The North Norfolk village with the fascinating history  

'Friday' Forsdick     - Game Keeper and Fisherman

Alexander Easter Forsdick,
son of a gamekeeper, was himself a gamekeeper to the lord of the manor, Mr Savory at Kelling Hall (as had been John Hancock of Salthouse). Born on Good Friday 1879, Alexander was known to everybody as 'Friday'.

Although a Blakeney man born and bred,
Friday spent several years in Salthouse where his daughter Betty was born.

Friday' and his dog on Salthouse beach 1920s

Betty as a girl in Salthouse

'Friday' enlisted in the army at the outbreak of WWI and served in Mesopatamia. After the war he made Salthouse his home, buying two derelict cottages at the east end of the village, opposite the road to the beach, and building himself a bungalow on the site.

He lived there during the 1920s with his two sons Cyril and Alec. It was during this time that he made his living from the sea and from the heath (as a common righter) like his neighbours, the Cookes and the Holmans.

Friday Friday Forsdick (furthest right in the group around the net)
hauling in his catch of mackerel on Salthouse beach c 1923.

left: The white bungalow as it was when Friday built it.

below left:
Friday with his boat on the beach

In 1930, Friday's first marriage having failed, he met and married Evelyn Fletcher of High Kelling (known as Flossie), and they lived in the bungalow he had built.

Later, when they were offered a council holding in the North Walsham area, they left Salthouse, to take up farming, and both worked very hard to establish themselves.

The white bungalow was let and their first tenants were their friends, newly-weds Freda and Alec Morse. [click here for Freda's account of her time in the white bungalow]

Friday's daughter Betty was born in 1933. It is thanks to her that we have these details and photos.
Friday became very successful despite the slump in farming, he moved on to increase the acreage of his farm in1935 and again in 1939.

Friday's pony 'Lizzie' loaded with Salthouse children. His younger son Alec is standing second from the left c 1925.
Lizzie pulls the boat up the beach

In 1946 he retired from farming and returned to live in the Salthouse bungalow. Betty has kept many newspaper cuttings and photos, and the picture on the right, from the EDP, shows Friday (second from the right) salvaging what he can of his beehives after the 1949 flood.

Betty says, "I remember Father telling me that the Cookes used to run along the village shouting 'The water's over! The water's over!' You see, it's always dark when this happens, or seems to be. The water never comes over when it's like a mill-pond; it's always a terrific gale.
Every time a breaker came in, just as it does on the beach, the wave would break up and over the bungalow and the windows would be covered with flotsam and jetsam, and the chances are, something would be in it that would break your window and then the sea would be in. Very few houses in Salthouse had a front door in those days because of the sea. Father had extended the bungalow when he retired, and put a bathroom in; they then had a problem with water coming up the drains from the sea, and the wells were contaminated. That's when my mother said 'Enough is enough; I'm going'.

And this decided my father to sell the bungalow and move to Stiffkey. Our Salthouse days were ended."

left: Beach picnic c1930, taken before Betty was born. Looking at this photo, Betty says "No one would believe that when this was taken you could park cars on the beach".

From the left: Kenneth Allen of Blakeney, Betty's mother Flossie, Ernest and Edith Allen (Kenneth'.s parents and Betty's godparents-to-be), and other friends.

Behind them: Fred Haylock's beach hut and Hopper Holman's old railway-carriage where Granny Ruth once served teas.