It was Sunday school, cricket...even bombs!

TREVOR Frecknall has covered many challenging assignments during a lifetime in journalism. A former Evening Post sports editor, he had the privilege of reporting Nottingham Forest's two European Cup triumphs in 1979 and 1980 as well as many of Notts County's milestones – and covered Notts cricket during the successful Clive Rice era.

But he knew he faced a tough task when he set out to trace the folk who lived in the Notts village of North Muskham at the time of the Queen's Coronation in 1953.

The labour of love emerged seven years later with a fascinating insight into rural life in middle England during a decade when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was telling the electorate: "You've never had it so good."

Trevor was born in Bathley in 1945 and the family moved a mile or so east to North Muskham when he was in his early teens.

He learned to love the place by delivering daily newspapers before going to school, working in one of the village shops at weekends to fund his sporting interest and, most proudly of all, helping the village men's team win a cricket trophy when he was only 16.

He married his wife Gill in 1966. Since then, work has taken him all over the world, especially after moving into athletics in the early 1990s.

But he continues to be based in North Muskham and that's clearly where his heart is.

The village, four miles north of Newark, sits in a triangle formed by the River Trent, the Great Northern Railway and the Great North Road.

When Queen Elizabeth was crowned on June 2, 1953, North Muskham had more pubs and shops than televisions.

It was an era when mums stayed at home to look after the children and do the housework without the aid of washing machines, electric cookers or vacuum cleaners.

When dads returned from a full day's work to toil away in the garden, providing the family's veg.

When folk who could not afford a coal fire scavenged for drift wood on the Trentside marshes.

Trevor surprised himself with some of his discoveries in charting the lives of everyone in North Muskham during the era before the A1 dual carriageway scythed through the village.

On Coronation Day (June 2, 1953), it rained so persistently that North Muskham's celebratory procession had to be cancelled.

In impressive detail, the author evocatively recreates the route that would have been taken and takes readers into each home along the way.

Then, virtually every youngster in the village attended Sunday school at the Methodist Chapel.

"If you didn't and your dad found out, you got a clout", recalled resident Barry Talbot.

"Anniversary services were a bit daunting. I remember standing in the pulpit when I was 15 and getting my recitation all wrong."

There was also fun and games once a year when North Muskham children took part in the Newark and District Sunday School Festival. More than 1,200 youngsters took part in 1953.

Throughout the country, Friday night was then music night on the wireless – except in North Muskham.

Charles Copp, who lived at Riverside Cottage, made sure it was bell ringing night at St Wilfrid's Church, where he was a devoted warden for many years.

Two of the village's greatest characters were Percy Spafford and Jack Guy.

A hard hitting batsmen and sharp-eyed fielder, Percy played local cricket well into middle age.

Jack, a cheerful chappy, caused a hasty evacuation of Newark Police Station one day by turning up with a bunch of unexploded mines in the back of a lorry – he unearthed them helping to clear Balderton Airfield to build the hospital.

Compiled with the help of residents' recollections, newspaper archives and parish records, the book recaptures the true spirit of the post-war generation.

Coronation Village, North Muskham in the 1950s, by Trevor Frecknall, is published by History into Print at £10.95.