early 1920s Bowerdean was agricultural land, with three farms in its vicinity - Birch’s, Plaistowe’s and Phelp’s. There was also a wooded area, which is still known as Lucas Wood, perhaps named in the 17th century after Richard Lucas.