Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Garratt, Simon (O2008.3) |
| Interviewee | Simon Garratt (SG) |
| Interviewer | Eve Sangster (ES) |
| Date | 12/06/2008 |
| Transcriber by | Jean Riddell (Purkis) |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: O2008.3
Interviewee: Simon Garratt (SG)
Date: 12th June 2008
Venue: North Rd House, Hertford
Interviewer: Eve Sangster (ES)
Transcriber: Jean Riddell (Purkis)
Typed by: Corin Jones
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
ES: Thursday June 12th, I’m at Simon Garratt’s, North Rd House and he is, I think, the last miller of Hertford. Can you tell me when you were born?
SG: I was born in 1943 and I have two older sisters who were born in the 1930s.
ES: And where were you born?
SG: I was born in the Old Pest House, Byde St, Bengeo. It was built by Baron Dimsdale I believe and my parents had married in 1931 and they rented it from Hargreaves who then owned Port Hill House and lived at Port Hill House, then after a year they (parents) bought it for £1,000.
ES: And how long did you stay there?
SG: I was born in 1943 and we moved in 1951 to the White House, which was No.2 the Avenue, it was a house that was built by Addis’s for one of their managers in the 1930s.
ES: [Brief pause] Simon is back with us and Jean Riddell (JR) is here as well. You were saying that you moved to No.2 the Avenue.
SG: It was called the White House, it was white and four bedrooms and detached in a reasonably large plot and I always remember it had metal-framed windows, they would have been Crittall windows – they are not really regarded very well these days.
ES: They’ve come back, I think people are starting to think of them quite affectionately.
SG: They were nice, they were casement windows and I always remember it had gas fires with three mantles in them, ceramic mantles, in the bedrooms, certainly, I remember it in my bedroom. But it had full central heating so it would probably have been put in when the house was built, big bore pipes which was powered from an Aga which was stoked with coal, quite hard work which my mother did. And the central heating was put on if the weather was particularly cold. So it certainly wasn’t put on at the beginning of winter and left on. We then moved to a house in Hunsdon, a rather rambling old house which had partial central heating. I remember we were there in the very cold winter of ’63 and getting dressed in the bedroom was absolutely perishing and then in ’66 we moved back into Hertford to Little Molewood and at great expense complete central heating was put in and that was on for six months of the year as I remember. So from the early ‘50s to the mid ‘60s central heating moved from being a rather exotic luxury to being a necessity.
ES: Why did your family move so much? Was it your father’s job?
SG: No, my father worked in the mill, Sele Mill, and they lived in the Pest House for 18 years, then they decided to move to the White House because they wanted something a bit bigger they’d got three children, I was growing up and in the very early days we had a resident maid. My sisters had a nanny but by the time I came along we didn’t run to nannies. We did have a resident maid, I remember an Irish maid and I remember her showing me an Irish penny with a cockerel on it, then later we had a Mrs Whitehouse – Mrs Whitehall, who lived with us, a general helper, she looked after me and so they decided they wanted a larger house. It was only slightly larger than the Pest House, both four-bedroom houses, looking back on it I don’t quite know why, because I think the Pest House could have been extended then after we lived in the White House for only about eight years we moved in ’59 to the Pump House at Hunsdon, and I think partly the reason for that was an uncle of my father’s had died, who lived at Ware Park and he’d left my father some money and I think they thought they’d like to try living outside Hertford and it was a very nice house, with a walled garden, on the village green and the reason we only stayed there six years, having decided to move out of Hertford, really all our social life was in Hertford and so you had to drive eight miles. My mother did join village life, but nobody else did.
ES: Just going back to the Pest House, have you any particular memories of it. Jean, do you just want to say what you know about it?
JR: Well, it was built in the early 1760s by the Corporation for Dr Dimsdale to use for his patients when he was carrying out his inoculations. The patients who had smallpox by natural means, I think the more mild cases were put in there and he could take the fluid from their pustules and inoculate patients at Port Hill House. I’m not sure he ever lived at Port Hill House, it was just being used as a glorified clinic and he lived at the Priory I think.
SG: Which is the Priory?
JR: Well, it isn’t there now, it was until the 19th century Priory House, and it was facing the river and was next to what was Ewen and Tomlinson’s yard which became Jewson’s.
SG: Whereabouts is this?
JR: Well, Priory St.
ES: Priory St behind Christ’s Hospital.
SG: Oh, I know. So he didn’t actually live in Bengeo.
ES: No, I think he may have had a staff up there and lived at the Priory.
SG: In Beckwith’s there’s a pencil drawing of Bengeo Cottage, not cottage like, it’s a rather substantial grand big house. No idea where that is.
JR: No, can’t help you with that.
[transcriber’s note: this property was facing the junction of Bengeo St and Sacombe Rd and was burned down about 1910. Bengeo Mews now stands on the site]
ES: You never found anything as a child in the Pest House? When we took West St we found things under the floorboards.
SG: I was only eight when we left the Pest House. I can remember the black and red tiles in the hall which I think are still there. I delivered some furniture there a few years ago. It was just a standard three-bay house with a room either side of the hall and a staircase in the middle and a room either side at the back and then there were two bedrooms and a bathroom which, I think, we put in and behind my parents’ bedroom was my father’s dressing room and in the attic storey two bedrooms.
ES: You said you went away to school did you go to a junior school in Hertford?
SG: Yes, to Duncombe School to start with.
ES: Who was head then?
SG: Mrs Taylor and Mrs Beaze and that was when it was still on Pegs Lane.
ES: Yes, where was it on Peg’s Lane?
SG: Halfway up on the left, it must have been incorporated with the Grammar School.
ES: That’s strange, isn’t it? Well, it was started, somebody told me, in either No 3 or No 5 Highfield by Miss Taylor (sic) so Duncombe started there in Highfield Rd, she then went down to Pegs Lane, I think it must have been a wooden er…
SG: It was a Scout hut?
ES: A Guide hut and then it of course went up to [Bengeo].
SG: I think it was called Duncombe School because she lived in Duncombe Rd. I then went to Heathmount and I’ve since become interested in architecture. I can’t honestly say I was when I was a schoolboy – I was aware of it, a very good sweeping late 18C staircase, which the boys were not allowed to use. We had to use the service staircase behind it.
ES: So, can you say something about your father, he was the miller at Sele. How far does the milling tradition go back in your family?
SG: We’ve got a family tree that goes back to 1796, Samuel Garratt who was milling at Grove Mill in Hitchin which was burned down in the early 19C. And I’ve come across a reference somewhere of a Garratt in Stevenage in the middle of the 18C, some misdemeanour, but he was described as a miller. He was transported to America. So if my ancestors were milling in Hitchin in the late 18C there must be some connection. And it was just after we’d sold the business I got a phone call from somebody in America researching a firm of flour millers in the western states of America, Utah at Salt Lake City a firm of four millers called Garratt, he’d traced their ancestry and they came from Herts in the 17C. But I never heard any more. I sent him some details. So we were flour milling in Herts in the 18C and all around the place, Codicote there were quite a lot of Garratt’s in Codicote churchyard. My great grandfather, George Garratt, his older brother Thomas was the first to come to Hertford and he bought Sele Mill in 1867 and he only stayed there 10 years and sold it to his younger brother, George, in 1877 and George was milling at a time when flour milling went through considerable changes. The flour milling largely didn’t get affected by the Industrial Revolution as a small local business and then later in the century we ceased to be self-sufficient in wheat and started to import wheat from America.
American wheat is very hard and it’s difficult to grind on the stone and Hungarians had invented steel rollers and these two things came together in a short space of time, about 30 yrs, about 1880 into the early 20C. The whole country changed from being covered by thousands of little mills were much more concentrated into fewer and larger units and George Garratt seemed to handle this change very well. The mill burned down in the 1890s and he took the opportunity to rebuild it with new machinery. He put in a brand-new plant in a nice tall, solid, late Victorian brick building.
ES: Have you any idea what the mill looked like before it was burned down?
SG: Yes, the mill house still exists. It’s end-on to North Rd just in front of the mill.
ES: On the right-hand side?
SG: No, as you face the mill it’s on the left.
ES: That’s been converted into flats?
SG: We converted them into flats.
ES: That’s where David Kirby’s mother lived.
SG: Yes, that’s right.
JR: That’s very well seen in George Towers’ paintings.
SG: Yes, I’ve got a copy of one of the Museum ones, you can see it on the left and you can just see this house on the right.
JR: Can I ask you something about your mother, you said her name was Collet.
SG: I don’t know so much about them. She was born in Clapham, 37 Narbonne Avenue.
ES: An exotic address, don’t you think – Narbonne.
SG: I hadn’t thought about it.
JR: It’s [a corruption of] Narrowbone.
SG: Oh, yes, oh! And they used to come out to the Herts countryside and they stayed in a farm near Amwell – you know where the head of the New River is – just down the road from there – I think the farm’s still there [does he mean at Amwell Pool?] and they liked it so much that her parents decided to move to Hertford which they did during the First World War, in 1917. And they moved to Farquhar Cottage, it’s not a cottage at all, it is a very nice little Victorian house in Farquhar St. And it was Percy Collet and Granny – I’m not sure what her Christian name was and I don’t really remember her only a vague memory of her giving me some sweets. But I have at various times met other Collet relatives. They have this tradition that they came over with the Huguenots, it seems quite plausible and I have got a couple of prints of watercolours of John Collet who I think was in the circus or circus theatre.
JR: I’ve got a few Collets here; I don’t think any of them fit that bill. In the County Chronicle of 1829 an obituary of Mr John Collet, miller, of Cambridge, aged 86.
SG: I don’t think so, I think it was south London.
JR: I’ve got two London merchants for you, for later on.
SG: They lived in Farquhar Cottage until their deaths.
ES: How did your parents meet?
SG: I’m not exactly sure how they met but obviously they both lived in Hertford, they met through friends I suppose. They became very friendly and my father’s mother, who was a Davies, their business was an iron-monger’s in Shropshire, I only remember her as quite an old lady, I always got the impression that the Davies’s rather fancied themselves and the Garratts were a big family in Hertford, and so my father’s mother didn’t really think that Betty Collet was good enough for him and pressure was brought to bear and so they stopped seeing each other and my father became engaged to somebody my sisters would know but that my grandmother thought more suitable. Anyway my father realised that this wasn’t quite what he wanted and so out of the blue having not seen my mother for quite some time, he went up to see her, she was then staying with an older brother in [inaudible] and he went up to see her and proposed and they got married. And the nice ending to that story is that my mother and [her] mother-in-law got on very well together.
ES: I just wondered what level of Hertford your mother and father moved in – did they go to dances at private houses or did they go to dances at the Corn Exchange?
SG: I don’t know. My parents grew up in a totally different Hertford from myself. There was a much more enclosed Hertford scene. I never really had any social life much in Hertford outside my family. When I was growing up there were lots of us, not Garratts, all on my mother’s side. The Garratts had all died out or were rapidly dying out and so it’s difficult to answer.
ES: In a way you have answered it, I mean I would hardly know what the social scene was in Hertford, I don’t think we belong to it, any of us, do we.
JR: I think we do, indirectly, through our interests.
ES: Well, yes, you go to COPS and there’s a group and you go somewhere else and there’s another group.
SG: There is also one little interesting incident – I won’t actually mention the names. There was a couple my parents were very friendly with and or a similar sort of …
ES: Class?
SG: Class, yes, and this would have been in the 1950s and they said they had decided they were going to move up in the world and were my parents interested in coming with them? And my parents said, no.
JR: How did they intend to do this?
SG: I don’t know, but I’ll tell you who it was when this is switched off.
JR: I think another social advantage was the tennis playing, wasn’t it, everyone belonged to a tennis club and you met people there.
ES: But even that was a bit fraught, one of the oral history interviews I was recently listening to, they talk about people up in Morgan’s walk, that they were superb tennis players and they had a superb tennis court, they always won, but they spoke with a Cockney accent.
SG: In my grandmother’s obituary, I think it was in the Mercury, it said she was famous for her tennis parties, and I have a copy of the diary of David Wingate, he was the brother who was killed and it’s very poignant because it covers the period just before he died at the beginning of the Second World War. He’d joined the Air Force and he’d come back to Hertford on leave for Christmas and he bumped into somebody on the train – I used to know him, he emigrated to America, and he says he went to a party at my grandparents - Douglas and Flo’s at Froome and he said all Hertford was there. [not to be confused with David W. below]
ES: I’m quite interested in that little snippet. David Wingate went to school in our house when it was Miss Fountain’s. Michael Wingate gave me a photo of a class of the 1930s standing on the terrace, David was there and it always seemed a bit [inaudible]. Oh, that’s quite interesting. Where did the Wingates live then?
SG: I think they lived in Foxtrot in Morgans Rd.
ES: And, all Hertford was there, so then there would have been a social set.
SG: And Hertford would have been half the size it is now.
JR: Could you give us the names of the extended family, your family married into lots of prominent local families.
SG: They married into the Wingates and of course the Wingates and Raymond Wingate was working in the firm for quite some time it was Raymond and I running the business, the mill. Then his nephew, that Michael’s son, David, he joined us, he was working for us for 10 years or so.
ES: The Garratt family also married into the Ginn family.
SG: Yes, and I’m trying to remember what the connection is.
ES: Actually, they married into the Ginn’s twice. We do know that. I found that out from Doreen Wingate.
SG: I remember Leslie Louis Ginn and Eta Purkiss Ginn. I think it was Eta’s husband built Hornbeams the house in the Avenue, to my mind it’s one of the nicest houses I’ve been to in Hertford, 1930s, mainly Art Deco and on a wonderful site, southwest facing garden.
ES: I think this must be the house I know.
SG: White stucco, moulded.
ES: Looks like something from Hollywood.
SG: Yes, I hadn’t thought of it that way but it does a bit, yes. And then you see, she lost her husband and her son in WW2.
JR: Well I think he died of natural causes, her husband, but the son was killed.
SG: She [Eta] and the Webbs swapped houses so Alan Webb – Horns Mill glove people – they moved from Little Eaves which is a very nice little house, off Farquhar St, part of the pre-war development.
ES: Oh not the er…
JR: Pemberton Billing.
ES: Oh yes.
SG: And so I knew both houses. And then when Eta died in the ‘90s I think – Eta lived with Mildred Gripper and when Mildred died it was then bought by my Auntie Mollie, whose husband was my mother’s youngest brother John and when he died they moved back to Ireland. And similarly Foxtrot, the Wingate house, that was lived in by John and Mollie for a while and we bought Little Molewood from our cousins Gaye and Mick Wingate.
ES: Just remind me which Wingate had Foxtrot not Doreen and Michael?
SG: It would have been Michael’s parents, George and Betty Wingate. I didn’t know George.
ES: Just partly about the mill, do you know anything about the decline of the town mill?
SG: No. I remember when I was a teenager on a bicycle I remember delivering something to Percy Ilott [town miller, Mill Bridge]. It would have been a hopeless site because in the 19C typically, mills were built and at that point all grain would have been delivered on horse-drawn carts. You then had to adapt these site and cope with 30-ton lorries, well, in the town you couldn’t have done that and that was all part of the demise of small mills.
ES: But Sele Mill was still thriving but is that really because of the modern machinery and the site?
SG: Well, when it was rebuilt by my great grandfather in the 1890s I’m guessing it would have been about the size of lots of other mills. There would have been bigger ones at the ports, to handle the imported grain. In terms of country mills 100 years ago it was about the average size. Over the decades the number of mills gradually reduced and the remining ones got bigger and we probably got left behind. If you look back to the 1930s we were the same size as Bowmans Mill at Hitchin. Well, Bowmans did very well they’re still a very successful company and they’ve got another mill up in Yorkshire and they ended up far bigger than we were. I think it’s fair to say we got rather overtaken. We had our local bakers, the backbone of our trade. But then local bakers were falling by the wayside and we made that up with various other customers, buying large quantities of flour.
ES: When you sold the business, was it sold as a going concern? Or did you just sell your customers?
SG: That is slightly complicated. We realised in the 1980s that we couldn’t just carry on so we were joined by somebody called Bob Williams who had worked for Rank Hovis McDougall and we set about trying to expand our customer base and in the course of that we bought another flour mill at Holbeach in Lincs called Tindalls, and we ran the two mills side by side for a while then decided there was no point in doing this, we should concentrate on one site and because they had the better site and it was a very good agricultural area, we decided to move up there.
So we set about seeing how we could sell Sele Roller Mill and at that time Spillers were looking for extra capacity so we sold them the mill but not the business and in the late ‘80s we moved the whole business up to Holbeach. We put in a second plant in the Holbeach site, which we bought from Italy, and that was quite successful. Where we came unstuck was the difficult time economically – interest rates, we borrowed a lot of money to do all this and if you borrow a lot of money you’re nervous, constantly, if you’re not making lots of money. And so we decided in the end to sell the business, which we did. And we sold to Northern Foods.
ES: Have you anything to say about your days as a miller because it does sound a romantic trade. You didn’t come back from work covered in flour?
SG: Looking back it was terribly amateurish – I was just sent off to Henry Symonds a milling engineers up in Stockton and they put me in a few mills so I could vaguely learn flour milling, no commercial training at all, it’s the commercial training that you need. We were relatively small; we were selling 120 tons of flour a week. We bought wheat in bulk but the flour was mainly in bags, big 140lb bags. One of our customers was Horlicks. The basis of Horlicks was flour and they moved over to bulk and so my father put in a couple of bulk bins. My father was 40 years older than me, I joined the business in my very early 20s and when I was 25/26 my father retired and I had to run the business, I think it’s a miracle it survived the way it did.
ES: Did you want to be a miller?
SG: Yes, I had no great vocational advice - it seemed sensible to become a miller since there was a flour mill [there]. Whilst I was training we bought a bakery, Geary’s of Edmonton, they’d been customers of ours and my uncle Geoffrey was visiting them to take their order and collect the money and Bert Geary said I’m going to retire, are you interested in buying the business and so we did which was very successful. So my cousin Raymond ran the bakery and I ran the mill. In those days I would give a hand loading lorries.
ES: When you say your cousin Raymond, do you mean Raymond Wingate?
SG: Yes.
JR: Raymond Wingate is the husband of Mary Kemp?
SG: Yes.
JR: I don’t think I need to ask anything to go on the tape, I’ll ask some things later.
ES: Well, can’t you, what’s wrong with having it on the tape?
JR: Because it’s not relevant to your area.
ES: Oh, I see - is there anything we can say about the house – doesn’t the garden look lovely.
SG: It is amazing that this garden survived. It’s about an acre in the middle of Hertford.
ES: Just say, for the benefit of the tape, how you came to buy the house.
SG: It was November 1981 and I had no intention of moving. I was living in a house I had had built by Norrises, other relatives of ours.
ES: Oh! How are you related to the Norrises?
SG: Sybil Collet, my mother’s older sister, there was another older sister – Jessie – Sybil Collet married Henry Norris, about 1930, and it was Henry Norris & Sons Ltd. I assume that was him but It’d been going on before, with Fred Norris.
ES: This is Norris the builder – were they related to Norris the estate agent?
SG: I think so.
[transcriber’s note: the first Henry Norris to arrive in Hertford got a job with a Mr Taylor, builder, 11 Fore St, old numbering. In 1854 they built the printing office for Stephen Austin – now the Hertford Hotel, No1 Fore St].
I saw the house advertised in Clark Quinney’s of Fore St and on the spur of the moment went in and said could I have the particulars and I came to look at it with a friend and I was completely dumbstruck by the house, and in those days I was working five minutes’ walk down the road, and I thought I shall never get another chance like this again.
ES: You mean you were in the antiques centre then?
SG: No, no, the mill.
ES: So equidistant between two places of employment?
SG: Yes. So I did [buy it].
ES: But how much was sold off before you bought it?
SG: To go back 100 years it had about 12 acres. The Medlocks who were the previous owners had, I think, four. By the time I came to look at this house the two or three lots had already been sold. The 12 acres had gone over to the other side of the river. [It seems that the land for Swallow Court and that now occupied by the nursery, formerly Dr Anderson’s house, were part of the land of No2].
JR: The Folly, which once belonged to this house, when was that sold off?
SG: That went with this, in 1981/2, to the sheltered housing – Beane River View. The Medlocks still owned the Folly and when it was sold, after Mrs Medlock’s death the Folly was in part of one lot. I think, where Beane View is, the sheltered housing, that is built on land which was part of North Road House garden and part of Vale House.
JR: Vale House isn’t a house that is very big.
SG: No, not nearly as big, no.
JR: I know where the Courtyard Arts Centre is – that was the stables, coach house.
ES: It wasn’t deep.
SG: No, and the ground of North Rd House ran all along and beyond it, behind Port Vale.
JR: There must have been easier access to cross the river.
SG: There was only foot access.
ES: Yes, where does the bridge go now, nowhere? Haven’t you got an ornamental bridge?
SG: Yes, I have. There was another bridge just before the waterfall, going over the River Beane going to behind Vale House. There was only a modern bridge when I came here and I took it down.
JR: Where does the millstream join the River Beane?
SG: Just at the end of my garden. You can have a look at it if you like.
ES: I will ask a little bit about the antiques business. So, did you drift into that?
SG: We sold the mill, the business, in 1993, April 1st and so I suddenly found myself at the age of 50 with no work and I suppose I didn’t have to but I thought I must do something and then a few months later Russell Norris approached me with the idea of opening an antiques centre. I was living here at the time with Dennis Ashworth who, when I first met him, he was a textile designer. He then moved into antiques and sold antiques through antiques centres.
ES: I remember Dennis, he belonged to the Civic Society.
SG: And Russell was quite impressed by this and felt it was quite a good business plan. So we decided to look for premises. We eventually settled on Cawthorne House in St Andrews St, the street in those days had several antiques shops and we took out a lease and we put an advert in the Antiques Gazette – new, high-quality antiques centre – quite a lot of people answered the advert and we set up in business.
ES: I was going to ask you, what slightly interested me – as you said, there were several antiques shops, in fact for a time Hertford was an antiques centre and it’s one of those trades that the more there are, the better you do. What happened to the momentum?
SG: I’m not quite sure. My father used to buy antiques. He liked country furniture. He used to say he had a price limit – he’d started off at £2.10s and by the time it got up to £20 he decided he’d give it up – of course we’re going back to the 1950s. And at that time antiques were very specialist – it was something just a few people did. But when you got to the ‘60s, ‘70s, 80s everyone became an antique dealer.
ES: Even I used to sell antiques with a friend.
SG: And everybody seemed to think they wanted to have antiques in their house. It boomed and then it peaked and then it’s never been quite the same since. The fashions change and a lot of young couples now want the more minimalist look also the auctioneers corner a bigger percentage of the trade but I also think there are still people in the trade so it seems to be profitable. Hertford isn’t on the main antique route, you have to have a critical mass and having done Hertford there’s nowhere else to go to. Going to the West Country, the Cotswolds, that’s become, that’s retained a lot of antiques.
ES: OK Jean, why don’t you ask your questions if you want to. In a way I think I have asked what I wanted to ask, obviously we could fill the tape with a bit about Mrs Medlock. Why can’t you ask your questions?
JR: Well, they don’t need to be recorded. There’s just something about the Purkiss -Ginns you might like to hear.
ES: Well, I’m interested in the Purkiss – Ginns.
JR: OK, I’ll say it then. A lot of people have asked me why it’s Purkiss Ginn and I endeavoured to find this out, do you know why it is?
SG: I have a feeling my father might have said something about it at one stage but I can’t remember.
JR: Well, it’s a guess but it is founded on fact. I think Alexander Purkiss Ginn was the first one to be called Purkiss Ginn. His father was Richard Ginn and I think his father was Thomas Ginn – he was founder of the firm about 1814 [although he had been in Hertford earlier than that working for another builder]. It was his daughter [sister to Richard] that married a John Archer Purkiss from Little Distaff Lane in the City of London [between Queen Victoria Street and Cannon Street]. Now whether he was from the Archer family in this town, because there was a substantial Archer family here. We don’t know how she met this man, he himself could have been apprenticed to her father. They had a family including a brilliant son called Henry who became a Senior Wrangler at Cambridge [top mathematics undergraduate] and when he left, having got his degree he became the director of one of the big museums in London, and aged 23 went back to Cambridge for a visit and drowned in the Cam whilst swimming and it was just about the time of the birth of Alexander and I think they may have called him after his illustrious cousin. His death was reported in all the national papers.
ES: You couldn’t believe all the honours he’d accrued and still only 23.
SG: That sounds totally plausible.
ES: It has just reminded me to check with you the extended family – the Ginns, the Norrises, the Wingates – are there any others?
SG: No, I think they are the three that I’m aware of.
JR: There was actually a diary kept by Ann Wickham – have you heard of the diarist, Carrington, from Bramfield (No) he was quite well-known, she was his grand-daughter, she married Wickham the brewer about 1830 and she mentions Mrs Purkiss in the diary and Henry as a small child coming back to Hertford to act in theatricals, because this family, Wickham, were really into amateur dramatics.
ES: Well of course the amateur dramatics thread was always rather strong in Hertford.
SG: And going back to your earlier question about social life in Hertford, the Hertford Dramatic was part of it, my mother and Auntie Sybil were both active members.
ES: Yes. You don’t remember seeing Doreen Wingate do you, well, you know, she’s pretty good-looking now.
SG: She doesn’t look 80!
ES: People I’ve interviewed have said she was completely stunning and she played principal boy in the pantomimes, Michael met her there and they acted together, I should think it must have been a pretty potent mix. I just wondered if you recall seeing her, you can imagine her as principal boy, can’t you.
SG: Yes, I can imagine.
Recording Ends