Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Coates, Brian (O2002.26) |
| Interviewee | Brian Coates (BC) |
| Interviewer | Eddie Roche (ER) Peter Ruffles (PR) |
| Date | 14/10/2002 |
| Transcriber by | Jean Riddell (Purkis) |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: O2002.26
Interviewee: Brian Coates (BC)
Date: 14th October 2002
Venue: 34 Lys Hill Gardens, Bengeo Hertford
Interviewers: Eddie Roche (ER) Peter Ruffles (PR)
Transcriber: Jean Riddell (Purkis)
Typed by: Freda Joshua
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
PR: Is that an old man’s failing then, missing the word that’s coming, because I’ve got a bit of it, yes
ER: If it is not a rude question, how old are you, Brian?
BC: 75.
ER: You’re not doing bad for 75.
BC: I’m still here, I didn’t think I would be.
ER: Here we are on a Monday afternoon. It’s not very nice outside, quite cosy in here. 14 October and we’ve got the company of Peter Ruffles and myself, Eddie Roche, talking to Brian Coates. First and foremost, I’ve known Brian quite a long time as a customer, but what I didn’t know is that Brian is a Hertford person at Crouchfields was it?
BC: It was Herts Training School in those days and what is now Crouchfields, it was Crouchfields before.
ER: When you were born there it was ..?
BC: Herts Training School, shown on the ordnance maps as Herts Training school, the earlier ones say Herts Reformatory. It was, in fact, a Home Office approved school if you know what that is?
ER: A school for boys of a certain age, one assumes.
BC: For naughty boys who’ve been before the magistrates, the courts and there were 3 levels – do you want to hear about this? The junior school was at Danesbury, Warren Park Road, now a housing estate, they lost the old house there. The next group up was Pishiobury, Sawbridgeworth, which is now ‘Beckham’s Palace’, and the senior boys were at Herts Training School and most of them came from the East End of London. I can tell you some of the history of it if you want to know. Crouchfield House, I think it was part of the Woodhall Estate, the Abel Smith estate, and I’m not sure if the freehold still isn’t but the man who lived there and had the lease of it, I don’t know. It was somewhat similar to Dr Barnardo. He used to wander round the streets of the East End of London- I’d better not say picking up orphaned boys! – finding boys who were homeless and bringing them back there and giving them a home, that’s how it started. And that was just the house along the front.
ER: So it was a type of orphanage?
BC: It was, that’s how it started. Then the police and authorities asked him to take boys who were in trouble and couldn’t be kept at home because home was not a good environment.
PR: What kind of dates are we talking about when he was operating, broadly?
BC: I can’t tell you exactly but I should think it became a reformatory somewhere about 1900, late 19th century. [This may be a popular myth – the school was built as a reformatory in 1857 on land given by the Abel Smiths] The school is an independent school run by licence from the Home Office so it was, in fact, Herts Training School Limited, a limited liability company and the governors were a self-perpetuating body by co-option, who ran the school to the Home Office rules and under their inspection, so two or three times a year a Home Office Inspector arrived to see that they were doing what they should be doing.
The general idea was to keep the boys there in those days for three years regardless, they just got three years to teach them a trade and put them back into the world again. If they were good and behaved themselves, they were let out on licence as it was called, before the three years. And what did they learn? My father started off teaching them cabinet making and in those days radios and radio-grams were rather posh pieces of furniture. The factories round the Wembley area in London gobbled up those boys, he could always get them a job there. He (father) trained them and he wouldn’t have any machinery, only a lathe and a hand morticing machine, and he used to say any fool could use a machine, so he insisted on doing everything by hand.
ER: So that was cabinet making and carpentry?
BC: Carpentry, then you get joinery and the top of the tree is cabinet making – finer work, finer finishing. When they left there they left with a full kit of tools. My father told me that they were getting 70% successes who never appeared again, which he thought wasn’t bad.
ER: Having a trade and having work, they’d got something to focus themselves on, hadn’t they?
BC: That’s right, they generally did well. My father went there in 1924, as he said, to get two years’ experience, and stayed there for the rest of his career.
PR: What had his background been? How did your father find himself in that role?
BC: Well, the family home is Gloucester, does that help? Historically we’re carpenters and undertakers. My paternal grandfather was an undertaker in Gloucester so he picked a lot of it up from my grandfather. He, by the way, was quite a skilled man. In the first World War he made wooden aeroplane propellers which had to be balanced and it wasn’t easy to get a propeller out of one piece of wood and they were always landing those down and slicing the ends off.
ER: He was never out of work on that?
BC: He was in the Royal Flying Corps and was making and repairing their propellers for them. I think he put his age up and joined the army before the first World War, in the Gloucester Regiment and when they went they kicked him out because he was too young to go and eventually he did go and, to cut a long story short, he got taken prisoner trying to rescue somebody in no-mans-land and had a rough time with the Germans and came home and although the war ended in November, they didn’t let him or any of the family see him until March of the following year, so he must have been in quite a poor way.
I got this from my uncle, my father never spoke about it.] Then he went to work in Gloucester as a pharmacist. In those days you were apprenticed to a pharmacist, you didn’t go to university and take a degree. He was apprenticed and I don’t think he got on very well and it was suggested to him that he could get a government grant as an ex-serviceman. So he applied for it and got it and went to Southampton University and qualified as a teacher of woodwork and cabinet making and also metal work and also physical training. I don’t know how he found this job, there was a house with it so perhaps that was the attraction. I remember him telling me, coming back to Hertford, he was brought up in Gloucester, which is a large cathedral county town city. My mum was from Malvern, which is another cathedral large city. When they came to Hertford they thought they were going to see the same thing. He was quite taken aback that Hertford was the county town.
ER: Very rural.
BC: …than the provincial centres that he’d come from. He must have liked it because he stayed here.
ER: Where he was, Crouchfield, Hertford was quite a distance relatively, so they were a bit isolated on top of everything else, weren’t they?
BC: He told me that the tarmac road ended at the top of Bengeo Street where the fork roads used to be. There was a horse trough in the middle and, as an engineer, I know that it was macadam the rest of the way, which was gravel rolled in with water and a steam roller, belonging to Alfred Scales. So that’s what it was the rest of the way and the red-roof council houses in Bengeo Street, opposite the church, were being built at that time. That New Road, Gosselin Road, they were under construction then.
ER: So he was a master at …
BC: That’s right and ended up as deputy head by the time he retired.
PR: Were you the only child then, Brian?
BC: Yes.
PR: Looking back, was it the ideal place to spend a childhood?
BC: There was a lot of freedom to run across the fields, I think I had a good childhood. It was in the days of the old thick hedges, there were many hedges, gone now that were there, that you had dens in and all that sort of thing.
ER: Were there other boys?
BC: Not many. As soon as a new member of staff was taken on the first thing I said was, ‘have they got any children?’
ER: Isolated, wasn’t it?
BC: Oh yes. There is a story why I’m the only child but I don’t think it’s …
PR: Oh yes, yes.
BC: Well, as it’s a picture of the time, my father came from a family of nine but one of his sisters contracted consumption and eventually died. My mother told me this after my father died, that he was so put out by this, she said, he didn’t know if it was running in the family and he wouldn’t have any more children if it was.
PR: I think it’s, as you say, life as it was and decisions made very sacrificially and thoughtfully.
ER: So where would you have gone to school?
BC: Bengeo School, by the church which is now a block of flats. Well, I started off in the infants school in …
ER: Tonwell?
BC: No, Trinity Grove.
PR: Yes, a little Twitchell.
BC: Mrs Walker’s, the infants, and the juniors were down there, two sisters, MIss Walkers. The older one started the school in Warren Park Road called Duncombe School.
PR: Oh Well, I’m blessed!
BC: And then the next stage, juniors or whatever. Mr Bottomley was the Headmaster and a very dragon-like lady called Miss Williams took the junior class, then you went up to Mr Bottomley. Tilly Williams, you’ve heard of Tilly Williams?
PR: Yes.
BC: Lived at 23 Duncombe – do you know, forget where I’ve been half the time but all this is quite clear in my head, 23 Duncombe Road she lived. She was built like a battle ship, a terrific disciplinarian, taught you everything, but she carried it out of school and if she saw any boys misbehaving in Bengeo Street she’d shout down the street like a sergeant major, ‘Boys come here’, whack!
ER: You see you wouldn’t have that discipline now.
BC: No, it’s all gone.
ER: And I think we’re all the better for that.
BC: I used to send her a Christmas card ‘til she died. I had great respect for her and I think she taught us well. Boys from Bengeo School used to reckon that they did well.
ER: Several contemporaries of mine were Bengeo boys.
BC: There was one, Brian Wilde.
ER: Oh yes, I think everyone knows of, or knows Brian Wilde.
BC: We were friends and still are friends, used to go everywhere together on our bikes. He’s a lot taller than me.
ER: I think he still is. What form of transport did you have from Crouchfield? You walked from Crouchfield?
BC: Well, when I was young at Bengeo School, mother brought me in on the back of her bicycle, tough lady that she was. When I got too much for that I walked and walked home again, sandwiches for lunch.
ER: There weren’t things like school dinners.
BC: No, you got your bottle of milk to go with it, a third of a pint in those days. But things happened then that you would frown on nowadays. Various people would give me lifts. There was a Carter Patterson delivery service in the area, the green wagon, if he saw me he’d always take me home and there was a man called Saggers who lived in Trinity Grove who had a horse and trap. It was all I could do to climb up into the trap, he’d take me home. I used to think that was great. Talk about having lifts home with strange people. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road. Then when I was 10 I had a bicycle, a new bicycle, bought for my birthday, a Hercules. The first thing I did was put on the brakes too hard and went over the handle bars. When I was thought to be safe I cycled to school.
ER: Bengeo School?
BC: Yes, and then eventually to the Grammar School.
ER: See, that was a fair old trip to the Grammar School, that was more than twice the journey coming back after a hard day’s journey.
BC: When the war started Battersea Grammar School came and we had the school in the morning and they had it in the afternoon, so I only had half an education. If there was an air raid I didn’t get educated!
ER: Did you win a scholarship?
BC: No, I passed an entrance exam.
ER: We’re talking about the days when the Grammar School was a paying…
BC: I think it was subsidised but there were fees as well.
PR: Was your time at the Grammar School all war-time?
BC: No, I was there before the war, 1938.
ER: Are you a member of the Old Hertfordians Association? You’re not?
BC: No, I’ve got an application form at home but I haven’t filled it in. Well, doing the jobs that I did, rightly or wrongly, I steered clear.
ER: I know several people in your situation, yes.
BC: And I only joined one thing – Round Table. And two things I’m grateful to them for, one that they accepted me knowing what my job was, and no-one ever asked a favour of me, and at various times I’ve had to make a speech at meetings and so on and I think I learned public speaking there, in front of my peers who could give you a hard time, which was all to the good, but after that I was never afraid to stand up and talk in front of anybody. Do you remember that?
PR: Yes I do, I’ve sat at your knee at many a seminar and …
ER: So did you move on from Round Table into Rotary?
BC: No, I could have done but I didn’t. It wasn’t the same in Rotary I found, and one or two of my peers who went into Rotary, came out again. So it wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea.
ER: I think all those organisations are a little bit like that, aren’t they. I mean, my father was a Rotarian all his life, well from when he went in, he never left, even in his last years, he was an honorary member. I think he found it good comradeship, as you do Table. In those days, I don’t know what it’s like now, as you say no-one asks you a favour. There was mutual respect for position.
BC: I appreciated that because I had to be a bit careful.
PR: We must talk about Brian, there’s so much, he’s a legend, you see, a national figure, so we’ve got to kow-tow. But can we go back to childhood Bengeo, were there any short-cuts from Crouchfield to Bengeo Street across the fields? You couldn’t do a diagonal thing up through?
BC: No, the only short-cut was into Hertford. There was a cart track much more defined than it is now. How to define it? Before the little hill going into Bengeo…
ER: Where Reg the Veg has his tractor?
BC: Yes, after that there was a triangular-shaped copse and there was a tramp living in there. You could go up the track to the side then into Waternill Lane, which was then a cart track and if I was going to the cinema at Hertford, I’d go that way.
PR: So Watermill Lane would bring you out in St Leonards Road?
BC: Yes [overtalking].
PR: Was the school that Mr Bottomley and Tilly, separate schools for boys and girls..?
BC: Yes, side by side and an iron fence in between and we weren’t supposed to speak to each other. But I still meet one or two ladies who were at school when I was and we recognise each other. We have a laugh about this fence.
ER: I’ve got a picture of that in one of the books of Hertford I’ve got. I’m not sure if it’s Len Green’s book or one of Heath’s books, pictures of Bengeo School.
PR: Miss Clewes was the head, wasn’t she, after, Ida Clewes, always struck me as a good name for her. But the school heating always fascinates me.
BC: Yes, big tortoise shell [turtle?] stoves. We had to put the school milk round it in the morning to thaw it out, it was frozen solid in the morning.
ER: One thing I’ve never liked, warm milk. In St Andrews they put it inside the fire guards, the bottles of milk, and by the time you got it, it was warm. So you had sort of hot stoves as opposed to we had open fires.
PR: Like one in your living room really.
BC: I think they were called tortoise or the manufacturers were called Tortoise.
PR: Yes, a slow burning –
BC: Coke stove.
PR: Yes, there’d be one of those in the classroom, would there?
BC: There was certainly one in Tilly’s room. I think it had been two classrooms, the far end was a handicraft centre, making chair seats and book-binding.
ER: Raffia work, things like that.
BC: That’s right, but the desks that we sat at were the other end so there were two stoves in that front part of the school.
ER: And I suppose they’d got a caretaker sort of a chap who’d come in and get those …
BC: Yes, I’ve got a faint memory of someone coming across from those cottages by the White Lion.
PR: Was the population of the school pretty mixed in terms of ability and social background?
BC: Yes, well the people that had come up into the red houses I think had come up from Bircherley Green and that area and I’m picking my words carefully, there were some rough diamonds and there were some real diamonds amongst them. The people who went to Hornsmill were from the same area and it turned out exactly the reverse. Hornsmill generally has always been a bother.
PR: Yes [overtalking].
ER: People also, at that time, also came into the town. I’ve heard people saying about Addises coming from London and they brought people and some of those went to Bengeo.
BC: And some of them went up Gallows Hill.
PR: And Foxholes and Campfield, but I wonder if there was any social engineering by the housing management team, because Bengeo’s always had that higher social… but as you say with a few exceptions.
ER: It was always said that Bengeo was built for people to live in to look down on the poor people of Hertford.
BC: I can only say that, between one’s parents, the local police and Tilly Williams, there wasn’t much crime in Bengeo, or bad behaviour.
ER: I think it always had the reputation of being a nice place to live, a little bit better than some other areas in the town. I lived in Hertford in a different area and think to myself, ‘Oh, the people from up there’.
PR: What about the pubs, Brian? There’s the Reindeer at the bottom of the hill and the White Lion, the Globe, the Greyhound.
BC: I had my first drink in the Globe.
PR: Did you?
BC: With Brian Wilde.
PR: Oh, was that a legitimate drink?
BC: I think we had a half-glass of cider each and felt very much risqué. I think my father minded most about that. He had a thing about smoking which I can tell you about. He smoked and I think everybody who’d been in the war smoked, but he said to me, out of the blue one day, ‘I would rather you didn’t start smoking, it’s not good for you and you’ll rue the day. You can do better things with your money than ruin your health smoking, but I don’t want you smoking behind my back, behind the bike shed, metaphorically. If you’re going to smoke, smoke in front of me, but I’d rather you didn’t’.
And I have to say that I had such a respect for my father, he’s got a terrific way with boys, that I tried it once and it made me sick and that was it, I’ve never smoked since. The strange thing was, when I was in the army, North Africa, we used to get 50 cigarettes free issue in round tins, I don’t know if you’ve ever had that?
ER: I’ve got a tin in my garage.
BC: Craven A and you used to get [overtalking]. At the time I had a whole lot of Rommel’s Africa Corps working for me and they weren’t allowed money but the currency in the prisoner of war cages was cigarettes. So at that time I had three stripes on my arm and I had a prisoner for a batman and I paid him in cigarettes and he was well-chuffed. But, again, being stuck in the desert, if we played cards money meant nothing and we used to play for cigarettes and, damn me, I nearly always won.
ER: So you were a card player then, Brian?
BC: I used to have to give them all back – they were no good to me.
ER: So was that 50 cigarettes a week, was it? (Yes)
PR: You said your dad was a good schoolmaster?
BC: I’m prejudiced but yes, he was definitely recognised.
PR: Was he like you in appearance, physically?
BC: I was like my father. If you lined me, my father and all his brothers up and looked at us from the rear, we’d all be the same, the same pattern of hair loss, it must obviously be in the genes and it’s only recently that I’ve got this bit of fuzz on top otherwise I was bald.
But I wish I had my father’s skill in my hands, that he had in his hands. It sounds a bit boastful but I did find when I was in the army and later working, I did have the ability to get people to do what I wanted, them to do without chasing them
PR: And had you seen him doing that?
BC: Yes, I saw him once put down a semi-riot in the school. When I was in the army I put down a riot in the NAAFI in exactly the same way and it worked. I crossed my fingers and went into the couple of hundred bods trying to break the place up, and it worked.
ER: It’s having a way with people, isn’t it. Unfortunately, very few people have this.
BC: But he had it and I did it, absolute silence, I just walked in with my hands behind my back, fingers crossed and walked through the middle and it went silent. They just stood there like a lot of naughty boys. I thought, ‘What the hell are they doing, smashing up their NAAFI, and they’d better get to work and clear it up and those who could, better repair the furniture’.
When I came back I wanted to see it done. If it happened again, they’d be running round that parade ground so much they’d get dizzy, ‘Yes, sergeant’, and they turned the guard out – was behind – how the hell did you do that? Magic! I didn’t tell them how. I learned a lot. Two important people in my life - my father and Horace Gilby, and I was his articled pupil, he was my professional mentor.
ER: So going back to school time, you went to the Grammar School and, I would assume, as you got to be one of Horace Gilby’s pupils you must have done reasonably?
BC: I got the Schools Certificate.
ER: Reasonably well and any prowess on the sports field?
BC: I could run long distances.
ER: Cross country running?
BC: Yes, but I was no good at sprinting because I wasn’t built for it. I played rugby and in the army I played rugby, being what I am, a hooker at the front of the scrum. I threw the discus but I wasn’t all that terrific at sport. I was in Hale House at school.
PR: Was Taphouse the house master? I was in Hale House and he was my house master. I got the impression he’d been there for …
BC: Most of the time he was away in the army.
PR: Yes, yes you’ll have missed him.
BC: I remember him going in the army and a man called Field, who was the art master went in the RAF and his wife came and taught us art. We had a lady teacher for the first time there, Mrs Field.
ER: I can remember in my time, which was 1949 onwards, we had one or two ladies, well, Mrs Blake, she taught chemistry under a bit of supervision of old Tab.
PR: Chlorine.
ER: Yes and we had a French teacher, Mrs Holmes.
PR: She was from Barnet. She used to cycle in from Barnet.
ER: She had two sons there. I think she started off the French exchanges.
PR: She came with the Battersea boys.
ER: And then, after normal school time, you passed into the hands of Horace Gilby [slight confusion]?
BC: The king.
ER: So you were called up, obviously, the war was on.
BC: I was dead keen to join the army and my father wasn’t all that keen, otherwise I would have volunteered when I was seventeen-and-a-half.
PR: Had you done the cadet force at school (Yes).
ER: What year would that have been?
BC: ’45, it was just finishing.
PR: Yes, you went to the school in ’38?
BC: I joined the army in Bury St Edmunds with a boy called Barker whose father used to drive the ambulance and, I forget his Christian name, Cooper, who’s now dead, the sign writing Coopers, then East Herts Electrical. He was a late call-up, had been in the auxiliary fire service, so they put him in the army fire service.
ER: They got you then, into the army eventually?
BC: Yes, I couldn’t wait to go, actually.
ER: I can understand that for whatever reason.
BC: You’re young and daft, aren’t you?
ER: So you went in with no experience of the building industry as such.
BC: No. I wanted to go into surveying, I asked to go into the Royal Engineers and, to my amazement, they put me in it. I went into a Field Survey Unit and that’s what I was in in the Middle East. We were map-making and correcting maps. No other country in the world has anything like our Ordnance Survey, nothing like it at all. People were preparing to invade Japan, the British Army were the only people who’d got maps of Japan, the Americans were coming to us for our maps ready to invade Japan. They hadn’t got any, no military maps at all. Of course, the tracks across the desert, we used to disappear into the desert trying to …
ER: That’s what you were doing in the desert.
BC: You’d see a track and it’d go off into a whole load of question marks.
ER: That’s what you were doing, creating maps of the desert after the war?
BC: Yes, Egypt and Libya. We did some work down in East Africa and the revision of the Jordan Valley, Palestine as it was, and then keeping the peace. The British Army has to keep the peace, doesn’t it?
ER: You still had this mixture of cultures then.
BC: Oh yes, like Palestine, very much so, both sides shooting at you and the Egyptians everybody. When I left the country we thought we were going on active service to Jamaica. I thought, ‘Great, Jamaica, that’d suit me’. So off we set and the train ended up in Dover and across to Calais. Went right through France down to the Mediterranean and I thought, ‘Well, this is not the way to Jamaica’. And then they said, ‘You’re going to Greece’. But I ended up in Egypt, Malta.
ER: At least you saw a bit of the world.
BC: Called in at Haifa, then down to Port Said, and there we were. This is nothing to do with Hertford [overtalking]
ER: So after doing your stint for the army you came back to Hertford?
PR: How long was the army stint then?
BC: I came home in ’48.
ER: And still living at Crouchfield?
BC: My father was living at Rockfield House by then, he was the Deputy Headmaster. As he got promoted he got a better house so we moved anti-clockwise round the estate, four different houses. The Lodge at one time, then Southview then Rockfield House.
PR: So ’48 brings you back to Crouchfield, was your mother still there, and father?
BC: Through a mutual friend, my father had heard that Horace Gilby was looking for a pupil and that was the way into the profession – to be an articled pupil. Before I came home, I’d been an active Sergeant Major and was demobbed and came down to being a pupil! Which was a great come-down in life.
ER: Could you just explain to us, when you say you were a pupil, what being a pupil meant?
BC: Articled pupils were in the surveying profession and in the legal progression and it was a way in. There were no university graduates, that was not a way in, you could be but it wasn’t a recognised way.
ER: It was an apprenticeship?
BC: It was a posh form of apprenticeship. You’d get a very highly stamped and sealed document saying you were an articled pupil and you were articled for three years and paid a salary in the third year. First and second years you didn’t get anything.
ER: Sometimes parents paid for their sons and daughters to be articled to a firm.
BC: That was quite true, they paid what was called the Premium. Because I was an ex-serviceman, the ruling council said they didn’t want a Premium.
ER: Horace Gilby at that time was working for… [name lost in overtalking].
BC: The government gave me a grant £1.11.6 a week, which I thought was a funny sum of money until I realised it was one-and-a-half guineas. People were, in those days, being paid in guineas. You ask young people nowadays what a guinea is, they say, ‘what?’. Don’t know what it is never mind what it was worth.
I was living at home and my father was feeding me and keeping me, which he was happy to do, so I did my two years and then got paid for the third one. Then I saw a job going in Baldock and I went up to Baldock as an engineering assistant, Baldock Urban District Council, and stayed there a couple of years until I got a phone call from Horace saying, ‘I’ve got a vacancy here in the office for an assistant engineer – it might be a good idea if you applied for it’.
I thought about it, because one hears that you shouldn’t go backwards in life, but he was such a good boss, not an easy boss, but he taught me a lot. I thought, ‘there’s a lot to learn from this man’ and the man I was working for hadn’t got a lot to teach me, I won’t go any further than that. So I applied for the job and got it. It was rather a funny interview. Do you remember George Turner at all, who lived at Green Hall [sic] in Bramfield, the retired County Land Agent [overtalking]?
He was a crusty old devil but he was on the interview panel. They obviously knew of my previous history as a working pupil so old George says, ‘You in the army, boy?’, ‘Yes, sir’, ‘What regiment?, ‘I was in the Royal Engineers’, ‘Good, good’. So he then turned to the chairman, an ex-serviceman, was in RE, in front of me, ‘Give the job to him’.
PR: How things have changed.
ER: So that was a good career move.
BC: And what I learned from Horace Gilby – I couldn’t write it all down.
ER: That was Hertford Rural Council still? (Yes) and were they operating from …
BC: The offices were over the solicitors in Parliament Square, had been Hawkes, but I think it belonged to Longmores, so I guess Longmores rented it. The upstairs rooms, which the Engineers and Public Health went together, and the Clerks for the Finance were in rooms over in Castle Street, which no doubt they rented, for the good reason that Eddie Williams, who was a partner, was a part-time clerk of Hertford Rural District Council.
ER: All fits together doesn’t it ?
PR: It would be nice to elaborate on a character sketch of Horace Gilby. He was also in a separate but linked life as Alderman of the Borough whilst serving as an officer of the neighbouring council, which must have taken a bit of careful management.
BC: We talked about it, we talked about everything. I think I was one of his closest friends because, after a short while, I became his deputy. So when he was off doing his meetings, I had charge of the ship. I remember him saying to me, ‘Well there it is, you know the job, get on with it as best you can and it you make any mistakes, I’ll try and put it right when I come back’.
ER: He obviously had a great deal of confidence.
BC: He did, which was true, I did the job as I knew how he wanted it done.
PR: So we’d better describe what the job was, the daily routine and the tasks.
BC: I was engineer and surveyor and chief public health inspector as it was called in those days.
ER: For Hertford Rural District Council?
BC: When I first started it included water supply, building council estates with roads and houses on, new sewerage schemes because the rural areas had been sadly lacking before the war and it was government policy to catch up quickly. There was a lot of capital money put into rural area to put in sewerage schemes and sewage disposal works.
ER: This would be in the early ‘50s?
BC: That’s right. It’s interesting that as soon as we had got the water undertaking in profit making money to bolster the rates in 1960 the government took if off us and we started having larger units to supply water. I thought we were a very efficient unit, actually.
ER: So when you talk about Hertford Rural District being a unit, an undertaking like water, how did you link in with the Borough, for example?
BC: I think there must have been some links to help each other out. For instance, Hertford Heath was supplied from the old Metropolitan Water Board. They levied a separate rate for water in Hertford Heath or Little Amwell Parish as it was.
PR: Is that right opposite the College Arms.
BC: Well, the War Memorial, all that area.
ER: Did they not convert it into a private house?
BC: Well, it weren’t much of a water tower. It was round the corner towards Hoddesdon.
ER: Up by the College.
PR: But the Rural District was autonomous.
BC: We were sitting on a vast underground lake of water. During my time there, Stevenage sunk their bore holes, put down three water pumping stations in the Beane valley, which you may have seen if you drive up there on the left. And Harlow came across here and sank three bore holes on the road to Sacombe Pound. They’re pumping water directly to Harlow. How we got out of that, they had to pay rates.
ER: Where would they get permission?
BC: Harlow New Town was looking round for water supplies and the experts said the best place is there, and I daresay it would be done under the New Towns Act, that they’d have the right to do it. But certainly, as far as Stevenage is concerned, we had a pumping station just a bit further up the River Beane for supplying the north part of the area and we had to test it for a fortnight. There were two pumps in there, one was meant to be a standby. We ran both of them running to waste up in Aston to see if we could lower the water in the bore holes, and after 14 days’ non-stop we depressed the level 18 inches, and within three quarters of an hour it’d come back up again to the original rest place. So we said there’s enough water there for Stevenage.
ER: So that was the test [overtalking].
BC: I knew at that time that all the head waters of the Herts rivers had dried up three quarters of a mile from when records were first kept at that time, so there wasn’t so much water flowing in the rivers, but it was underground, in these chalk fissures.
ER: That still holds good today, does it?
BC: No, the amount that’s been extracted has taken it down. Three years ago we had that drought and the rivers nearly dried up, they got very worried about it. I think with the rainfall since it’s more or less gone back but there’s a terrific amount of water being taken out. I mean the pumping station along the B158, I can remember that being sunk when I was a boy, that was done in my time. That was to supply Hertford, and that was reckoned to be an artisian well because it came so far up the borehole once they’d [words lost] otherwise we’d all be rich.
PR: What other things would the Surveyor’s office, as it were, have done?
BC: The state of housing. I was inspecting houses to put closing orders and demolition orders because they were so bad.
PR: We’re in Rural District at the moment.
BC: And we were involved in planning development control side. In those days, the County Council did the academic planning and prepared development plans. People made their application to the Rural Council who took advice of the County, but the decision was made by the Rural Council at its planning committee, and I used to go and advise them. But at the end Horace gave it over to me. I used to do it [words lost]. So I can say at the time when East Herts Council came along in 1974, I had 20 years of planning experience.
ER: The job was a very rounded job.
BC: Oh yes, Jacks-of-all-trades. The great thing about it was that you could get away from what I call the Gas Board syndrome. Somebody goes into somebody’s house and gets asked a question, and they say, ‘I don’t know that, that’s somebody else’s job’ [overtalking]. I did the same when I was doing building control, I wouldn’t allow any of my people to be specialised, we all had to be able to do it all. So you went on site to do one thing and something else was happening that you could deal with. I hated this business of ‘it’s not my job’. I was never bored and I never had a job with nothing to do.
PR: Any emotional input on house closures, or were they landlords’ properties?
BC: They were private properties. One emotional one was an isolated cottage in Broxbourne Woods, which was occupied by a family of the name of Bamber and it was in a filthy, disgusting, unrepairable state. It was adjoining a wood called Emmanuel Pollards, which is a nature reserve. Do you know Broxbourne Woods?
PR: Yes.
BC: Along White Stubbs Lane and there’s a turning down to Wormley West End, just after that turning. There’s nothing to show now that that was ever there but they got so uptight that they put a huge hoarding up, about 10x3. It was in the national press about these poor people losing their home. It was so iffy I was sent up there and we said we’d demolish it by direct labour and not give it to a contractor. So the foreman, who was Jack Patmore, whose brother you would know, Councillor Patmore.
PR: Did he live in Benington?
BC: He lived in Benington, went up there with a sledge hammer, knocked a corner post out of this house and the whole lot came down like a pack of cards in a great cloud of dust and straw, because straw was used as insulation in those days. The floors and the roof were all stuffed with straw. Anyway, it all came down, it was lucky it didn’t fall down on anybody’s head before. But the people were very emotional about that, losing their home, but it wasn’t worth keeping and they were going into a brand new council house.
PR: They were owner occupiers were they? I can imagine going into the Lord of the Manor’s property and…
BC: The notices were all served and not disputed, it was just the people living there. Whether they were tenants or not, I can’t tell you now. It may have been part of the Bosanquet Estate.
PR: Quite likely, because of the proximity. They’ve done a very good lot of new building and controlling the quality of the new build and on their estate.
BC: I never had anything to do with that, officially.
PR: Part of the Rural District boundaries – I wasn’t thinking of Wormley West End.
BC: In the 1936 Borough Review the Borough took large chunks of what was the Rural District. Bengeo was in the Rural District, there is a Bengeo Rural Parish still.
[Beginning of tape obscures part of the next statement]
BC: It was a menace to anybody who had to live in it, you know, disgusting, no proper lavatory, water supply.
ER: Of course, there were many of these places about, weren’t there.
BC: I did a survey on what was then three cottages that lay behind Bayford Church and I went upstairs. No carpets on the floor, just wooden boards covered in flattened out cocoa tins where the casters of the old iron beds had gone through the floor and they’d put a cocoa tin over the hole! They were all over the place. That was in a terrible state. We put a closing order on that. Somebody bought it and turned it into one house. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, if not, have a look at it. I should think it’s pushing half a million with the land that goes with it, must be.
ER: Is that the lane where you can park if you go to Bayford Church?
BC: Yes, if you turn right behind the war memorial and go down that lane, down there on the left. Obviously spent a mint of money on it, bought it for the site, it looks a real lovely place now.
ER: Rural Hertford has become a very affluent place to be, wherever you look at rural Hertford, as most rural areas, you go to Bayford and you look in the paper now the houses in Bayford and Essendon and Brickendon asking two million pounds, which years ago would have been hundreds. Anyway, we were digressing.
PR: We were just going off on the boundary thing in either ’36 or later, whichever you think.
BC: Certainly the top end of Bengeo was Rural District. If you turn right on the B158 into Wadesmill Road, that last bungalow on the left, top of the hill, was built by the surveyor of Hertford Rural, a man called Riggs.
PR: It looks as if it’s got that [overtalking[…
ER: 150 thousand.
BC: Well, Riggs built that, he was the surveyor at the time and that was in the District. Their office, I understand, was a shed behind a house in Trinity Grove for a while after Riggs time. I forget the man’s name but his son was at the Grammar School same time as me.
The village of Hertingfordbury was in the Rural District, of course there’s still a parish of Hertingfordbury that’s in the Rural District now, but the village was in, would you believe, Wallfields was in Brickendon Liberty parish. I mean, the Borough of Hertford was quite small originally until the boundary changes. The parish of St John has disappeared into the Broxbourne woods, a thin, narrow area as St John’s Church.
PR: Yes, St John’s Hall was picked up…
ER: I’ve heard talk about Brickendon Liberty and how close it was to the town.
PR: You can see a thing on Longmore’s wall in Castle Street, the boundary…
ER: Brickendon was quite an important area if it stretched that far into the town.
PR: And where did Hertford Rural hit Ware Rural?
BC: Well, Ware Rural included Ware Park so more or less, the River Rib. Certainly, the training school was in Hertford Rural and Chapmore End and up nearly as far as Wadesmill and going round the back of Tonwell into Sacombe. Sacombe House was in Hertford Rural.
PR: What about Watton? Did you go beyond Watton?
BC: It took you to the parish of Aston.
PR: Right, so that’s the current East Herts boundary.
ER: So it was a big patch, wasn’t it, in what you’d call acreage?
BC: Yes, but not the biggest, the biggest one in the county was Hitchin Rural. That went across the top of the county.
[Some interruption to the recording]
PR: We made a bit of a cock-up when we went to Mrs Cleone Gardner . [overtalking]
[Tea drinking]
BC: A lot of people have said you ought to write a book about your experiences, I can’t. I found that people were always taking me into their confidence. They’d tell me all sorts of things about themselves saying, ‘Of course, we know it won’t go any further’, and it never did. I never spoke to my wife about the things that people said to me, why they’d done things and so on. I wouldn’t want to go back on that. Once you start you don’t know how far to go, do you. I could tell you some funny jokes but that’s not the same.
ER: Strange how that some people have this thing that people will talk to them. I think it happens to Peter and it happened to me in the shop, they felt that they could trust you and it wouldn’t go any further [overtalking].
PR: I think partly because you’re not going to be in their life for ever, as it were.
BC: Anyway, where are we, we’re on the boundary.
PR: Yes, I think we’ve probably got the feel of the District, have we?
BC: Little Berkhamsted was in it, Bayford.
ER: So did you go out as far as Hatfield, Essendon?
BC: No, Essendon was in Hatfield Rural, Bedwell Avenue was the boundary, that stream, I can remember that. And up round Letty Green and Cole Green and nearly into Welwyn Garden City.
ER: So it was a big and a varying patch. OK, mostly rural as the name implies, also containing lots of different features that you wouldn’t even get within the Borough. Problems to deal with that were totally different.
BC: I found by experience as an enforcement officer there’s one way to talk to a firm of North London builders in the town and a small village builder in a village. I have the advantage, being born and brought up in the country that I could talk to them about country things.
For instance, I had, at Datchworth, to lay a sewer across a farmer’s field, especially when it comes to manholes, which can break ploughs, but before we started I went to see him and had a chat and we talked about the weather, how his crops were doing, various people we both knew. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, then I said, ‘I’ve got to lay this sewer, I’ve got to do it without upsetting you. How are we going to do it?’ ‘Oh’ he said, ‘Get in the Landrover, boy, and you show me where you want to go’.
I said, ‘There’s two things, One. Where can I put the manholes that won’t worry you in the hedgerows, and when can I do it. I would think the favourable time is when you’ve taken your crops, I can go across a stubble field like nobody’s business’. ‘Right’ he said. So many idiots in other places wait until the corn was up that high and then put a digger through the middle of it, the farmer’s not best pleased, is he? And it’s so simple when you think of it.
PR: While you’re accommodating the farmer or he was accommodating you [overtalking] (you?) have to meet the builder or the developer’s calendars and dates and things at the same time [overtalking]
BC: I was surveying the whole parish of Datchworth, it was a long haul down into the Beane valley and the trunk sewer.
ER: So you would have come right down to Watton?
BC: It was near Frogmore where the Jarvises are?
ER: Under the railway, the whole shooting match. Do you go for Sunday afternoon drives round your old parish and look wistfully at these.
BC: I do, sometimes. Do you know Chapel Lane [Hertingfordbury Parish], winds about like that. I had to lay a sewer up there. Sewers have to be laid in straight lines so it was criss-crossing the road all the way up and me trying to keep the manholes in the pavement.
I wrote a letter to everybody and said ‘we’re going to have to lay this for everybody’s benefit’. I didn’t want to close the road but I was going to give instructions to the contractor to do it in short lengths, that nobody’s driveway was to be blocked until after 9 o’clock in the morning and that we’d open it up again certainly by the time children came home from school and if there was a [word unclear] there, we’d put a plank across it so they could get their cars out, and if it didn’t work out, there was my phone number, phone me and I would put it right. I didn’t get one complaint and the contractors said they’d got tea coming out of their ears. And once you hear that housewives are giving them tea, you know you are all right. But it was worth the stamps, wasn’t it?
PR: But that’s what led you to be the national man. East Herts was panicking that we’d lose Brian to the nation. So you were often in the trade magazines.
ER: When East Herts came, you became part of East Herts?
BC: The new Director of Planning, it was a new thing for the district council to have a Planning Department, hadn’t happened before, Jim Preston, he asked for me, I was headhunted. He came from Watford and so with their agreement, I resigned from Hertford Rural six months before the new council started and worked for them for six months to help set it up.
So I set up the new council and set up the Planning Department. And there were certain members of the new Planning Department who I interviewed for their jobs, which might seem strange for a building control surveyor. I was given the job to interview them and I did. There were various senior officers that I interviewed, much to their surprise. Perhaps they thought that some of my questions were a bit more penetrating. I was very keen on what is now known as customer relations, to keep a good relationship with the public. Still, that’s a long time ago now.
PR: It’s a very high theory. I don’t think we’re as good as delivering in the last 10 years as we were previously.
BC: I retired 10 years (ago) last month!
PR: What about building difficulties in Hertford town centre, are there?
BC: Yes, I’ll give you one story, I won’t mention names. When the Castle Hall was going to be built, being where it is, you can imagine the ground conditions, peat and all sorts of stuff under there and it had to be piled. The architects got structural engineers in to design the structure of the building and it was an international company. And I have to tell you that we found mistakes in their design. I can forgive people mathematical mistakes – anybody can, though you shouldn’t have it, it should all be checked, but it’s more understandable. But they made mistakes in concept of the structure and I chucked it out. And the architect came to me and said, ‘Why isn’t my application being passed?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s been back with your structural engineer because I’ve had to refuse it’, so he sacked them! So here was this very large international firm who were [phrase unclear] given the push. But it would have come down on people’s heads otherwise and that was a justification for me doing my job.
ER: Your first mistake is your best mistake, isn’t it?
BC: I mean, many architects and engineers would say, literally, this has been said to me because a lot of people grumble about building control being useless, that say I can sleep more restfully in my bed if I know you’ve looked at [it] as well. Because I know what it’s like working at a drawing board, you can get blinkered and you can’t see the wood for the trees sometimes. That’s how conceptual mistakes get made. A decent professional person doesn’t mind his work being looked at.
ER: So the Castle Hall would have been built and then slowly…
BC: … started to sink into the river.
PR: There are changes, aren’t there, because the Green Dragon Vaults, which have been there quite a long time and I think now are ankle deep in water because of the water table changes, which were just over the road from where you’re talking about and we’re building now where previously, historically, no building was deemed possible [not quite so, there have since the 17th century been buildings on the Castle Hall site].
BC: In an old town like Hertford a lot of the buildings had their own wells. I’m going back a couple of hundred years, this is very much so in London. In the centre of London nearly everyone had their own well, then when mains water supply came along, they started to use these wells as cesspools. So they were dirtying their own sub water supply until it was stopped. That didn’t happen in Hertford as far as I know, but certainly there’s a lot of wells capped off, we’re always finding them. You start building foundations for a new building and a hole would appear and they said, ‘God, we’ve found another well’, which we would then have to fill in.
ER: I remember when they built Neal Court when they were digging out the foundations from the old Cold Bath Yard, they came across this old sewer. It was a brick sewer, work stopped and it was a long time before they found out where this sewer came from and where it was going and who was responsible for it. Obviously it wasn’t in use.
BC: Bishop Stortford is a terrible place for that. There’s pipes going in all directions.
PR: So Hertford is one up on them from that point of view, subterranean stuff.
BC: Well, they’ve got their fair share of pipes.
ER: You’ve got to remember that Hertford is a very old town so you are going to come across these problems.
BC: Old wells were dangerous because some of them had been covered with only wooden boards and, of course, they’d rotted.
PR: So when would a town like Hertford first begun to get horizontal pipework, subterranean.
BC: The point I was making there, because the wells aren’t there that helps the water level come up, it’s been coming up for decades.
PR: We knew about Victorian sewers and they’re still functioning in various places.
BC: Beautifully built.
PR: And the Romans did things, did they? But not so well built.
BC: Yes, but they worked.
PR: Is there much ancient pipework in Hertford that’s still operating?
BC: Not that I know of, no. Certainly of a foul nature, there may be brick culverts taking surface water into the rivers still operating.
PR: You were mentioning Coopers, the sign-writers, they had a place in Cowbridge. No13, right next to the bridge. That building began to tumble because of a collapsed pipe under it beside the river. I didn’t quite understand where that would have been coming and going to.
BC: It would have been a surface water drain.
PR: Cor! What a life you’ve had.
BC: Yes.
PR: Did your wife feature in your life at all? You haven’t actually mentioned her!
BC: On rare occasions!
PR: When did you meet?
BC: At a dance in Ware Drill Hall
ER: A time-honoured answer to quite a lot of questions.
PR: So was she a Ware girl?
BC: No, a Hertford girl.
ER: At least you didn’t fall into that trap, did you?
BC: No. She had to put up with my funny hours, being on 24 hour call-out. That’s why our phone’s ex-directory. Still getting calls from the Fire Brigade.
ER: Any interests outside work or did you not have time?
BC: Because my father was very keen to know what happened to the boys when they left that school and in many cases did his level best to stop them going back home or just being chucked out on the world, during the war they had a very strong army cadet force there.
They’d had an army cadet force before the war, it was the 19th Herts Cadets and part of the regime in the early days was, after the boys got up, cleaned themselves, cleaned the school, literally, had their breakfast, they did three quarters’ of an hour arms drill in the yard before they went to work, as a way of instilling discipline. And they had these Longley Enfield rifles on loan from the Tower of London, which was an armoury. The armoury has moved to Leeds, but it was the armoury.
I don’t know how well you know the Tower of London, the building on the far side of the gates, with all their firing pins removed, of course, so nobody could hold anybody up with them. Some of the boys were as tall as these rifles. Anyway, he asked me to help him with them so for a while I did join the army cadet force until it packed in and didn’t become so important. Some of them did very well in the army because the discipline in the army was not as tough as it was at the school. They were better off in the army and because of their training began to show – they soon got a few stripes on their arms and they did very well. This was a reformatory school and yet before the war they had an old boys’ association and they’d been sent there by the courts. They bought a billiard table for the boys to use and had an annual dinner in the YMCA in Tottenham Court Road, several of which I went to. It’s strange to think of it now in this day and age.
ER: I remember in recent times when Mr Harding was the Headmaster, he was in the Rotary Club, he’d say, ‘Guess what, So-and-so came into see us’. I think for a lot of them it was the best home they had . Did they do farming when you were there? (Yes) Boys didn’t want to leave, perhaps a cow was going to calve..
BC: That’s right and they’d get attached to the horses. They didn’t want to leave the horses.
[The recording ends abruptly here at the end of tape 2, side 1. Side 2 is blank]