A stroll along the Thames Path from Hampton Court to Shepperton

A lovely walk in autumn sunshine. John Rogers describes it thus in his YouTube blurb:

Starting at Hampton Court Station in East Molesey we walk one of the most beautiful sections of the wonderful Thames Path. 

We pass through Hurst Park, look across the river at Taggs Island, Garrick's Temple, pass by Molesey Reservoirs with its WW2 tank defences, stop for lunch at Walton Marina and cross the river at Walton Bridge. 

Our walk is guided by Donald Maxwell's 1932 book A Pilgrimage of the Thames and takes us to the ancient St Nicholas church at Shepperton. A church has stood on the site since the 7th Century. 

Our Thames path odyssey ends at the Shepperton home of author J.G Ballard.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

The Joy of Six 1372

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The latest connections from our Trivia Desk

These just in.

In her London Review of Books review of Barbra Streisand's memoir My Name is Barbra, Malin Hay records:

By the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’).

Did he really dress like that? When Fischer burst on to the international scene aged 15, he dressed like any other American teenager of the Fifties and wore a T-shirt. A few years later, he agreed to fly over to record a programme for the BBC because he had calculated that the schedule would allow him enough time to be measured for a Savile Row suit.

Certainly, he was well turned out for his world championship match against Boris Spassky - there was no sign of a deranged pilot then.

******

At the start of his biography of Noel Coward, Oliver Soden writes:

Violet Coward doted on her son. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, disarmingly bright, and he showed signs of being musical, reaching tiny fingers up to the piano in the parlour of the Cowards' semi-detached house, known as "Helmsdale", at 5 Waldegrave Road in Teddington.

Violet and her husband, Arthur, had befriended the local celebrity Robert [actually Richard] "R. D." Blackmore, bestselling author of Lorna Doone, and he agreed to become godfather to their child, sending a carriage drawn by a white pony to trundle the boy, resplendent in his Victorian skirts, around the streets of the prosperous Middlesex suburb.

But this was not Noel: it was his older brother Russell Arthur Blackmore Coward, who died, aged six, the year before Noel was born.

Because I think I already knew about Neil Diamond and Bobby Fischer being classmates of Barbra Streisand, R.D. Blackmore being the godfather of Noel Coward's brother is our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Later. As well as correcting my and Oliver Soden's errors, Richard James tells me that R.D. Blackmore and Noel Coward's father were both chess players.