Born: William Arthur Everitt, Leicester 1925, died: Oadby 2008
These memoirs are the first part of my father’s life story, which I encouraged him to write down. They run up to 1938. He didn’t like talking about the war or what he did then. However, we now know that part of his work was to inspect crashed aircraft to determine the cause.
The text is from files found on his computer after his death, in an old format from which the text had to be extracted and repaired. Some of the text appears to have been scanned from printed (perhaps originally typewritten?) pages by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which sometimes misreads words, while other partially-duplicated text appeared to be corrections, so it was necessary to work out the meaning in places and make edits for readability.
The very first file was titled “Chapter 1” and, although subsequent chapters are not labelled, there are four main headings:
After which, there are no further files.
The tribute read out at his funeral gives a general background, with some details from friends and family.
“Leicester was described in a magazine in 1909: it is difficult to think of Leicester as a town of considerable industrial importance. The impression remains with one of a clear and sunny atmosphere with wide streets, clean brick buildings, and a constant background of green trees. The boot and hosiery factories appear to give out little or no smoke. Leicester continued to grow rapidly during the 20th century. It was made a city in 1919.”