Fifty years on

What were we all doing fifty years ago?  Those younger than that do not need to answer!  I was away from home, furthering my education and planning what would turn out to be my only long-term career move.  Living a few months at a time in "rooms"  I would still be fifteen years away from owning my first home.

What, then, was happening back in St Albans?  In 1963 I couldn't go online to view the e-edition of the Herts Advertiser, but it came to me just the same; the family's copy wrapped in one of those paper collars with the words "Newspaper Rate" emblazoned down one edge.  There were similar local newspapers delivered to the house in the same way from places such as Mountain Ash, Cheltenham, West Ham, Portsmouth and Hull.  Local news came to Birmingham the old-fashioned way.

So, during the next few months we will dip into what was happening in St Albans' East End during that year, fifty years ago.  The website will have a dedicated page to 1963.

Meanwhile, here are two advertisements from that year.  Unfortunately, the quality is not good as they come from having photocopied the microfilms, but they serve their purpose.

Where the land between Smallford and Colney Heath Lane is now packed with factories and warehouses, it had, before WW2, been worked as part of Butterwick Farm; and the name Butterwick Wood lived on as the name for the formative industrial estate.  Apart from the James Halsey timber yard,  the first firm to arrive at the Smallford end was Tractor Shafts, a company run by the Hobbs family, developing agricultural machinery.  The firm wasn't directly advertising for new employees, but it chose to place an 'ad' in a special engineering supplement in the Herts Advertiser one week in April.

In the same supplement a much older factory company also placed an advertisement.  As the renamed Salvation Army Printing Works, the Campfield Press in Campfield Road announced the range of publications which it would print for clients.  Among this range you will not find the staple diet of the works when first created: Bibles, hymn books and sheet music for the Army bands.  Instead there is a list of more commercial requirements of a modern business community, including circulars (junk mail?) and brochures.


Old advertisements are one of the ways we can recall businesses which once thrived in and around the city, but have either outgrown their former locations, been taken over by rival firms, or closed because they had served their purpose.