This was serious

Gosh, I missed that one.  At the end of last year this blog clocked up one hundred and fifty posts – and that total excludes the 70 or so on the previous platform and still available from the SAOEE website.  So that's 220 stories about the east end of St Albans.  Who would have thought it?  It is certainly not a part of the city which lacks interest, lacks stories to reveal, lacks something unusual to reveal.  Just have a look for yourself.

When you don't have a home

COURTESY HERTS ADVERTISER

In collecting photographs from the Herts Advertiser for the period after WW2 I found there was one recurring theme which now makes me extremely unhappy about the people who were involved.  At the time I was blissfully unaware of such matters, growing up in a house which was there for us for all time – or so it seemed.  Everything would be just as it had been every other day you came home from school.

But there were people; mums, an increasing number of dads returned from areas of European conflict,  their children, and their bundles.  The bundles were bags or wraps of essentials, mainly clothes.  Families who were seeking a home, any home, even redundant nissen huts or service huts, which would offer basic shelter.  Illegal of course, and although some authorities did remove squatting families, increasingly councils were under pressure to allow them to stay and were given rent books to formalise the arrangements.  Then, of course they needed to arrange for water and electric supplies to be brought to the site.  Although there were locations all over the wider district – wherever there was a hut there was likely to be couple of families desperate to squat – the site which most of us have heard of was Abbey Camp, in use until the 1960s because no other houses were available. Abbey Camp was next to St Stephen's Hill where Westminster Lodge pool, car parks and open space is today.

COURTESY HERTS ADVERTISER

Surviving a 1950s winter in a wooden hut would not have been a pleasant experience.

The Herts Advertiser, however, more graphically disclosed a rather more disturbing kind of distress.  I have not identified specific locations or individuals, but the newspaper did not hold back from showing photos of a family or an individual on the footpath outside a house, and surrounded by their personal belongings.  The bailiff had secured the property and his role was completed once the tenant no longer had the key.  We cannot know what led to the householder being unable to pay the rent, but we were always left with the same question: where would they spend the next night and how would they and their chattels get there. including limited items of furniture?

It wasn't only a 1950s story, of course.  It is also a today story.  The only difference is that we are unlikely to discover photographs such as the above in next week's paper to prove that it is a today story.  We may be grateful for that, but, on the other hand, without the local press informing us about such tragedies, how else would we know?  It was, and maybe still is, a St Albans issue and an East End of St Albans issue at that.