Former Advertiser reporter remembers Trevor White, a great Rugby man who died before his time

What's in a name, a certain celebrated son of leafy Warwickshire once wondered.

Indeed. But perhaps more to the point, how does that name come about in the first place?

Take this mundane example. Wood Street, Rugby. I can only imagine it was named after someone called Wood, because it must have been many a long year since there were any large clumps of trees in that area.

All right, there may once have been a primaeval forest sweeping down the hill that would one day become the settlement of Rugby, but as our Celtic forebears had no written language, we have no way of knowing.

My earliest memory of Wood Street was the smell of the gasworks, once whiffed, never forgotten.

The Churchover bus always stopped to pick up passengers opposite this grimy edifice, thus facilitating a good few nostrils’ worth of fumes before that Midland Red diesel engine once

again sputtered into life to go under the Newbold Road railway bridge.

Ah yes, the gasworks. Rotten eggs… and then some.

My parents lived in Poplar Grove when they first married, and so my elder sister attended Wood Street school, where she remained even after the family had departed for Churchover.

The headmistress in those days was a Mrs White, and there will still be Rugby people who will have fond memories of their schooldays at Wood Street.

A while back I had a long phone conversation with Colin White, her surviving son, who now lives in Braunston. I say surviving because Colin’s brother Trevor died in a road accident in June, 1968.