Mr & Mrs George Henry Ambridge

Rushden Golden Wedding

Mr. Ambridge is a Sticker - Long Service to Ambulance, Football. Rechabites and Employers 

Sportsmen and ambulance men are among the host of friends offering congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. George Henry Ambridge, of 112 Harborough Road, Rushden, who celebrated their golden wedding on Sunday.

Mr Ambridge has had three great interests – football, ambulance work and the Rechabite movement. In his youth he was a Rushden Town hockey player, belonging to a team which drew no fewer than nine of its players from Roberts Street. Mr Jack Archer, Mr Roger Helsdown and himself are the only survivors of that team today. After the war he gave long service to Rushden Town F.C. as a committee man for 20 years retiring two years ago. Everybody knew him at the Rushden ground and many remembered that his brother Fred used to play for Rushden.

For many years Mr. Ambridge has been a sergeant in he St. John Ambulance Brigade. He joined in 1897 and is now the oldest man on the books. From October 1914 to March 1919 he was on the R.N.S.B.R. staff at a large naval hospital, and this led to an interesting family record of British Legion membership, embracing three generations – Mr Ambridge, his only son G.H. Ambridge, junior (who served in the last war) and his grandson Ken (now in the R.A.F.). As an ambulance man also, Mr Ambridge went to London for King Edward VII’s coronation.

Worked when nine

A Rechabite from the age of seven, he has been through all the offices of the ‘Morning Star’ Tent save those of treasurer and secretary. Sick steward since 1905, he has in fact, held office continuously for 40 years.

Mr Ambridge is 71. He was born in Bayes’s yard, the house (since demolished) standing on a site which is now part of Rushden House Sanatorium grounds. At the age of nine he worked as a sprigging boy for Henry Bull of Little Street, a laster. There he remained for 16 years and then for a few years he was groom and gardener to the late Dr. C. R. Owen. He is still working for Messrs. G. Selwood and Co., boot manufacturers, after 41 years with them. They call him “Father” at the factory, and the firm, in sending him a substantial Golden Wedding gift sent him a written letter thanking him for his faithful service.

Mrs. Ambridge is 72 and was born at Irthlingborough, coming to Rushden 55 years ago to enter the service of the late Mr. Amos Cave. She has not had many interests outside her domestic life, but she must be a good one in her own sphere, because her husband sums up his own story in these words: “I have had a good innings. I have got a real good wife – one of the best in the world”.