Letter from John Valentine to his wife Ursula
Title
Letter from John Valentine to his wife Ursula
Description
Number 12. Has received letter and discusses future with affordability for house, agricultural activities, transport, mortgages and other costs. Talks of some properties she has seen and way forward through agricultural journals rather than London estate agents.
Creator
Date
1943-03-26
Temporal Coverage
Language
Format
Two page handwritten letter
Publisher
Rights
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
EValentineJRMValentineUM430326
Transcription
NUMBER 12. 26-3-43
My Dearest Ursula: The 3 week silence was broken by the arrival of your of 23rd Feb dealing entirely with houses etc I’m sorry to say that I think the properties you describe are quite beyond us. Even the £2500 one seems to be more than I could manage. As you say we should want £650 for purchase money, then an odd £100 or £200 (at least) to complete the house furnishing & in addition some more £100’s for stock, implements seeds & manure as well as a motor car or cycle to take me to the station. Then comes the question of the annual sum required to repay the mortgage & the interest therou [sic]. purchase over20 years would cost approx. £200 so that only £250 or so out of my paltry income would be available for maintenance of you & family, education of latter, travelling to town (about £50pa) repairs etc etc. No it is quite out of the question, I think As to the choice of purchase or lease. I definitely favour the latter. As you know most farms are rented & a landlord is a jolly useful man to have behind one for such things as additional farm buildings, land drainage etc. When the war is over I might find myself with a few hundred pounds in my pocket but even then not enough for a [underlined] tenant [/underlined] farmer to be free of all worries. He needs capital too, you know. I think it would be extremely foolish to pledge my all & a great deal more towards the purchase of a property & to leave myself without any liquid capital for setting up house & embarking on a farm – even if the latter is very small. I addition, I judge from the small area & large price of the properties you mention that all the money is represented by the house – wheras [sic] in any farm the lad is the thing that matter the house being merely an extra (but none the less important) we don’t want anything erected by a wealthy man who wishes to play at farming. I don’t think a London (West End) estate agent is the man for us. Agricultural journals would offer much better opportunities I should say, but by far the best man to approach is a Country Agricultural Adviser or whatever his title is As you know, there are innumerable small holdings in the country, all Grand & there must be constant changers in the tenantry [sic] – especially around Michaelmas. One of those, with a modest home, which could be modernised if necessary is what we want. In any can, before taking on a property I should consult the Country bloke for his OK. It is his job to help people like us. I’m afraid you’ve got a rotten job to do & if I were doing it I should be more than loath to comment an indigust [sic] couple like ourselves to contrast insolving [sic] £2000 – £3000 – All my love darling, John.
[page break]
71
[underlined] Kriegsgefangenenpost [/underlined]
[sticker] EXAMINER 3310 [/sticker]
An MRS U M VALENTINE
LIDO
Empfangsort: TENTERDEN GROVE
StraBe: HENDON
Kreis: LONDON, NW4
Land: ENGLAND
Landesteil (Provinz usw.)
[postmark] GEPRUFT 32 [postmark]
[underlined] Gebuhrenfrei! [/underlined]
[sticker] P.C.90 OPENED BY [/sticker]
Absender:
Vor- und Zuname: Sgt JRm Valentine
Gefangenennummer:
Lager-Bezeichnung: M.-Stammlager Luft [deleted] 1 [/deleted] [inserted] 3. [/inserted]
[underlined] Deutschland (Germany) [/underlined]
[page break]
My Dearest Ursula: The 3 week silence was broken by the arrival of your of 23rd Feb dealing entirely with houses etc I’m sorry to say that I think the properties you describe are quite beyond us. Even the £2500 one seems to be more than I could manage. As you say we should want £650 for purchase money, then an odd £100 or £200 (at least) to complete the house furnishing & in addition some more £100’s for stock, implements seeds & manure as well as a motor car or cycle to take me to the station. Then comes the question of the annual sum required to repay the mortgage & the interest therou [sic]. purchase over20 years would cost approx. £200 so that only £250 or so out of my paltry income would be available for maintenance of you & family, education of latter, travelling to town (about £50pa) repairs etc etc. No it is quite out of the question, I think As to the choice of purchase or lease. I definitely favour the latter. As you know most farms are rented & a landlord is a jolly useful man to have behind one for such things as additional farm buildings, land drainage etc. When the war is over I might find myself with a few hundred pounds in my pocket but even then not enough for a [underlined] tenant [/underlined] farmer to be free of all worries. He needs capital too, you know. I think it would be extremely foolish to pledge my all & a great deal more towards the purchase of a property & to leave myself without any liquid capital for setting up house & embarking on a farm – even if the latter is very small. I addition, I judge from the small area & large price of the properties you mention that all the money is represented by the house – wheras [sic] in any farm the lad is the thing that matter the house being merely an extra (but none the less important) we don’t want anything erected by a wealthy man who wishes to play at farming. I don’t think a London (West End) estate agent is the man for us. Agricultural journals would offer much better opportunities I should say, but by far the best man to approach is a Country Agricultural Adviser or whatever his title is As you know, there are innumerable small holdings in the country, all Grand & there must be constant changers in the tenantry [sic] – especially around Michaelmas. One of those, with a modest home, which could be modernised if necessary is what we want. In any can, before taking on a property I should consult the Country bloke for his OK. It is his job to help people like us. I’m afraid you’ve got a rotten job to do & if I were doing it I should be more than loath to comment an indigust [sic] couple like ourselves to contrast insolving [sic] £2000 – £3000 – All my love darling, John.
[page break]
71
[underlined] Kriegsgefangenenpost [/underlined]
[sticker] EXAMINER 3310 [/sticker]
An MRS U M VALENTINE
LIDO
Empfangsort: TENTERDEN GROVE
StraBe: HENDON
Kreis: LONDON, NW4
Land: ENGLAND
Landesteil (Provinz usw.)
[postmark] GEPRUFT 32 [postmark]
[underlined] Gebuhrenfrei! [/underlined]
[sticker] P.C.90 OPENED BY [/sticker]
Absender:
Vor- und Zuname: Sgt JRm Valentine
Gefangenennummer:
Lager-Bezeichnung: M.-Stammlager Luft [deleted] 1 [/deleted] [inserted] 3. [/inserted]
[underlined] Deutschland (Germany) [/underlined]
[page break]
Collection
Citation
John Ross Mckenzie Valentine, “Letter from John Valentine to his wife Ursula,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed April 25, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/19287.
Item Relations
This item has no relations.