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Transcript Title	Ellingham, Don (O2003.20)
Interviewee	Tessa Chestnutt (TC), Ann-Maire Parker (AP), Don Ellingham (DE)
Interviewer	Jean Riddell (Purkis) (JR)
Date	09/10/2003
Transcriber by	Jean Riddell (Purkis)

Transcript

Hertford Oral History Group

Recording: O 2003. 20

Interviewees: Tessa Chestnutt (TC), Ann Marie Parker (AP), Don Ellingham (DE)

Date: 9th October 2003

Venue: Hertford Heath

Interviewer: Jean Riddell (Purkiss) (JR)

Transcriber: Jean Riddell (Purkiss)

************** unclear recording

[discussion] untranscribed material

italics editor’s notes

JR: 9th October 2003, JR here and I’m at the house again of Tessa Chestnutt and I’ve got with me her cousin, Don and Ann-Marie Parker and we’re going to start talking about Ware Road.

TC: Do you want my cousins surname, Ellingham.

DE: Donald Ellingham.

JR: And I thought if Ann-Marie would start, join in with each other, don ‘t worry about that, but if you start us off then Don can chip in where he wants. What were your earliest memories of moving to the area, where you still live?

AP: Yes, although I did move away and came back. The reason for coming to Hertford was that my father had lost his job in London and Harrow and he got a job in Hertford. My mother was quite reluctant, at first, because it seemed like a very, very rural sort of area from where we’d come from, but the thing, I think, that sold it to her, and that transmitted itself to me as a child. We went to have a picnic in the Castle grounds and the Castle grounds were not very different from what it is now, there was the river, there was the pavilion for the Jubilee of King George and it was so lovely and as children we played peacefully and would, could have had a pick of 3 houses.

One was Oak Street, which was in the gaol development and of course that was very much a thumbs down, the other was quite a nice bungalow where I think Tony Lake now lives on the Waterford rod but of course it was near a weir and my mother thought she’d have two drowned children. So we didn’t go there. The only other house available was in Woodlands Road and there were quite a lot of houses there, it was a new development and it was rented, it was not dissimilar to what it is now. It had obviously been built on a big sand-pit and so the gardens were covered in poppies - they were all uncultivated and they swept down. So front gardens swept down and the back gardens swept down and we moved in as old what’s name [Rob Wilton] would say, “On the day war broke out” – we moved in on the day before. Because my first memories were speaking to someone called Corine Froudes because she was standing at the gate and she said what’s your name? and I said my name’s Ann-Marie Parker and she said, oh, this is my dog, Kim. And we remained good friends but she went to the convent and it was the parting of the waves there.

The house itself is very interesting. They’re real Art Deco and all the… there was no central heating and we had to light fires and a great big boiler. But all the fireplaces were of wonderful design – they were different in each room in my house. What I didn’t know, until about 2 or 3 months ago when I looked at other people’s houses, theirs were exactly the same in houses that had been untouched like Amy G, who lives opposite. When you look at het house, they’re all different again. So it was very good craftsmanship, very little has gone wrong with the house. They were wonderfully built house, they were Norris-built.

DE: My Dad owned a couple of them.

TC: That’s right, he owned the bottom ones on Gallows Hill.

DE: He paid about £250 I think.

AP: It was £450 in 1939, but my father didn’t have £4.50 [£4.10s] so there was no way we could actually buy the house, but that’s the price in 1939.

JR: Did you rent through Norris the builder?

AP: I think we rented through Lee’s – WH Lee who rented there at the very beginning and they went on until later on when we actually bought the house.

TC: They were the agents for people, Lees didn’t own them.

DE: My father [Uncle Bert] had two on the bottom, the green roofed ones, near the Ware road end.

AP: They’re very pleasant houses because the rooms really are large compared with modern semi-detached. The real bugbear for everybody has been the gardens because you’re on a very very acute slope and of course since everybody had cars – when we came nobody had a car and I can remember during the very bad snow in the 1940s we used to toboggan and skate up and down the hill.

TC: Well, we used to on the Ware Road, which was Kemps, Fairfax Road which used to be a field where Miss Kemp kept her horses. Where Don lived in Ware Road, no. 97 I think, there was a ditch ran down the side and when it was put up for sale it said “with delightful stream”! We had lovely times playing in the ditch and the boys braver than I used to creep under the road, ‘cos the ditch came down the other side and into the meads.

AP: I could draw a map of Braziers sandpits which were un usual, great ravines, and old fashioned railway lines and machinery there, it was just a child’s paradise and we used to walk right the way over and there was a stream running somewhere there which went underground and we went underground, we tunnelled through and it led into Balls Park! Well, Balls Park was privately owned then and it was a real no, no and so we were terrified that a gamekeeper would chase us out, so we didn’t stay in there very long. But it was a marvellous place. We used to go out early in the morning in the holidays, take Marmite sandwiches, mother would say be back at 5 – nobody worried in those days.

TC: The meads used to flood in a different way – there used to be lots of ponds rather than that great lump of water at the end now.

DE: And the grass grew very high, about 2 foot high, I used to hide there from our little dog.

AP: And the lovely thing about walking on the lower bit were the trains, ‘cos you could hear them and you could feel the vibration.

TC: Do you remember the Hipgraves who lived where the crossing was?

DE: The crossing keeper?

TC: Yes, he used to come round in a pony and trap and collect all the food waste. His wife used to really be the gate keeper because he was always out with his pigs.

TC: I should think you were one of the last people who went to school at Miss Morrises, what was it like? [Glengarriff}

DE: Well, there were the three Miss Morrises, Flo, Em, and Liz. Miss Elizabeth was the senior – oldest sister, Miss Emily spoke lite a gattling gun, Miss Florence was very meek, the youngest sister and they taught us very well. They taught us beautiful copper-plate. We started off with pots-hooks and hangers and I had a very nice copper-plate hand when I left the school.

And they kept silkworms and used to wind the silk into skeins - and big walnut trees in the garden, we used to get walnuts from them. It closed the year before I was due to go to the grammar school and I had to go to the only other school, St. Joseph’s, the convent and they insisted that I wrote in printing, completely wrecked my handwriting. There were 4 classes at Miss Morrises, with about 12 in each classe [He doesn’t say who the other teacher was].

AP: And during the war the Miss Morrises used to stand outside and watch the school children go by. They used to hand us bacon rind ‘cos they thought we weren’t getting enough food and they didn’t like bacon rind, it was wonderful and we just ate it [cooked]. When did it close down?

DE: It must have closed down 1936/7.

TC: Their brother ran the furniture shop in Parliament Square, which is next door to the night club, Zeros, and behind the columns and when the land mine dropped it cracked all the glass there.

AP: The land mine was quite extraordinary because the blast went for miles around, we had an ornament which went round a bend and ended up right down the back garden and didn’t break!

TC: My parents were with Don’s parents when the land mine went – at first they thought it had landed in your garden and then they realised that it had landed in Tamworth Road. You used to sleep in the cellar, didn’t you?

DE: We did, once or twice, but it was so uncomfortable.

TC: Daddy made bunks and we all slept in the cellar.

DE: My dad made beds but they were so uncomfortable.

AP: Most people slept downstairs, the beds were moved downstairs. Did you have that black awful sticky tape all over the windows and after the war it took ages to get it off so your windows were covered in black? No? It was blast-proof, sticky stuff.

DE: We had a very thick old door curtain over our kitchen which saved us because we were mostly in the kitchen. When the Tamworth road bomb went off that thick curtain was pinned to the opposite wall with slivers of glass which would have gone everywhere. I was blown down the cellar stairs and Cicely was in her bedroom trapped by the fireplace which fell out in the corridor in front of her, but none of us was hurt.

AP: But somebody was killed?

TC: Mrs. Brett was killed, Miss Wright died afterwards. I think in all three people died, if not four, because of it. Betty Brett was killed – the houses had outdoor downstairs loos and she was in the loo so she got the full force of it. I was trying to think of the shops at this end….

DE: Braces, the grocers on the corner….

AP: Tony Brace, who was the son, went off to serve, used to send me love letters at primary school a and then he went off to serve on HMS Arathusa which was a training ship and he still sent me letters, I was about 11 and he wasn’t much older, but that was a nice little grocers shop on the corner of Ware Road and Townshend Street. Next door to Pullhams. Then there were two more farther down Marchants where the present grocers shop is on Ware road, the Post Office Stores and his name was White and we used to call him….

DE: He used to make nice ice cream…

TC: And lemonade

AP: And you could get sweets, you’d have 1/2d pocket money and for 1/4d you could get gob-stoppers and sherbet dabs, well Whitey did the best sherbet dabs in the business and liquorice things that you drew out….

DE: Liquorice bootlaces.

AP: And they were 1/4d each but her sold sweets you couldn’t get anywhere else.

TC: Then going home from Whiteys into Tamworth road, on the corner of Tamworth road and Rowleys Road there was a little café. After we were bombed out we went and had breakfast there and I think that was there probably when the ‘bus station was there, it was the canteen.

AP: And there was a laundry next to it, Snowdrop Laundry.

TC: We used to roller skate on the nice concrete forecourt of the bus station. I always remember the first time, because you boys could jump up and down the kerbs, the first time I did it I felt so proud and so frightened.

DE: And a but further along was Gilbert(son) & Pages biscuits and food for pheasants.

TC: And the field there where Fisher kept his horse. Then going further along we came to Hodges, which was originally Kemps in Talbot Street. Then beside that was a little sub post office. They were one of the first places that sold ice-cream.

DE: In Railway Street (Place) opposite the junction with Talbot Street there was a little sweet shop.

TC: Johnsons the butchers in Railway Place, I think it’s now an electrical shop, it lay back and there was a forecourt. They moved from there to Ware Road.

AP: The railway model shop was the other side of the road.

TC: If you come from the Ware end of Talbot Street and go straight down, its immediately opposite you and it lies back with a little forecourt and that was Johnsons and the other side of the road there was a yard where they slaughtered the animals and opposite that was the maltings, do you remember how we used to peep down in and see all the things?

DE: Oh, yes, I liked the maltings [at one time Percy Hargreaves], travelling home from school on a cold winter’s day I would go up and talk to the very old boy shovelling the malt over the big grating, all the lovely hot air was coming up and my little frozen knees were nicely warmed.

TC: Where the slaughter house was there was a double-fronted house which did at one time sell models, I can’t remember what that was originally.

AP: If you go farther into the town, on Railway Street there’s a place I used to love, the blacksmiths – a bit farther down from the open market.

DE: I used to go and pump the bellows for him!

AP: The other two interesting sisters, talking about the Miss Morrises, who were Victorians, weren’t they really. If you think about them, Victorian/Edwardian ladies, were the Miss Pryors, They were real characters. They lived in the first house in Tamworth Road on the right-hand side and they taught music and the house, as you went in, smelt to high heaven. I can smell that stale smell now, and they had an extraordinary sort of shade over the light.

One sister had one room with a piano and the other sister had another room with a piano and it had gas brackets [probably candles] and it was such an old piano and all we did most of the time was Czerny scales – D – I’ve got that book stil. l Oh, dear, they were extraordinary trouble but I think the fee was 1/6d for an hour and it was a good grounding but they were real characters. She must have been, in the 1940s, the one I had, the elder sister, she must have been in her eighties then.

TC: What was the name of the people – was it Miss Mansfield, who lived next door to you in Ware road which is now where the Hudsons live – and they had stables at the back? (yes).

AP: I remember the Fosdykes.

DE: Oh, Lewis Fosdyke.

AP: The children, they used to go to Sunday School but they wore an orange and brown uniform, was that the church Army?

TC: They were very involved with All Saints.

AP: But they wore this uniform on Sundays, the children

DE: There was a youth fellowship, I belonged to that.

TC: Do you know what she (AP) told me but you don’t remember, can I tell him? (yes) you were her first boyfriend!

AP: Well, not first, but one of them, an early one. I remember going out on your motor bike.

DE: Yes, you told me that.

AP: And I had a great burn (from the exhaust pipe) I don’t know where we were going.

DE: Nor do I, frightfully sorry, Ann-Marie, but I remember the motor bike!

JR: You didn’t make an impression then?

AP: None at all!

TC: Do you remember Kingsmead, travellers, at the bottom where Daddy had in the war the Home Guard, a brick-built house placed, and if they stayed overnight and had food, they had to do so much work?

AP: I do remember, and I do remember Kingsmead where those children were very nicely treated, people said it must have been an awful school but it wasn’t. On Saturday and Sunday they used to take them fishing on the meads – Mr. Tookey – and I always remember my brother and I were so jealous because they used to have great slices of pink and yellow cake, It was the most vivid pink and the most vivid yellow you could imagine, but as children we had boring old currant cake and our eyes were on stalks as this cake came out. But the children were paddling and catching tiddlers and old Jimmy Cox was always there – he really ran their smallholding.

TC: On the Ware Road side of the corner were little buildings.

AP: Another thing that was in that bit of ground was the air-raid siren, and everybody could hear that for a long way around.

TC: Do you remember when war broke out and all the soldiers came along Ware Road And they’d stop, and I was with Aunt Flo and we all rushed out with trays of tea for them.

AP: Quite a lot of Scottish regiments

TC: That was later – Cameron Highlanders-

AP: And the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

TC: The Cameron Highlanders were billeted along Ware Road and they came straight from Italy and Mummy washed all their kilts for therm. I can remember seeing rows of kilts on the garden.

JR: The Street Directory of 1922 shows Gallows Hill, after that it is called Stanstead Road.

AP: So, the Stanstead Road houses were earlier. There was a very big oak tree and the top and that by legend was where the gallows were – it was always called the gallows tree. And there was another huge tree in the Foxholes bit where we used to toboggan in the fields behind Foxholes and that was always called Ferdinand’s Tree – it was just a huge oak tree.

TC: Daddy used to go there when he was a child and it wasn’t until he was walking on that bit which you could still walk through, I think he was taking Clare through there, and he said that’s where I used to climb when I was a littler boy. And he went, and he could still where he put nails in to help.

AP: It was still a steep slope, you felt it was like a mountainous area. It was quite magical really.

TC: Where Wheatcroft School is now there was a chalk pit there and Grandpa had it flattened and made possible for the children of Kingsmead School to have a sports field around there. When Kingsmead School was closed, they wanted to sell it and Grandpa stood firm and that’s how Wheatcroft came there.

AP: As children you could go to most places and go in but you could never actually get into that chalk pit. Whether they recognised how dangerous it was, but it was quite a steep cut-out, then there was a flat bit and in my memory nobody ever went there. Unlike the wood at the top of Gallows Hill where the gallows tree is still, now that was where we used to go with our little bag of Marmite sandwiches and used to play there all day.

TC: And, of course, there was the isolation hospital.

DE: About 30 years ago Sylvia had TB, when she was 5 or 6 and we had to take her there.

TC: I was a bit scared of it because people went in there who’d got DISEASES!

AP: That’s absolutely right! And because I was in isolation hospitals before I came to Hertford, either in Harrow or London, we passed by with quite a bit of fear because in those days if you said scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles – very difficult now to understand how frightening these diseases were – and if you said diphtheria, well it was the end of the world.

Although my brother had infantile paralysis and they did put him in isolation in the county hospital but they didn’t know what it was, they thought it was cerebral meningitis, because he was one of the first children in England to actually have it. And there was a wonderful doctor, I think his name was Dr. Ramsey, and I think he killed himself with over work, but he had worked, he was in the old Bench practice along St. Andrew Street – he had worked both in Australia and South Africa with Sister Kelly and her said to my parents your boy I am sure has got infantile paralysis. Well, again, that was dread word and he said could you possibly afford to get a consultant down? Well, they barely could, but they did and this chap said you must get this boy into an iron lung and into isolation because it is infantile paralysis – there was a little isolation wing which is still standing at the edge of the county hospital and Tony was in there, but interestingly enough he didn’t go to the isolation hospital, perhaps they realised he was more seriously ill than that.

TC: When we first came here you could walk along or play, used to ride down to Raynham Street on the pony because it was all fields which is now all Foxholes, but Pinehurst was all the golf links, that’s where they’ve got those names and there is that iron-age barrow there still.

AP: And that was the walk we all did on Sunday afternoons, across the golf links, sometimes up to Hertford Heath. But that was the other tradition one’s forgotten that every Sunday after your proper Sunday dinner at lunch time all families walked and there was a pattern where you went and the golf links were one, going up to Hertford Heath was another, he Meads was another, the Warren….

TC: Do you remember how we used to skate on Hartham before it was levelled? Uncle Bertie’s father was one of the first ordinary people to have a car in Hertford and he was hated by a lot of people for this. But we always went for a ride in the mo-mo as I called it as a little girl. Donald and I used to sit at the back and Aunt Flo used to sit in the front and she always wore a lovely hat and Don was dreadful, he used to screw up pieces of paper and put it on her hat.

DE: I remember the car, it had a dickie – it was a biscuit-coloured car with a dickie seat.

TC: Sometimes they used to stop at a pub and we weren’t allowed in.

DE: And we used to get pub biscuits, big arrowroot biscuits, for 1d.

AP: Everybody went to Abel Smith and nobody that I knew went anywhere else and at the other end of the town were the Cowbridge people – they were the 2 main primary schools. Of course, there was the infants’ school and there was Miss Baker – we shouldn’t forget Miss Baker – she lived in Davies Street and she taught at the infants’ school, everybody loved her and she must have been such a good teacher because they all came up to Abel Smith able to read and write and she had a kind manner.

DE: The other character was the nurse, she had that bike with the umbrella up, which I inherited! Miss Campion’s bike. It was my sister’s, actually, and when Cecily left home, I used to use it to ride to the station when we lived in Hoddesdon Her little black and white dog was called Mac.

AP: Did she just do our side of the town? You used to see her cycling down the Ware Road and everywhere…

TC: She was a district nurse and midwife – brought me into the world, that’s why I was called Teresa. I should be Margaret, but my birthday is very near St. Teresa’s day and she insisted.

AP: She used to wear a uniform, she had a hat.

TC: She was a Queen Alexandra nurse.

AP: I always equated her with that dear lady Miss [Savage] in Ware who took down her house and rebuilt it, she was that sort of woman, very determined. I could see her saying, no you don’t want Margaret, it’s got to be Teresa. The other one was Nurse Lacey, my goodness, she was a force to be reckoned with, she was a nurse who lived along the Ware road, opposite Don.

TC: Then there were the Hills who lived in the Spinney where all the new houses are, and then there was another big house, Beech Houser, nearly opposite you, the drive to go up, and on the left-hand side looking from your house was where the Lacey’s lived and then on the right-hand side were 2 or 3 new houses, there was a big house there called Beech House.

AP: Sister Lacey ran her ward at the county hospital like a military operation, but she was a brilliant nurse.

TC: Grandpa said when he was a little boy he used to come to Hertford and Ware Road, Raynham Street and Tamworth road and Fairfax Road was a gravel pit.

AP: I remember as a child that the lines of social demarcation were very carefully drawn, and I don’t think things had altered – Annie S. Swan said that – since 1910 and I think, like so many other place, it was the war which began to break down that and lots more people were moving to Hertford.

But certain people shopped at certain shops. You’d shop at Bates, Bates was the place to shop but you’d queue up 3 times in Bates – you’d go to one counter then another counter then another counter, you wouldn’t go to Pearks.

TC: I remember children walking to school and we that went to the convent wouldn’t walk along Ware Road because that’s where the elementary children walked to school. We walked the back way, which you’d think would be !!........ Because the convent, you see, was by the church.

AP: The other school that was fascinating was the Jewish Orphanage. We had Battersea Grammar School boys and the Jewish Orphanage, and they did a most wonderful Mikado and if you were particularly good one year at Abel Smith you were allowed to go. The music just gave me a total love of Gilbert and Sullivan. It was magical, but I think they did it very well – this was in the middle of the war.

TC: Everybody knew everyone who lived along Ware Road, but there was a true community spirit, if anybody needed help someone would, but there wasn’t this being matey, matey, matey – you weren’t in and out of each other’s houses.

AP: There were no Christian names, we always called Mrs. Martin next door “Mrs. Martin” although she’d been there for ages. I think the war altered that.

TC: Yes, who were the people who lived next door to you, they had the greengrocers in Hertford, didn’t they?

DE: The people who lived next door to us were Rowse, Gerry Rowse, and the Mansfield’s on the other side of the ditch.

AP: Myra Hess used to come down occasionally, now she stayed somewhere where you were, she played at the Drill Hall, she came down like Kathleen Ferrier did, she had friends in the North Road and I remember once seeing Kathleen Ferrier and I only knew her because somebody pointed her out. You weren’t used to seeing people like that, no television, but Myra Hess came and played during the war at the Drill Hall at least once, but who it was she stayed with……must have been friends.

JR: Did you find any conflict between your estate and the local [authority] housing?

AP: I think the children who came with me to the primary school, one or two. I won’t mention names, but there were at least 2 or 3 fathers in prison and I was certainly encouraged not to walk with them. You tended to walk with the children in your road because you knew them, although I did know, and was very friendly with, somebody like Mary Geering, or Mary Cook as she was, just down below and we used to walk to school together and Mollie Palmer, but there were one or two families you would not cheerfully mix with on the Foxholes estate because you knew father was in prison or the son was in prison. There were one or two quite rough families.

TC: Do you know Marian Gossemy? She was a great friend of mine at school and her parents used to live in Foxholes Avenue and they moved to Ware Road near enough on the corner of Cromwell Hill and I always remember her saying, yes, you see, Mummy and Daddy didn’t want me to live there because the man next door says “bloody”!

AP: My brother’s best friend was Kenneth Mann and he lived in the “gaol”, Ash Street. I think mother had died and they were left with 2 or 3 children, the father tried to bring them up, they were a wonderful family and I remember going down there, you would not cheerfully go down there and I don’t think it was rough in any sense of the word, it was just you didn’t go into the gaol, don’t ever go down there.

TC: I never went down there.

ED: Oh, I never went into the gaol, no.

AP: So there were extraordinary areas, but look, it’s no different now. I mean, I discovered some streets in Hertford the other day and I was absolutely staggered, and I wouldn’t cheerfully leave my car there more than 5 minutes.

TC: Do you remember the nursery that used to be where Addis was, and they built the first bit which was the town side and then they built another bit and there was a nursery there and then when Addis took over that bit they took on a greengrocers shop in Fore Street next to the Post Office. I can see the man and they had a son who always used to ride a bicycle everywhere.

DE: No, I can remember the Blakes, a sort of garage. I used to know one of the Blake boys, a bit older than me. We used to go out together on our bicycles.

AP: In the grounds of the Addis site was where the 1st and 2nd Hertford Brownies and Guiders used to meet. You’d go in there and there were wooden huts at the back, there were quite a lot of grassy areas and they must have let us meet in there regularly once a week and we had the use of a hut.

DE: We had the use of huts lined up at the back of Addis where they had all the sacks of bones from which they made the toothbrush handles.

TC: Lillies had that.

DE: Yes, Mr. Lillie was a blacksmith for Addis.

TC: And he lived nearly opposite because when you were bombed out you stayed there.

AP: One thing I do remember [about Addis] is when we were at primary school Mrs. Addis, who was the grande dame, used to visit once a term and to those pupils who had done very good work, she would present one toothbrush so there were about 3 “lucky” children. Now, when you think of how many toothbrushes would be distributed and only 3 in each form got one.

DE: I used to do business with old man Addis sometimes. I used to sell him polystyrene for making his tooth brush handles and so and when I was talking to the buyer he used to come in and fire off a broadside of questions and sail out again., I used to play tennis with Robin. I remember when once we were collecting for Distressed Gentlewomen’s Fund or something, knocked at the Addis house and Mrs. Addis answered and said “Oh, I can’t afford that, I’m a distressed gentlewoman myself!”

TC: Do you remember the Marshalls?

DE: Of course, I remember Bernard Marshall!

TC: He wads lovely, he was one of my first boyfriends, but don’t tell Zara! Old Mr. Robbins, he used to live in the house next door to Miss Morrises and he was one of the last men to wear a little velvet cap and smoking jacket. They were people that one time owned the Dicker mill.

DE: Oh, yes, Birdie Robbins I knew, must haver been his son.

TC: Then there was old Mr. Gray on the corner of Currie Street and Ware Road, he was a lovely old man. Fosdykes, and after the war the Hydes.

DE: Yes, Gordon Hyde I remember.

TC: Do you remember the people before, Chamberlain and her father?

DE: Betty Chamberlain, yes. She married Gro Pavey.

TC: Then over the other side there was the Andrews, Aunty Ann.

DE: Oh, yes, Mrs. Andrews of the stonemason fame.

TC: And then there were the Sherriffs.

DE: Oh, Yvonne Sherriff I remember and the Garrods, Betty and Barbara, who used to take you to school and Barbara became a teacher.

TC: Then they built the new house next to Braziers, that was the Cooper of the shop.

DE: Dufty Cooper, I remember.

TC: And then Major Bugg.

DE: Oh, yes, Teddy Bugg…

TC: Who married the other district nurse, she was Sister Major. Lillies had that house built.

AP: Another thing to say about Nurse Lacey, how important these nurses were, particularly district nurses, everybody knew them, in a way that now you don’t know them, it was a very personal service.

TC: They all lived in the town and they worked in the town. Then there was Aunty Beckwith, do you remember their son, he had only one eye.

DE: George Beckwith lost an eye, air gun or something. He was a conjuror, and next door to them were the Thomas’s, Nancy Thomas, she came to Cecily’s memorial service. My sister died in Canada, Vancouver and she had a memorial at Standon where her husband came from, he was Philip Stott and about 5 years ago they had a memorial servicer where Philip’s remains are in Standon.

TC: Then there was poor old Susan Brown, it’s very sad, that house.

AP: Susan used to do a lot of riding, she was always beautifully kitted out, was that Audrey Kemp’s school?

TC: No, it was Ann Brazier’s Aunt Becky, which was up in the pits. Where the garage is if you went up there, there used to be a big black shed and it was a skating rink at one time [Caxton Hill], that was there a long time, apparently out granny used to skate there [roller skating].

DE: It must have come down when I was about 10.

TC: Oh, no, I can remember it.

DE: It must have come down about 1936.

TC: Where the Grubbs lived on the corner of Fairfax Road Fosters lived next door [photographers]. Jackie Butler used to work in Barclays Bank – they used to take me to school, they were convent girls. It was her sister that married Mick Hudson, they were school sweethearts, they used to go to school on the bike, but she never pedalled because he pushed her.

AP: My father was home on leave and went to the cinema that night of the landmine and as soon as the landmine went off the management must have known and they closed the film down and everybody went “ahh” and there was a big notice “Ladies and Gentlemen – you ought to go home” so everybody went home early – they didn’t allow it to finish.

DE: Do you know the Coburns? They lived at the bottom of London Road.

TC: Ah, yes, but initially they were in the Ware Road between Fairfax Road and the end of Gallows Hill

AP: Who were the two girls that lived near Foster and one of them married the chap that lived in the green-top houses in Stanstead road?

DE: Chambers – Pam and Zillah, who is Zillah Driver now. Pam was evacuated, during the war, to America

AP: And there were two other girls….

TC: And one of them married Louis Fosdyke and their father was the police superintendent.

DE: Spicer?

(discission on surname)

TC: Then coming along the end, next to Jean Barrington lived…….., she was one of the first physios and before she came to live there…

DE: Pauline Gladwin, I fancied her!

TC: Is it her brother who’s the bishop?

AP: Yes, there were a lot of bishops around the same year. One was Richard Charters and one was Tom Gladwin.

TC: Don had this thing about Pauline Gladwin and I had to be dragged along, I was standing on the back doorstep and she’d come out, she was very pretty.

AP: She was head girl at Ware Grammar School and her great friend was Polly Parratt [Mary]

TC: Next door to Gladwin’s were the undertaker people, was it Scales? and their house was Hope Villa. Then there was the dentist and there was a little field there, then Eileen Mann, the Pamphilon’s…

AP: What about Gerry Booker, he taught at Hertford Grammar School….

TC: The Comley’s, Daddy Comley used to play the organ at All Saints. There weren’t many boys forthcoming so they decided to have girls and women in the choir and I was asked to join in. In fact, Edith Fosdyke started it and she asked if I would join and I did and we appeared first at evensong and the hymn was “Who are these like stars appearing” and we were all kitted out in these brilliant white surplices.

TC: Ware Road is a suburb of Hertford, you’ve got the old town and it’s just grown.

AP: When we were young we didn’t mix at all with people from Queens Road, that was absolutely upper crust, but we didn’t mix with anybody from St. Andrew Street, didn’t know those people, you didn’t even walk down there because all the Abel Smith people were on our side of town.

And all the Cowbridge people were that side, you never met. West Street and Castle Street, a bit of a no no, West Street now so much, but West Street was very run down, you couldn’t cheerfully live in West Street. It’s quite different now. And you certainly didn’t know anybody in North road, that was miles away!

Tape ends