Your error, I believe

History is a record of the facts, right?  So, what happens when facts are recorded incorrectly?  I have just been alerted to information, which if it had been written correctly, would have become lost in the general melee of statistics, and part of the story of Fleetville would not have been resurrected one century on.  Here is the account of that error; it being passed to me as a straightforward summary of a communication lodged in a file at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS)  by a University researcher.

During WW1 it was the role of the County War Agricultural Committee to ensure that all farming land was being fully utilised for food production.  At the time members of the Committee visited Oaklands Farm, the tenant farmer, Mr William Moores, was also responsible for Beaumonts Farm.  The committee noted that one field at Beaumonts had been left as pasture and with no evidence that it was being grazed.  It requested that Mr Moores plough it for a wheat crop.

Mr Moores was puzzled because the 8-acre field in question and named as Fleetville Meadow was not part of his farm.  However, Mr Moores did admit that one of his fields, also of 8 acres and numbered 821 (on the 1898 OS map), is also a meadow.  He had been trying to plough this meadow for the past four years, but "the people of Fleetville have made it a regular playground."

Home Meadow was to the left of this picture of
Beechwood Avenue.

So what was the error the Committee had made in writing to Mr Moores?  The field he was responsible for was known as Home Meadow, yet the Committee had referred to it as Fleetville Field.  At such an early date, and probably even now, Beaumonts Farm could not be said to be in Fleetville; the field was generally a wedge shape, lying between Beaumont Avenue, and the present Farm Road and Beechwood Avenue.   Clearly, either the Committee had been confused geographically, or had made a copying error.  The only field in Fleetville which was not yet committed to development was a linked pair of pastures still owned by St Albans Grammar School (now called St Albans School) where Fleetville Junior School and its playing field now are.  Together, these fields are 8 acres in size and one of its field numbers was 811.  Could a clerk have recorded 811 instead of 821, and from there used a look-up list to find the name Fleetville Field?  This area of ground is more likely to have been neglected during the war since it was not part of an existing farm, though it may have been grazed intermittently by Oakley's, a local dairy business based in Camp Road.  The Committee has therefore, unwittingly, given us the name by which people had come to know this patch of land in the early 20th century, a name which could not have existed before Smith's Printing Agency arrived in 1897 and named its little hamlet Fleetville.

The other fascinating piece of information lies in Mr Moore's reply.  "The people of Fleetville have made it a regular playground."  The Fleetville Recreation Ground had been donated to the city in 1913 by Mr Charles Woollam, but inevitably nothing was done to improve this stub of a field straight away.  Indeed, one or two residents proposed that the council plough it up for residents to tend as allotments.  Before the war, and possibly for some time after, part of 12-acre field, opposite Nicholson's in Sutton Road, was used as a football field.  A pasture, Home Meadow, right on the edge of the built-up area, was inevitably going to be an attractive playground for local children and families.  Clearly it was popular if Mr Moores regularly found himself unable to plough it – and he doesn't appear to be making an excuse.

Home Meadow therefore is revealed as a previously unrecorded public open space for the inhabitants of the eastern districts on both sides of Hatfield Road.  A fact which has only come to light because of a mistake made by a committee, and which required a written response from the accused farmer – and, of course, the diligence of a researcher in passing on what had been discovered.