Missing 12-year-old schoolgirl Margaret Clarke was found safe and well in Ryde after a 4-day search involving 500 Police officers, it was reported on 9th September 1954.
Margaret – from Birmingham – had been holidaying in Bournemouth with her parents, who had found the following note in their holiday flat:
“Dear Mum and Daddy, I have gone for a swim. Love, Margaret.”
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She had taken a bathing costume, towel and handbag. However, after having found no trace of Margaret on the beach, her father George Clarke informed the Police she had gone missing.
Margaret was apprehended by PC Rex Selby outside an amusement arcade after she had been recognised by members of the public, who had seen her photograph in newspapers.
Margaret’s mother said after she had been found:
“She probably doesn’t know about the hue and cry to find her and how terribly anxious her father and I have been. We are hiding her in the country until all the whole business has died down.
“What she has done is very wrong and has hurt us. We were frantic with worry. We don’t want Margaret to think she has been clever. she hasn’t.
Article continues below this advertisement “I have no idea what she did for 4 days. She is back safely. That’s all that matters.”
The Police at Ryde informed her parents that she told them she earned money by carrying luggage ashore from ferryboats and slept on the sands and in seafront shelters. With the money, she went to the cinema and ate in cafes.
She had other meals from families whose children she joined in games on the sands.
Margaret’s Dad said:
” She joined the Girl Guides recently, and I think that gave her the idea of wandering off and trying to look after herself. I won’t punish her.”
Her mother continued:
“I think she saw the outline of the Isle of Wight from Bournemouth and thought it would be nice to go there. Or she may have bumped her head swimming and lost her memory.”
An Isle of Wight Police Officer concluded:
“It was all just a childish adventure.”
Margaret herself told a mainland newspaper reporter:
“I wanted to prove I was a good Girl Guide and quite capable of looking after myself if necessary.
“I took a bus from Bournemouth to New Milton, and after watching the ponies in the New Forest I walked about 6 miles to Lymington.
“I slept the night on a bench behind a public house. In the morning the landlord gave me a cup of tea and I took the train to Southampton.”
Margaret continued:
“There I got a little lost, but a policeman showed me where the Isle of Wight ferry was. When I got to Cowes I had spent most of the 7s (35p) on me, so I had to walk most of the way to Sandown where I had a swim.
“At night I walked around the shops and amusement arcades, and slept in a beach tent. It was draughty and cold.
“I walked along the sands to Shanklin. As I had no money I went to the railway station and earned 5s carrying people’s luggage from the entrance to their hotels.”
Margaret concluded her story:
“I had spaghetti on toast for supper, had a walk round, and slept the night on the sand beneath the pier at Sandown.
“A man gave me a lift in his van to Ryde, where I slept the night by some deckchairs on the beach.
“[The next day] I had no food until 16:00, when a woman let me share her picnic tea on the beach after I helped to feed her little baby.”
An enterprising young lady! But I understand why her mother would have gone spare.
……About this website. I’ve mentioned the slowing down of getting onto the site to comment.
But it also feels less friendly and about the Island because the site seems swimming in adverts now.
Obviously money needs to be made somehow, when news is free to readers. But the sense of warmth (and grousing!) from a particular, localised community is what has created our interest, but now that local element seems secondary as one scrolls through lots of more prominent (than news stories) adverts that at first look similar to local stories, but then usually aren’t.
The previous version of IE seemed to give prominence to Island stories and it was easy to identify them and go straight to them.
It now seems a big soup with far too many similar ingredients to produce a distinctive flavour.
Sorry I can’t be positive about it. I’m sure there’s been a huge amount of work gone into the change. Good luck.
Good morning Mary. The number of advertisements on the website has not really changed from our previous version; there is 1 extra on the left hand column (which didn’t exist before) but there are actually less ads, as we have done away with the full-screen placements between articles.