The Other Hotel

 We have become used to thinking of the printing works which launched Fleetville as having been possible through the purchase of the field known in the 19th century as Long Six Acre from its owners, St Albans Grammar School.  While this was undoubtedly true our misconception is that the firm of T E Smith for the printing works occupied the whole of that field.  It did not; not quite.  The western end of Long Six Acre extended to the boundary which today separates Fleetville Junior School at the back of the site from Morrison's car park.  The first formal occupation of this field remainder was the opening of a timber yard for the family firm of W H Laver soon after 1926.  The family choose to pronounce their name with a hard 'a'.

Between the branch railway at the bottom of the map and Hatfield Road lay two fields of
St Albans Grammar School.  The Fleet Works is on the right and the cemetery on the left.
Paths were laid out for allotments during the First World War. The block bordered in red
was first owned by Trust Houses and then W H Lavers.
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The 1937 map shows the various seasoning and storage areas, with the 'in' and 'out' drives.  To the

left is the original building of the school, and the narrow plot to the right of Laver's will be used by employees of Marconi Instruments in the 1960s.

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The red box of the Laver's site superimposed on current layout of the car park between the school and Morrison's.  This is the additional land purchased by Safeway.
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Quite another proposal had been suggested at the time the printing works was in build.  The hotel group Trust Houses acquired a block of land which it intended to utilise for a hotel with full boarding facilities.

You will recall Benskin's purchased a similar block directly opposite and spent the best part of twenty years struggling to win over residents and the Justices for permission to open a public house in Fleetville.  Benskin's succeeded in the end, though it would be further along the road at Sutton Road.  Trust Houses were happy not to duplicate the battle, and eventually pulled out shortly before the Rats' Castle opened, selling its vacant plot to Laver's in 1926.

However, before Laver's arrived an extensive allotment garden, on both the remains of Long Six Acre, and on the next field to the west, Poor Six Acre. This is labelled on the first map above. There was an urgent need for land to augment farms, smallholdings and gardens during the First World War, and the Grammar School appeared to co-operate in releasing its land for this purpose, although the editor has not been successful in establishing how many plots were let, the yields which were possible, nor the quality of the soil.  The subsoil at the nearby cemetery is heavy clay, so tenants might have struggled.  The recreation ground narrowly escaped allotment fate, probably because of the quantity of available land on the south side of the main road.

Founder of the company William H Laver.

When the Laver's family opened for business, it was under founding member, William H, in the 1850s, working out of Corner Hall Wharf in Hemel Hempstead.  Most of the timber came from the Surrey Commercial Docks and brought to the site by canal.  Later the raw materials also came by rail, and in addition to the Wharf the firm opened sites in Merton Road and St Albans Road, Watford – the latter being a one-man yard.  By the 1930s the third generation replicated this arrangement with Hatfield Road as the main yard and a one-man yard next to the former fire station at the top of Victoria Street.

The timber yard site in the 1960s.
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Although national and regional house builders supplied timber from their own sources, smaller companies and householders helped to make Laver's highly successful, even during lean economic periods and the rise of DIY sheds.  Only the limitation of price got in the way of the variety of timber, length availability, natural seasoning,  personal service and delivery options which Laver's were able to offer.

Newspaper advertising for the company in the 1930s

As with many family businesses a moment arrives when succession is no longer viable, but Laver's drove business for four generations from its brown and cream carts and trucks.  The Hatfield Road yard was sold to Safeway in 1992, and a number of employees were  transferred to Travis Perkins and therefore remained in the timber business. 

One further rider to the story of 238 Hatfield Road is a reference to the site in the Valuation Office record.  While it recognises the owner as Trust Houses, as stated above, also mentioned is the occupier of the land: Hertfordshire County Police.  The police had opened an operational station in Tess Road (Woodstock Road South) in c1906, and the Valuation Office Survey was not established until 1910, in which its interest in the Trust House land was noted.  The ground may have been for parking of vehicles or for training officers, but there is no evidence of there having been a building on the site.  All we can do is to note the occupation from 1910 with interest!

Finally, what do we know about Trust Houses and why might the company have acquired a new site in Fleetville?  Trust Houses was, in 1903, a new entity.  A number of influential families had become concerned about the diminishing standards of some of the country's well known but old established public houses and hotels, especially since the closure of turnpike roads, along which they had flourished.  TH began acquiring an interest in and upgrading their reputation, structure and service offering, some of the earliest being in Hertfordshire.  Part of the business model was to purchase new sites in order to expand the number of new premises; hence the Fleetville land.  In this case it was a question of licensing and in the end TH went elsewhere.

An early advertisement by Trust Houses Limited.
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Wanted to Be On His Own

Today, Hutton Street is still a narrow street near Fleet Street, but comprise modern office buildings
instead of tightly grouped trading factories next to the Whitefriars Glass Works.

Hutton Street is tucked away behind the lower end of Fleet Street, near Ludgate in the City of London.  Its association with the printing industry was long established and many nearby firms developed as jobbing printers for the hundreds of City firms.  Thomas E Smith & Co was just one of them. Its footprint, like almost all back-street businesses, was typically small to reduce cost, but instead it grew upwards.

Fleet Street is just beyond the top margin of this map.
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In 1896 Smith's really wanted to expand into other ranges of work than churning out endless quantities of invoice blanks, letterheads and forms.  Colour work was attracting attention but the new colour machines were considerably larger and more complex, and were difficult to accommodate on the existing floor spaces, quite apart from the weight restrictions on upper floors.

Smith's inserted a promotional supplement into the 1907 St Albans Pageant book which it printed.
The Hutton Street premises is on the right and the expansive Fleet Works in Hatfield Road has
replaced the field sold to it by St Albans Grammar School.

Smith set up a separate arm of his business which he named the Smith Colour Printing Agency; and given that colour work would be in the form of catalogues, brochures, advertising and booklets, with the likelihood of large national distributions, a location away from London but with convenient transport connections was sought.

1896 was also the year in which the Trustees of St Albans Grammar School gave serious consideration to the inadequacy of its existing accommodation and to the future of the School. The tithe map reveals that with Earl Verulam the body owned three fields along Hatfield Road.  It was intended that the fields would be offered for development and the income used to create new buildings for the school.

The Grubb periscope and telescope works occupied the building c1916 and left in 1925. One or
two of the largest instruments were constructed in the open air at the back of the works.

A 1950s view of the factory in the second phase of the Ballito era. The side road on the left
is Sutton Road and in the foreground was the toll house nicknamed the Rats' Castle.

Mr Smith required a large site but nowhere near where others lived, so there would be no distractions for his employees.  He would build homes for them, provide shops and an institute for their downtime needs.  He would not need public houses or other risqué entertainments, nor provide them himself.  So he purchased two of the three fields, one on each side of Hatfield Road and in an area he thought of as "remote".  The factory, called Fleet Works after his London printing centre of the company's origin, went up on the south side of the road.  Houses, shops and an institute were planned for the north side in a development he established as Fleet Ville.

So we now know exactly where it was because locals have been calling it Fleetville ever since.  And once you give a place a name people have reasons to be attracted to it.  No sooner had Smith's walls gone up than Earl Spencer sold his St Peter's Farm to add to the earlier housing at Granville and Cavendish; and the trustees of Beaumonts Farm disposed of the first tranche of its land.  Smith did not want his printing agency to be anywhere close to others; regrettably for him, that was not in his gift, and within a few years his factory and ville were surrounded by homes and workshops belonging to others.  But it did give him plenty of employees living close by, and a hugely successful business.

The field on which the factory was built, bounded by the branch railway, Sutton Road and Hatfield Road, gave the district its life blood.  T E Smith Printing Agency lasted until 1918 (although no work was likely to have been undertaken after 1916, the firm having lost almost all of its skilled employees during the war.  Sir Howard Grubb & Sons Ltd were clandestinely moved in by the Government to continue its submarine periscope research before developing some of the world's major optical telescopes.

An aerial of the expanded works with a multi-storey building.  The bus is passing in Hatfield
Road.  The greyed-out section top right includes the adjacent timber yard run by W H Laver.
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In 1925 the buildings were acquired by the Ballington Hosiery Mills (brand name Ballito), another successful business both before and after the Second World War.  During the war the factory turned out millions of shell casings. 

Aerial view today but it includes the former timber yard. No part of the original factory complex
survives.  Although the supermarket is substantial in size it is still smaller than the factory it
replaced.
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Ballito moved out in 1967 and the site became home to Marconi Instruments for a few years before the site was cleared for supermarket use: first the Cooperative Society, then Safeway and currently Morrison's.  We will return to this retailer next time as land has been added in recent times.

What's that on the corner?

St Albans has been given a policing power as a borough and later city.  Most of the rest of the county was governed by the County Constabulary.  Before 1948 both forces were represented with buildings in Chequer Street and Victoria Street.  But this post is not about the history of these two bodies.  It is about what happened as a result of the expansion of St Albans.

The building on the right, at the top of Victoria Street, was the St Albans City Police Station,
 replaced in the 1960s by the new station recently demolished.
COURTESY ANDY LAWRENCE

Until 1913 the County Police found itself responsible for an increasing area east of The Crown as Camp and Fleetville districts spread, and some more rural communities expanded.  So a new St Albans Rural HQ was set up in Tess Road, now Woodstock Road South, where the nursery parking area is now situated.

In 1913 the city boundaries were expanded in several directions, most dominantly out towards Oaklands.  So the County's net spread wider and the City force took over within the new urban boundaries. Additional officers were therefore employed, but it became increasingly difficult without telephones for beat officers to report into Victoria Street from a wider patch while they were on duty.  And no easier for residents and business owners distant from the city centre to make contact with the police.

Police Call Box, location not yet identified, installed in 1932.
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Duty policeman seated inside to complete a report.
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In 1932 a number of portable police boxes or cabins were manufactured and sited in strategic locations.  An officer could then  complete forms and report by phone directly to the police station, either at the end of his duty, or on other urgent business.  When the station needed to contact the cabin a blue flashing light on the roof was lit.  If the officer on duty was sighted away from the box it was not unknown for members of the public to alert him "his Sergeant wants him on the phone!"  Residents could also use the phone directly to call the police station for the equivalent of a 999 service which had not yet been invented.  Although the phone was inside the cabin the listening and speaking parts were accessible from a little door outside.

By 1939 the wooden structures were deteriorating, and in preparation for wartime brick cabins with reinforced flat roofs replaced them. I was always aware of such a brick structure at the junction of Hatfield Road and Beechwood Avenue and had therefore assumed the earlier wooden cabin to have been there as well.

Brick replacement cabin with reinforced roof from 1939 located at the junction of
Hatfield Road and Beechwood Avenue.
COURTESY PHILIP ORDE

Recently I noticed in the background of a 1938 photo taken in Hatfield Road looking towards Ballito Hosiery Mill at Sutton Road corner, what looked very much like a wooden police cabin.  It was also marked on an OS map published in 1937 and therefore surveyed earlier.

Ordnance Survey map published 1937. The circled square in the corner of the Ballito Hosiery Mill
cycle yard is the Police Call Box.
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Circled in red is the PCB, or cabin, from the map above and pictured in 1938; this photo was also
shown in the post of 10th March.  The cabin is partly hidden by the hat of the lady walking towards Sutton Road and the Ballito Hosiery Mill.
COURTESY JANET STALEY HAINES COLLECTION

One of Fleetville's frequent flooding incidents, this in 1936. Circled is another view of the Police
Call Box.  The weather may have had something to do with the visibility of the
cabin in the picture!
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However, unlike other wooden cabins this one was not replaced in 1939.  So, did Fleetville not have a brick replacement?  It seems likely that during the later 1930s, and with the Beaumonts area expanding, the decision was made to shift the position of the brick cabin to Beechwood Avenue.  

I realise the quality of the photo was not good, so I was delighted this week to see another Herts Advertiser 1930s photo of flooding near Sutton Road; in the background was a wooden police cabin next to the footpath just inside Sutton Road, with its foundation just outside the end of the mill building where there was a row of cycle racks.

After World War Two the City Force was subsumed into the County Constabulary, and for as long as it was required the Woodstock Road South station continued to be occupied.

As telephone cables had been increasingly laid, lighter and slimmer police pillars appeared on a few street corners.

One of a range of pillar-type PCBs.  This was installed near St Peter's Green, St Peter's
Street.  No comfort, though, for police officers!
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But one final thought before the roll-out of relatively portable mobile communications: was there a wooden cabin, or later brick version, sited anywhere on the Camp side of the former railway line?  The 1937 map shows there was one at the Sandpit Lane entrance to The Wick.  The search continues.