Extract from an email to me from John Cooper.
"Regarding the photograph of my mother and father sitting on Leysdown Beach. My brother remembers the day. The young girl next to him was a neighbour from home. My sister who was there but not in the picture remembers a man on the sea wall with a camera on a tripod. I was also there but again not in the picture.
We all agree it was taken about 1956 plus or minus 1 year.
My father purchased an old "Coach" which was converted to a caravan, on Central Beach caravan site in 1951. Many people from London had caravans and chalets at Leysdown. Three families in our street alone.
I spent my childhood summers roaming the beaches, fields, woods and marshes of the Leysdown end of the Island.
We walked as far as Harty Ferry and back. But when we walked the cliffs and beaches to Sheerness we got the bus back.
Every family I knew had 20 mm cannon shells polished, and standing on the mantelpiece.
These were picked up from the beach between Leysdown and Shellness.
The area off the beach was a RAF gunnery range. The beach was littered with .303 cases and bullets. The 20mm were a bit rarer but still plenty of them.
I remember watching Spitfires and Hurricanes dogfighting over the sea."