Memories
of Wheathampstead 1941 – 1976
(by Pam
Murray - January 2003)
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Coming to Wheathampstead
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I remember the first time that I came to
Wheathampstead as if it was yesterday, it was a drizzly, damp miserable
day when my mother, her little dog Vic and me, a fourteen year old, with
my kitten in a box with holes in the top, got off the bus outside the
Church and wandered down the village looking for someone to ask the way
to Marford Road, although I think in those days it was called Hatfield
Road. We went into the Wool shop to ask and also to get a ribbon
to tie my hair back, it being fairly long, soaking wet and hanging in
rat’s tails, I don’t think I had ever felt so miserable in my life.
I had had to leave all my friends and the home and surroundings that I
had always known and here we were in the middle of the country knowing
no one and having nothing.
Twenty four hours before, we had been living
in a fairly large comfortable old Victorian house in a pleasant suburb
of London, and although we had had some air raids and had to go into the
Anderson shelter in the garden most nights it wasn’t too bad, then the
night before we found ourselves in Wheathampstead we had a most
horrendous air raid and lost most of out belongings including our home,
luckily we were in the shelter at the time so suffered no actual
physical harm. The firm that my father worked for in London had
been severely bombed a few weeks before and had relocated to St. Albans.
The `Guvnor` hearing that we had been bombed out ourselves sent a van to
pick us up and we were literally dumped in St. Albans with nothing but
the clothes we wore, the animals and little else. My mother made a
some enquiries about accommodation and we were directed to the Salvation
Army who said that an elderly couple in Wheathampstead, a Mr. and
Mrs. Hudson were offering a room in their home in return for help in
the house and garden. So that is how we came to be in the village.
On the way round to this house, no 14, Marford Road (I think it
was 14,) we had to pass the Police house that was on the corner opposite
Collins Antiques, where Ted Barker, the village copper was in the
front garden, we asked him if he knew of anybody that would look after
my kitten, he very kindly said he would and gave it a loving home for
many years. I couldn’t stay at the Hudson’s but was found
accommodation with Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Allen in Mount Road
by Murphy Chemicals, Mr. Allen was the local coal merchant, he
also had a Ford Pilot, which he used as a taxi. A Miss Doreen
Collins a schoolteacher at the senior school was also staying there.
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The Guides and school
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As a keen Girl Guide, one of the first
things I wanted to know was if there was a Guide company in the village,
and luckily there was. The captain was Miss Bubbles Rainbow
(real name Zuleka) who lived in one of the houses on the left
hand side of Marford Road just before you come to the Nelson Pub.
(we used to call them the `posh houses` as opposed to the council houses
on the opposite side of the road) The lieutenant of the company was Miss
Betty Elvin from the Lea Valley estate. I think
that Guide Company was the saving grace as far as I was concerned.
We used to meet in the corrugated hut at the back of the Church
yard by the old infants school. (Bury Green?) I should think it has long
gone. It had an old iron stove in it and that’s about all, and
many a time some one would put their foot through the floorboards only
for it to have to be patched up yet again. The Youth Club was also
held there, run by Miss Downer who used to live in one of the
pair of houses that fronted the pavement half way up Wheathampstead
Hill. I remember one evening whilst we were at a Youth club
meeting a most dreadful smell pervaded the hall and was tracked down to
young Dickie Dawes having put a cow’s horn in the old stove,
which he had most probably purloined from Simons the butchers
(now a tea room I believe). Dickie’s sister Ena used to
work for Hall’s the baker; she drove a small van delivering bread
round the village and outskirts. Another roundsman was Maurice
(Mo) Odell who delivered milk by horse and cart from the farm
up where Rectory Drive is now (was it Thrales?) I can see Mo now in his
breeches and Clark Gable moustache jumping on and off the back of the
cart while the horse slowly plodded along. Mo was a lovely dancer,
and I used to often dance with him at the local hop which was held at
the senior school nearly every week, the music invariably being provided
by a three piece band consisting of piano, drums and saxophone, and of
course playing all the old sentimental wartime tunes.
Although I was past school leaving age at
the time, I was able to go to the village school for a while as I
hadn’t been able to go to school in London for a year or so, as most
of the other children were evacuated and the schools were taken over by
the Army and other wartime organisations. I didn’t enjoy my time
at the school in the village, as it seemed as if the teachers and pupils
alike had a down on those ‘filthy Londoners’.
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Necton Road
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When we had been in the village for about a
year my parents were able to rent a cottage in Necton Road from Mr.
Titimuss so I could then live at home with them. The cottage
was very basic with gas light and the toilet, one of three in
a row, up the yard, I used to wait for ages to make sure the other
two were empty before I ‘went’.
The cottage had no bathroom but a big brick
copper at the end of the scullery that we had to heat the
water in, it was heated by a fire underneath the copper and because of
the coal shortage, we had to burn whatever we could lay our hands on,
like old shoes, old books, bits of wood etc., before having a bath in a tin
bath that used to hang outside on the wall. The scullery was a
single storey lean to, it had a shallow stone sink (which I still
have as a sink garden) It really seemed like living in the dark ages
after our house in London, but we were only too grateful to have
somewhere of our own to live. After the war my parents and my
brother bought the two cottages 26 and 28 Necton Road for 300
pounds each. They did upgrade and modernise them to a degree at a
later date.
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Starting work
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After leaving school I went to work at Murphy
and Son at Cavern House, I was only there for six months and
then went on to do a Nursery nurse’s training,, first, in St.
Albans and then in Welwyn Garden City. I used to get
the train every morning, it was quite a walk from Necton Road to
the Station and invariably I left it a bit late and by the time I had
run up the slope to the station and then puffed my way up the old wooden
stairs to the platform I would collapse in a heap in the carriage, the
door of which being held open by the porter, whose name I believe was Rueben,
he used to look over the bridge to see if anybody was running up the
hill to catch the train and if there was he would hold the train up
until the 'runner' arrived. Mr. Gerald Lee the Stationmaster
lived in the station house with Mrs. Ling his housekeeper.
Mrs. Ling used to belong to the Red Cross and some of my teenage
friends and I used to go along to the Red Cross hut in Codicote
Road where we had classes in first aid. We used to wear the
Red Cross nurses uniform and really fancied ourselves.
Incidentally Mrs. Ling eventually married Mr. Housden (Johnny)
the ex headmaster of the school and they lived in a flat in Offas
Way.
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Getting married
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I met my husband in Welwyn Garden City
and we were married at St. Helens in 1945 (using Mr. Allen’s
taxi for the occasion). My son Nigel was born a year
later at the Red House in Harpenden, again using Mr. Allen’s
taxi to bring us home.
By this time the war was over, the men were
mostly demobbed and apart from them getting a job our priority was to
get a house. The Council started by building the Swedish houses
quickly followed by Conquerors Hill, Ceasars Road and the rest of
the estate. These houses were allocated by a points system, the
more points, the higher up the list. Unfortunately for us neither
my husband nor myself having been born in the village, were not
considered to be locals, we would have had more points if we had been.
Eventually we were offered a flat in Greenways, the first
detached bungalow along Marford Road, the council had
commandeered it after it was left empty by a private catholic school and
they turned it into three flats.
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Village shops
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In those days we used to live our lives in
the village, hardly anyone had a car and apart from the occasional trip
into St. Albans mainly for clothes, we had no need to go out of the
village. We had plenty of shops, there was Blindells, the shoe
shop, two bakers, Garratt’s and Hall’s, two
greengrocers, Mr. and Mrs. Pateman (The Salad Bowl) and Lorna
Rowe’s tiny little shop, where I remember just after the war she
had the first delivery of ice cream in the village for six years,
we all queued up for an allocation of one small brick each, boy did that
go down well! There were three grocery shops, they were Woodley’s
round by the Bull car park, Mr. Stapleton’s, later to become Fine
Fare (I worked there for a time) and Mr. Bangs who had the
shop on the corner of Necton Road, taken over at a later date by Mr.
and Mrs. Oldfield. There was Chennel’s Dairy and Post
office, Mr. Chennels was rather a large man and it seemed as if he
was a permanent fixture behind the post office counter on one side of
the shop, his wife serving the dairy produce on the other side. Miss
Pateman had a haberdashery shop where the florist is now, and
apart from the usual stock of pins, needles, aprons, scarves etc., etc,
she had a few shelves with books on that she used to lend out at 1 penny
a book. (This shop was later to become a cycle shop for short
while, then Bentleys a hardware shop, then eventually Mr.
Stuarts, the gentleman's outfitter.) Next door to that was Mr.
Stubb’s fish and chip shop taken over by his daughter Connie
and her husband Reg Field on Mr. Stubbs retirement. People
would come from miles around to get their fish and chips there - they
were delicious. Prior to the bank being where it was until
recently the chemist used be, before moving to the mill.
We had the Wool shop that Gwen Kerrison ran for a long
time; we did lots of knitting in those days, not many of us being able
to afford to buy shop made woollies. There were two hardware
shops, Mrs. Collins with the petrol pump outside that you had
to turn a handle to get the petrol flowing and Millis’s.
You really had to see that shop to believe it! Mrs. Millis sold
everything. I remember seeing dusty old bowler hats, second hand
men’s jackets, buckets, bowls, pots and pans crockery, paraffin etc.
You name it she had it. Amongst all of this she used
have a large round cheese on the counter and other foodstuffs none of
which were covered up. I can recall to this day the smell of a
mixture of cheese, bacon and paraffin. There was Mrs.
Pearce’s paper shop, Mr. Morney Davis the Solicitor,
the Spinning Wheel tea room, later to become the Post office
shared with Mr. Cunnington’s electrical shop before he moved up
the village to the shop vacated by Blindells. We used to
take our accumulators to him to be charged at sixpence a time,
ultimately he moved next to the Walnut Tree where I believe
the shop still is. Mr. And Mrs. Albert Wright ran the Walnut
Tree and I can remember buying sweets there on the way to school.
Of course there was Titmuss’s mill where we used to buy
corn and meal for the chickens, practically everybody kept a few
chickens because if I remember rightly the egg ration was only one a
week or it might have been only one a month. There was Simons
the butcher where we used to go for our meager ration of meat, and I
believe I vaguely recollect Ball’s butchers in Church Street
where there was also a barber owned by Frank Knight.
How my son hollered when he had his first haircut there!
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Entertainment
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Apart from the numerous pubs and the Working
Mans Club, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the
village. The annual summer fete in the Rectory
Garden and the one at the Congregational Church
were well attended and enjoyed, and I remember going to Mr. Nicoll’s
farm when he held a Highland Games day in one of his
fields.
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Mothers & babies
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One of the highlights for us mothers with
young children was the fortnightly trip to the baby clinic held in the Mead
Hall in East Lane, where we had the babies weighed, and collected
the national dried milk powder and bottled orange juice
for them. It was a good excuse to gather with all the other
mothers and have a good old chat and compare our babies’ progress.
We all had proper prams in those days and used to take a great pride in
making them look nice (especially clinic days). These prams were
mostly second hand as you could only get new ones that were utility and
they were very basic with no springing. I remember going to
Harpenden to get mine, it was lovely big coach built thing (second hand)
with great big wheels and well sprung, I walked all the way back from
Harpenden with it when I was seven and a half month pregnant.
Unfortunately it was too big to go in my mother’s cottage so had to be
kept in the barn up the yard. The babies were so warm and
comfortable in these prams. We used to go for long walks,
sometimes taking a 'picnic' (a bottle of water and a sandwich). On
one of these walks with my friend, we came across a potato clamp being
opened by some German prisoners of war that were working on one
of the farms and as potatoes were rationed (as practically everything
else was) we persuaded them to let us have a few, so out came the kids
from the pram and these dirty muddy potatoes were put in the bottom of
it, covered by a blanket and the kids put back on top. We felt
like criminals all the way home and it didn’t do much for the pram
either, but a good scrub and nobody was any the wiser. Those
potatoes tasted better than any that we ever bought from the shop.
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Four Limes
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Quite a big day in Wheathampstead, was the
celebration of Mr. and Mrs. Cory Wright's daughter Cleone's ? wedding.
The Cory Wrights lived at Four Limes on
Wheathampstead Hill then (presumably it is still there.) and they had a
big marquee set up in their garden and everybody in the village was
invited. We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. They had a
meadow at the back of the house where they kept their horses, this
meadow had some horse chestnut trees in it and if, as youngsters
we were going to meet a boyfriend, it was always 'up the conker trees'.
Little did I realise at the time that the meadow would become Garrard
Way and I would live in the house at the end of Cory Wright's
garden, although by this time they had moved to Mackerye End and Mr.
and Mrs. Dangerfield and their son Graham had moved into Four Limes.
Graham Dangerfield was quite well known as the Zoo man on
television. He made the garden into a widlife sanctuary and
had all kinds of animals like foxes, that used to smell to high heaven,
badgers, otters, that ate all the goldfish in our pond, a roe deer, that
escaped and ate flowers and shrubs in our garden, an eagle that used to
screech very loudly, he had an injured swan who used to sit for hours
with its head through our fence for some reason, I have seen rats
playing on our lawn like kittens and the rockery was honeycombed with
rat holes. It was a novelty at first but got a bit too much in the
end and I think after numerous complaints he eventually moved away.
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Village characters
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We had quite a few `characters` in the
village and one that immediately springs to mind is Teddy Clark,
he lived with his aunt (who was the image of Margaret Rutherford) in one
of the bungalows just before the Swedish houses. Teddy
used to trundle around the village with a flat cart with a big wheel on
either side looking for odd jobs. I think he used to do a bit of
work for the Rector and also delivered grocery orders for Oldfield’s
shop on the corner of Necton. Nurse Hawkins the District
nurse must have just retired or was about to when I first new
her. I used to take her stale bread which she would cut into cubes
and put in the oven of the old kitchen range and bake it hard and used
it instead of dog biscuits for her little rough haired terrier.
Then there was Dolly Westwood, she was the spinster
daughter of Harry, and she used to look after her father and
brothers, she had always got lines of snow white washing hanging out.
I don’t know how she did it with soap being rationed and the fact that
the men used to get so black from working in the forge. She also
did shopping for any body that couldn’t do it themselves and I can see
her now dashing up the road with bags full of shopping weighing her
down. At one time she had a pet pig and it used to follow her
about the house and garden like a pet dog, I think eventually it got too
big and went to live down the garden field (allotment).
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Leaving Wheathampstead
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I really loved the thirty- five years that I
lived in Wheathampstead and will always consider it my home. Sadly
my father died in 1959, and my mother remarried six years later at St.
Helen’s and shortly after went to live in Wellingborough to be near my
brother where she died in 1983. My son married in 1969 also
at St. Helen’s but went to live in Devon, later emigrating to
Australia, from where, much to my delight, he has recently returned for
an indefinite period. We moved a couple of times still in
Wheathampstead, the last time to Garrard Way where for
domestic reasons I had to very reluctantly leave my dear village.
For the last year or so before leaving, I worked at the Bull and
loved every minute of it and often think about all the people that I
served whilst there. There used to be a small bar at the back of
the main one that was called Normans Bar for some reason, and all
the local lads used to congregate there as opposed to the `posh lot` in
the big bar. These lads were a lovely lot and although they could
be a bit rowdy they always behaved themselves. There was one chap
we called 'Bill the Hat', as he always used to wear an old
battered looking trilby hat, he had his own special seat and no one
would dream of sitting in it even when he wasn’t there. There
was Tony Dear, who had a pony called Tomasina that he used
to keep in a field along the Gustard Wood Road, We used to save all the
ullage for Tomasina and Tony would bring her to the back door on a
Friday night where she would enjoy her drink.
I now live in a village on the
Northamptonshire / Buckinghamshire borders and although the people are
lovely and it is quite a nice village to live in, my heart is still in
Wheathampstead.
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Sadly, Pamela Murray died after a short
illness in May 2006
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