Interviewed by Jean Riddell (Purkis) (JR)
Date: 15/07/2001
Transcribed by Jean Riddell (Purkis)
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: O 2001.12
Interviewees: John Kitchen (JK), Marjorie Kitchen (MK), Rosemary Stamp (RS), Peter Stamp (PS)
Date: 15 July 2001
Venue: Riversmeet
Interviewer: Jean Riddell (Purkis) (JR)
Transcriber: Jean Riddell (Purkis)
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
John Kitchen’s sister is Rosemary Stamp and her husband is Peter, Marjorie is John’s wife.
JR recorded them speaking about their childhood in Hertingfordbury Road
JK: The Thorpe’s, on the right hand side, orchard, old police houses still there.
[Just before turning to Valeside] Sgt. Pegg used to ride up the road on his old cycle and come round and if he caught Tony he’d cuff him round the ear’ole as he went past on the bike and he used to say, what’s that for? And he used to say, for the next time you’re in trouble, Kitchen!
RS: Another man who drove up and down the road quite often and everyone lived in dread and fear if they weren’t in school, was Mr. Peet – he had a little tiny black car – a baby Austin.
PS: He could just about squeeze in, he was a huge man.
RS: If you played truant and you got caught by Mr. Peet you were in big trouble.
PS: He spent all the day driving round in the baby Austin going to your parents and getting a valid explanation why you wasn’t at school.
JK: Walking home from school we used to see how many lorries had thumped the bridge as they went under – you couldn’t put a double-decker bus down the road because of the very low bridge there.
RS: Seeing the American convoys used to come through there all the children used to come out and see them and wave to them and shout, Got any gum, chum? And they used to throw loads of chewing gum.
JK: My Auntie Linda broke her leg on the ice over there [Castle Meads] skating on the field, and she said the headmistress, Miss H. Smith , when she was very young – she was at her first teaching position [Miss H. Smith returned as HM much later] she took all the kids down to skate over here, because it used to flood, like it flooded this year, it was regular, because the winters were a bit colder then. The whole of that would ice over and she took them down there and my Auntie Linda broke her leg and my grandma gave her such a hard time that my mum was convinced she never liked the name Kitchen after that.
RS: No, she didn’t like us much, did she, mind you, she used to give me private singing lessons.
JK: There used to be a little tobacconist on the right-hand side just after Crosses the grocer [end of St. Andrew Street] and I had to go in there and she’d give me a brown paper bag with money in and I used to have to go in there and come back and she used to smoke Weights. I had to go out of school because I was the tallest one, with this brown paper bag and hand it to the guy and he’d hand it back again and I’d take it back to her.
RS: Yes, she liked her Weights – used to bring a little dog and have it under the desk. Memories of Pateman delivering milk with a horse and cart up Campfield Road. John remembered being told one of his uncles “pinched his horse and cart”.
JK: Wackett had the shakes, or a stutter. I got my first bike from there. Dad bought it on the hp [hire purchase].
RS: Co-incidence – the old shed, where the garage is now [Esso Station] his name was Wackett as well. [The cycle shop in St. Andrew Street and the Esso foreunner were from the same family.]
JK: Fish and chip shop – Luca’s – de Luca – Thursday nights, fish and chips. [Now under the Hertingfordbury/Gascoyne Way Relief Road, approximately opposite the former Waters Garage]
RS: Do you remember, he asked Dad to lend him £100?
MK: He asked your Dad? Got a hope, hadn’t he!
RS: Dad had an accident and he got quite a lot of compensation. And he said would he lend him £100 as his business was going down. He never got it!
Cottages next to the Nelson [behind Waters Garage]: there were three cottages and Peter’s grandma, and my grandma, they lived next to each other for years. They had all their children there and I think Peter’s grandma probably had about 10 and my grandma had 11. [R’s grandma was Mrs. Parcell, Peter’s grandma was Mrs. Ginn; Albert was his uncle – Albie Ginn, remembered by others in tapes].
RS: He was very friendly with my Aunt Linda.
PS: He was the one from the Folly, there was Albie and there was the one from Bengeo, Alf.
RS: My mother, Doris used to be best friends with Winifred, which was his auntie.
PS: The picture in Len Green’s book of class of ’27 at St. Andrew’s School – Auntie Win is in that.
MK: Auntie Joan has listed everyone [copy given to JR]
RS: You could see quite clearly that it was his auntie, because she hasn’t changed.
PS: The last one surviving now.
RS: Yes, out of all those children in both families.
JK: Auntie Linda we lost touch for 30 years. She had a husband. Used to use her as a punch-bag. So she walked out on him one day. Married name Ansell.
RS: Cooking centre, Hertingfordbury road – the Ansell sisters used to work in there and do the cooking.
JK: After that finished, they used to grown mushrooms in there. We used to live in 126 Hertingfordbury Road.
RS: Campfield Road was our first - grandma’s home, but ours as well. Then we swapped into 126 because it was a bigger house. I was 12 then.
JK: I was born at 4 Campfield Road. [There is about 10 years between Rosemary and John]. Bloody cold house, those old Airey houses.
PS: They pulled them all down.
MS: They were in the last one, the end house.
JK: Reg Carter – lived in a ground-floor flat, his brother lived in Mount road. Labour Councillor.
RS: Grandma went from the cottages to 4 Campfield Road, then the cottages were pulled down, probably before the war. My mother was about 12 when she moved up. She had one of the first houses, they were brand new. My mother was there and my father was the lodger – they got married and he was called into the forces and he was sent abroad for a long time.
JK: A Chindit in Burma.
RS: My mother stayed there with her parents and I grew up there. When I was seven and a half my grandfather died and my grandma decided to go and live with one of her other children so she let us have the house.
Peter’s grandmas went to the house the Harts lived in Ashley Road. They all grew up and got married except for Auntie Win – took care of her father after her mother died and then eventually she met her husband when her father died and she got married. She left the house and it was taken over by the Harts.
JK: Harts used to own – you remember the slaughterhouse? There was a field behind it with all the pigs in it they had that. [Valeside now]. It was full of pigs up there. They were ferocious, and children would not go in that field.
It was dug out when the houses were put there, it was more of a gentle slope before – I remember them digging out for the houses and putting these concrete floats in, that’s why there’s a big slope now. I can remember the slaughter house down the bottom there, I can remember the pigs squealing, as well.
RS: Also along the Hertingfordbury road there used to be a big green before the extra houses were added to it. You had the old pre-war houses that my grandma and Peter’s grandma moved into but there was a big square of green
JK: That’s where the OAPs’ houses are.
RS: And right across the centre of this green there was a path that people used to walk across; so on the other side of the green, which was Ashley road, there was Peter’s grandma’s house, and at this end, right the bottom of Campfield Road was my grandma, so they had to walk across the green to meet each other.
JK: In the middle of the green, every firework night – the biggest bonfire – at one time we burned the telegraph pole, it was so tall. Used to have to guard it – or the Hornsmill kids would set fire to it. I remember the 3-storey houses being pulled down – they were slums, basically. [Corner of Hertingfordbury rd. and Cross Lane].
RS: A little boy I was very keen on when I was small named David Green, Ada Green’s son, blonde boy, he was [lived there]. Cross Lane was only a dirt track. School.
RS: Miss Smith, we used to call Moggy.
JK: K. Smith was later.
RS: And every year I used to put on a show for her – I used to make all these children line up and sing songs.
JK: You should add that you used to be in Hertford Dramatics.
RS: Yes, I had this leaning towards being on the stage. That was my sole ambition in life as a small child. I used to make all these poor children line up and make chorus lines of them and put on little plays, all for the benefit of Miss Mogg Smith’s birthday. She didn’t mind, once a year, she used to let me do it.
JK: Mrs. Mardle always had the class at the very back of St. Nicholas Hall. And every afternoon it was puzzles, no lessons in the afternoon. Puzzles would take 3 years, seemed 10,000 pieces. It was the biggest event when they were completed. St. Andrew’s School was so overcrowded we used to have a class in Durrant Hall and that one in St. Nicholas Hall and there was classes traipsing up and down all the time.
MK: If it was nice for Sports Day, we used to go round the Castle grounds.
JK: We only ever had one sport at that school – it was called shinty – but we used to play other schools, there was so much competition. There were 3 teams, the youngsters, the middle ones and the eldest. We used to get the old wooden forms and they were put all the way round the playground to mark out and the ball wouldn’t go across them and the kids used to stand behind them, when we had these games. I think it was Munnsy that started it, it was so, so popular when we were children.
(Rosemary asks what Ascension Day is, JR explains and says one of the major church festivals]
RS: We had to all stand out in the playground and have so many minutes silence for Ascension Day. [Confusion with Nov 11?]
MS: The Rector came every Friday for assembly – Canon Gill
JK: They were choir mad at that school.
RS: My solo was “Farewell Manchester”
JK: We used to have to do the Ash Grove and descant.
RS: Oh, yes, she used to love the descants.
JK: Munnsy was the best teacher there by miles. He was the first teacher that I saw that actually introduced a bit of science. I remember making a periscope and buying the couple of mirrors to do it. It was magnificent, he was something else was old Munnsy.
MS: I remember a Miss Redmayne from the Wall House.
JK: Church at Christmas, carols.
JK and RS: We were Ebenezer Strict Baptist! As children. Our parents didn’t go. It was their idea of getting a bit of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon.
PS: I came from Port Vale, but even I went to the Ebenezer Chapel.
RS: One year I went morning, afternoon and evening so I could get a bible and I got it and I’ve still got it.
PS: I used to have to do that because I was in the choir, had morning service., the choir at Port Vale.
Ebenezer Activities
JK: Christmas parties were the highlight – they were wonderful.
MS: The outing to Cromer every year.
RS: Walton on the Naze
JK: There used to be the God Coach with us lot in it. And the drunks with Freddy Hopkin’s mum and they were all as drunk as skunks on that coach. Not part of the Ebenezer, no. We had to say prayers in the carpark when we got there.
RS: We went to Walton on the Naze for this day.
JK: It was our holiday, wasn’t it?
RS: You waited all year, a fabulous day, it was so exciting. Miss Wynne ran it.
JK: They were real, strict old Victorians.
RS: One got married, but they were all old maids and they all ended up with dreadful diseases, where your back bends over.
JK: Curvature of the spine?
RS: Spondylitis?
JR: Probably a scoliosis.
JK: All my wanting to read came from that place because they used to get really excellent books.
RS: Oh, they used to give lovely books, for prize-giving.
JK: If you excelled or you’d done a bit of studying, everybody got a book, but you’d end up with 2 or 3 books. You used to get all these texts that you had to save, if you got a certain amount of them you’d get a bible in the end.
RS: My first one’s dated 1946.
JK: The books they gave were story – Enid Blyton – everything.
MK & RS: Treasure Island, Little Women, Jo’s Boys.
JK: Only on special occasions we went in chapel like carols, Sunday School only. I can only remember going in there about 6 or 7 times. The Sunday School was a little room by the side of it. It was so wet and damp. The walls were all green inside.
RS: We used to have our Christmas Party on the top floor.
JK: The food they used to get in for us! It was absolutely laden with food. They put so much effort into it, those old ladies.
RS: mWe used to play Postman’s Knock and somebody went outside and somebody was chosen and you used to go outside and kiss them and come back in again and choose someone else.
JK: And if you didn’t want to go to the Sunday School, you had to go out on Sunday morning and never come back home again until after 4 or 5 o’clock, after the Sunday School finished.
JR: Asked about the mixing of St. Andrew’s Church children and those who went to the Ebenezer.
RS: St. Andrew’s Church was rather a posh church.
MK: One thing I noticed when I worked at the Record Office, your grandparents, the earlier children than mum, they actually had christened at All Saints, mum’s siblings, as well.
RS: For some reason it was considered to be a church, a high church, and you didn’t have just ordinary folk going in there.
JK: When we got christened, we got all 5 of us done at once, at All Saints. My mum- St. Andrew’s Church – wouldn’t spit on it if it was on fire.
RS: Why St. Andrew’s was so taboo, I don’t know.
JK: We went to the Ebenezer Sunday School, but she wouldn’t have us baptised there, would she. I had friends, like Paul Wisbey, he always went to St. Andrew’s Sunday School.
JR: How did you get on, as a family, with people who lived in Peter’s[Ruffles] villas?
JK: They were always the posh people.
RS: Oh, definitely. They owned their own houses, mostly. We always rented our houses. And occasionally [there] you had someone with a car. When we were small cars were very rarely seen. Once the war was over, it was the villa houses most likely to have them.
JK: Your auntie used to be secretary at St. Andrew’s School?
MK: Georgie.
Questions about ‘this’ area, Riversmeet, once allotments behind a high wall.
JK: This area was always taboo. You couldn’t get behind the wall because there was a couple of eagle-eyed old boys who used to have allotments just as you went through the main gates and you couldn’t get past there.
RS: I told you last week that the garage, which you said was a blacksmiths shop, he just repaired everything and anything that he could get hold of to repair and he had one pump, which when cars were starting to get on the road you’d get the odd car, which was very rare, which would poodle into his garage to get petrol. He had one old green pump.
Other than that he spend most of his time mostly making up bikes. I got my first bike which was 30 shillings, which my family clubbed together to buy me for my birthday. It was upright handlebars and called a ‘sit up and beg’ bike. It was second-hand. He used to make them all up out of bits and pieces.
JR: Do you think the cycle shop in St. Andrew St. passed all their repairs to him? Or do you think they weren’t working together?
JK: They used to do all the repairs at the back of the cycle shop.
RS: But he [Hertingfordbury Rd. Wackett] had a showcase at the front of his old workshop, where he had a couple of bikes standing in it – brand new ones, mind you by the time they’d stood there for 3 or 4 years…
PS: No one could afford them, but we’d stand and admire them.
JK: Down there they had the old wood yard [Mimram Road] and the big house with the aeroplane in it.
RS: Where those factories are, top end of the road, a beautiful house. On the lawn stood an aeroplane.
MK: Like an old bi-plane.
JK: About 6 feet. It was a very posh house, they could never keep the kids from going in and out the hedge, that was just along the road from the bridge. There was a little railway bridge just before you get to the one there now that went under the viaduct, through to Hertingfordbury.
MK: That was a big event when that came down. I came down from Sele farm that morning to watch it.
JR: When?
JK: I was about 18, 19
MK: No! Because I can remember Dad bringing us down.
JK: Might have been 17, about 1967, I think. Underneath that bridge it used to flood.
RS: I remember bats as you walked under the main bridge at dusk. {She was frightened they would go into her very fair hair]. Didn’t realise until later that they’re blind.
JK: The kids were always getting knocked over on Hertingfordbury Road.
RS: I saw a little boy go under an army lorry, coming home from school, along where the wall was.
JK: At St. Andrews, kerb drill was always drummed into you.
RS: American convoys came through and there was suddenly all this traffic and chewing gum.
PS: Dangerous. One of the chaps on board would get a dozen packets of chewing gum and just throw them Some even went across the road, so you’d dive in the road for it.
JK: When you went to the allotments, they were tumble-down but the gates were quite ornamental. They looked more important than the entrance to old allotments.
RS: I’m sure there were old bits of wall in the allotments, themselves.
Frogs Hall
MK: It stood where that bock of houses is [west of the Esso Station]. I’ve dug up masses of china in the time since we’ve lived here, blue and white china.
JR: Tell me your idea about Frogs Hall. You have said on many occasions you think it was a big house.
MK: I think, having worked in the Record Office I used to look at plans there, it would be where that block of houses opposite [numbers 18-26 Riversmeet], also the amount of china we have dug up in the garden, never whole pieces. The Victorians didn’t have dust-cart collections so it all went in a midden at the bottom of the garden. This would have been their rubbish heap for kitchen utensils down here. Looking back in old directories, he ran it as a market garden anyway – it was a McMullen at one time. We’ve just got one apple tree left over there, but when we moved here there were three or four on the river bank which must have been part of the orchard.
JK: There used to be drying houses here, too, hut-things. Originally the Jehovahs Witnesses were there when we moved in. Fifteen years ago they rebuilt it in a week.
This is the third incarnation of the Esso garage. Esso took over directly from Wacketts.
MK: Mr. Wynne in between.
JK: Mr. Wynne ran the Esso.
MK: I thought he owned it independently. I used to go to school with his daughter.
JK: Just petrol and had a shop that sold sweets. It increased in size each time.
RS: Mentally retarded Reg, first house of the two houses past the garage, used to stand at the gate and talk to children on their way home from school. And the other house, next to him, was my grandma’s sister in law, can’t remember her name John.
The other focal point was the telephone-box on the other side of the road. That was for the whole of the estate. Oh yes, that was very important, especially when you went down and pressed the button to see if anybody had left any money in it. It was “press button A” and “press button B”.
PS: That was this side of the bridge.
RS: On the other side of the road.
JK: Yes, it was either that telephone box or the next one was in the village. Never got vandalised, though, did it?
MK: You used to phone me up from that call-box.
JK: The kids off the Hertingfordbury Road had the reputation for being the biggest hooligans, but never ever touched that.
RS: I remember Wrangles at Hertingfordbury [Road] had a telephone put in. Oh gosh was that something. It went all round everywhere “the Wrangles have got a telephone” and it was an old black one.
JK: My brother told me he’d worked out how you could dial for free in those old boxes. If you were dialling a 6, you rapped 6 times very quickly on the receiver, then a very short break, then the number etc. You could phone for free and we did it all the time. A little old lady used to come and scrub it all out. It was always smelling of Jeyes Fluid because I think a few unscrupulous people had used it as a toilet on the way home from the pub.
Wally Temple
JK: He must be about 70. I used to play down there, the coach yards, as a child with Paul Wisbey whose dad was the foreman there.
RS: I can’t believe how old this man Wally Temple is. He was there when I was a child and I’m 61. How old is this Wally Temple then?
PS: He seemed to be 40, 50 when I was 20, and I’m 60 plus.
RS: He’s got to be 90!
JK: He’s dead now, Wally Temple. His son looks after it. Warehams Lane – McMullens, Temples and a repair place. Behind the school there used to be some stables there as well and chickens. The ditch used to flood and come up the playground. The limes are still there.
MK: And the lovely outside toilets...
JK: ….that used to ice up in the winter. When they shut Wacketts down, all us kids broke in then and I found an old World War I periscope, all brass. The almshouses where grandma ended up. She used to get rats in there. Council ofices [St. Andrew St. formerly Ginns], they used to have big posters in the window “Flies spread diseases”.
The group them mentioned Reg Hayden and Fred Roche; Dan’s Cabin and Jubilee bags and the Lantern, which was strictly “weigh-outs”. Dan’s Cabin – he was a ventriloquist and had a daughter with a big plait.
Swimming in the river.
JK: Three Trees – the field opposite the Hertingfordbury Estate.
RS: Where the cooking centre was.
JK: Behind there, three prominent trees.
RS: That’s where I learned to swim.
JK: I learned to swim there, but if you went a bit further along, and Addis’s place was on the left-hand side, we used to go over there scrumping.
RS: And if you went further still, you’d end up going to the convent.
PS: Going the other way, I’m sure there was a path round there some how, I know you could sneak into the Hertford Town Football Club.
JK: Oh, yes, used to walk over the allotments under the big railway bridge into the little railway bridge, across there, down the bank and just slip in without having to pay.
RS: Then you got to Cut Corners, where we used to swim.
JK: That was when you were a bit bigger, because it was deeper. No sides to the football pitch, like there is now.
RS: We used to stand there shouting H E R T F O R D!
JK: There was more action behind the goal mouth when we were playing Ware, with people fighting than there was on the pitch.
Kitchen family: Rosemary born ’39, Tony ’46, Elsie, John, Belinda, Mandy
Friends: John – Hammonds, Catchpoles.
RS: – very friendly with a girl called Ovendon. We used to go to Walton on the Naze together with the Sunday School. Unfortunately when she was about 40 she died of cancer. Her brother died of cancer too, and her father. They lived down the bottom of The Walk.
JK: Fishing. The Three Trees was stocked out by a big London Angling Club for quite a number of years and we weren’t allowed to go in there. We used to go a bit further upstream and they’d have all this wire mesh across the river to stop the fish. We’d cut all the weed and it’d float down and push the barrier over and we were fishing rainbow trout there like there was no tomorrow. Used to take it home and my dad used to cook it. Moor hens’ eggs – always used to have a Sunday night fry-up, used to get loads of them. Easy to get to the river.
We used to go up Thorpe’s orchard and help ourselves to a few apples and we used to go around flogging them, to all the kids on the estate. [200/202 Hertingfordbury Rd.]
PS: There was a house in the middle of Chelmford Wood.
RS: The bomb dropped behind it and all the windows got smashed.
PS: That’s right! I went to see that, a rocket.
RS: There was a great big dip there, but they built houses all over that.
PS: On the Hertingfordbury Road just as the wood started, there used to be a bit of a field this end and in that bank somewhere, in Chelmsford Wood, there was a cave. You could get 7 or 8 children in – it was almost as deep as your conservatory.
RS: You used to scrump apples and hide them in the cave.
JK: [to get to the cave now] walk up Hertingfordbury road to the pig farm [after the pigs went it became Valeside], you could walk up that hill.
PS: At the side of the bank, a big bank 12 ft bank. Somebody started it off and it just got bigger, and bigger and bigger.
JK: When the pig farm had gone, all the old corrugated was lying on the ground and on Saturday and Sunday mornings I used to get 6 – 10 slow worms and I would sell them for 2/d at school on Monday. I used to put them in an old paint can.
PS: The cottages opposite the Oak pub. There always used to be an old lady sat out there. To children it would be a little wave and to grown-ups she’d get into conversation. But she’d be sitting there every time we went past. Houses on the road and a little gully-way outside of the house.
JK: Very sharp bend where the cooking centre was. I remember Whites the lemonade people shedding his load there and we all went out to help them clear up all the broken glass. The Police had stopped the traffic and we did all right for a few bottles of lemonade there. It was a nasty bend.
RS: If they came down too fast they couldn’t make the corner.
JK: I remember cars being on their roof there regular.
The green in front of The Dell
JK: In the middle of the green was a well, one of the 5 Cowper wells, where the village could draw fresh water [Hertingfordbury]. I remember it when it had a low wall and then it got dangerous and they put a huge concrete slab over it.
RS: There was no wall, at one time, it was just open. A beautiful garden and white house. We always went there to get a drink of water on the way to get bluebells.
JK: It was ice-cold and there was another very sharp bend as it went round by the green. They always had a very nice limo in the garage there.