Obstacles in the Road part 2

RESCUE MISSION 8

Obstacles in the Road 2

Last month I featured a church, St Pauls, which began as a temporary building,  then moved on, while the permanent building in Blandford Road was made permanent and grew in size.  I then extended the survey to other buildings of various sizes which remained temporary structures and on the whole had extensive lives.

This month I am searching for temporary structures which necessarily retained short lives because they had been built for temporary war time usage and were intended to defend routes across country especially on the approaches to towns and cities, and were manned by the Civil Defence in the form of the Home Guard, also known as "Dads' Army".

We will follow Hatfield Road as an example from the junction at Smallford crossroads – as it was then.  On the St Albans side of the junction was a series of concrete road blocks; most were large blocks of concrete which which blocked much of the road width and concrete pillars for protecting the footpath space while still permitting pedestrians to pass.  A shelter of some kind, perhaps a concrete pill box, housing a gun emplacement preventing enemy passage onto the road towards St Albans.

We are left, we think, with no photographic evidence of this installation, but we do have a brief description that the emplacement also protected  large water and oil tanks for the purpose of supplying Nielson's nurseries which lay alongside Station Road.

A road block prevented access from Hatfield Road over the original Ashley Road railway bridge and along Hedley Road.

At Crown Corner, a complex and strategic road block arrangement was set up on Hatfield Road east of Cavendish Road, across Granville Road, across Clarence Park Road and opposite the cinema in Stanhope Road.  But oddly the top of Camp Road did not appear to have been protected.  This complex was manned by a detachment whose base was inside The Crown Public House, which was most convenient.

A similar blockage protected St Peter's Street and Catherine Street, where the duties were based at The Blacksmith's Arms Public House.

Although we have no evidence of manned road blockages at Beaumont Avenue/Beechwood Avenue and at Sutton Road, there were police telephones at these two locations and references to a box at these locations.  Blocks would have been removed promptly at the end of the war or even before it, and deposited at one or more locations unknown.

You may find yourself sitting on or leaning against a concrete block.  I regularly passed
a former block with short lengths of rail poke out from the top and sides.  Not defended for
85 years.  They can still be located if we know where to look.

During the lifetimes of the installations no photographs appear to have been taken, but not because it would have been for security reasons impossible, because such photos were taken at other locations; but presumably no-one thought to do so. Newspapers would have been prohibited from publishing such images, and in any case space for text would have been considered far more important than for photographs when both ink and paper were in short supply.

Road blocks would also have been removed as soon as practically possible and to relieve the Home Guard which was disbanded during 1944.  Opportunities for taking a photograph were therefore not there for the taking, and I doubt whether most people owning cameras when film stocks were in short supply would have thought of clicking a road block "for history's sake" or "for the archives".

But the odd concrete block is occasionally located in a hedgerow or near a field gate, simply because it is still useful.  That does not, however, mean no photographs of local road blocks were taken and still survive.

The Stonies

 Every so often I take on a new plot of land for an allotment, or when I have moved house there is a new garden to tackle.  This may often include clearing ground.  Only once have I moved to fine tilth alluvium from river alluvium.

Almost inevitably I recall three very similar but distinct periods of my childhood and teens when I was faced with the ground already there and "something had to be done about it". The earliest was our garden, both front and back.  I was a young explorer, an archaeologist in training.  Perhaps five or six, rising eight.  I was interested in found objects; those discarded items on the farm which used to be. But I was encouraged by my parents to collect together ordinary stones, flints and chalky nodules and make a nice pile or two.  What for I had no idea, for the piles remained there, unused for many years.

By the time I was about twelve and moved school I had made friends nearby who lived in cottages on a nearby farm.  Their parents were employed on that farm, so while my home was on an ex-farm, their home was a tenanted property on their job.  There was something happening somewhere every day of the week, and occasionally I was encouraged to join in.  On one or two occasions I found myself in a group of several other teenagers of various ages including my friends.  At one edge of an irregularly shaped field had been collected a little pile of brown bags, a bit dirty and an occasional one with a hole at the bottom.  A potato Grubbing machine had worked its way through the field during the previous day, and here we all were on Saturday morning.  "Potatoes", shouted a man, pointing at the field while at the same time picking one up and demonstrating putting his potato in a bag tucked inside his belt.  "No stonies, got it?"  We got it, formed a loose line across the field edge, picked up our containers and walked back, always looking at the path already trodden, encouraged to pick up stray spuds.  As we slowly traversed our line there were murmurs of "don't they have machines for this?"  Naturally the retort was "you lot ARE the machines!"  And at the end of our session we received cold drinks – and a sixpence. The morning may have seemed long and arduous for a child, but we had a few pence in our pocket.

Two years later we became stone pickers.  Our new school had opened along The Ridgeway in Marshalswick, but the PE Department wasn't able to launch its games programme for us boys as the unimproved ground wasn't fit to have footballers and rugby players launching themselves across the marked out pitches even though there was a freshly emerging grass swathe.  A stoning machine should have been brought onto the site first, but presumably this was an expense too far; classes of children were much cheaper!

So on a few fine September mornings the timetable became "stonie" picking.  Each class appointed a bucket carrier – the classroom waste bin.  The teachers' roles were to ensure each class member produced a good supply of flint pebbles – especially the "sharpies".  The teachers also appointed one or two of the more burly boys to carry a rapidly filling bin to a pile close to the back gardens nearby.  The Head kept a tally of the number of filled bins being taken to the stone mountain.  There were shouts of "take your time" from classmates eager to take a break, but the Head, of course, reminded them that it is the class with the greatest number of full bins which would win the prize.

Suddenly, the vision of sixpences came into my mind from potato-picking days. But the encouragement about the prize was just that, and just an encouragement.  No actual prize was involved, then or at, for example an imminent assembly.  We, naturally gained the reward of working as a team, with the bonus of getting our school uniforms and shoes grubby.  Ah well.

RESCUE MISSION 7

Parishioners attending St Paul's

St Peter's has been an extensive and rural parish and when the city spread off the hill and its population eventually jumped over the Midland Railway in the 1870s, the Parish Church acquired a "tin building" to serve the new parishioners on the country side of the tracks. The new residents settled in Stanhope Road, Granville Road, the Cavendish estate and villas in Hatfield Read and those occupying the new homes in Clarence Park Road.

St Peter's Mission Church and Sunday school in Granville/Stanhope Road c1900.

The tin church was bolted together facing the former prison at the junction of Granville Road and Stanhope Road, opening just before the beginning of the new millennium, 1900.  An equally tinny Sunday School building was put together soon afterwards where later the car park for the cinema stood. Chatsworth Court flats are here today.

Two further generations of buildings have since occupied the pinnacle location since the church.  The first was The Adult Schools, and more recently de Novo flats.  But the little church also had later lives, as we shall see below.

Even the new permanent parish church of St Paul's had – and still has – its own temporary "church
hall" building in Blandford Road.

But the tin church site did not last long, for work began on a new daughter church, St Paul's, at the junction of Hatfield Road and Blandford Road.  That corner site was acquired by Henry Sear who had already launched a garden nursery to serve the owners and tenants of the nearby new homes.The new permanent building was pushed into use in 1908, after which the tinny was demounted and re-erected as St John's tinny church and Sunday school in Old London Road.It was only taken out of use and removed in recent years.

A Nissen hut dating from the early 20th century in use as part of St Paul's Sunday school in the
mid 1940s.

St Paul's played an early social and supportive role during the First World War, and a tablet inside the church confirms its connection with the War Graves Commission and its graves in the cemetery opposite. 

The East End of St Albans continued to grow in its population and unfinished building works remained unoccupied at the start of the Second World War.

Throughout the war St Paul's accommodation was used by children evacuated from Camden, and an increased young population as new families squeezed into rooms in Fleetville.  Even a section of Blandford Road became a temporary playground.

Among the unfinished building frenzy included new homes on the Beaumonts' estate, and at the close of the war St Paul's rented a temporary agricultural building to extend their Sunday school to benefit the children growing up on the estate.  These children were soon absorbed into the main church site at Blandford Road, and its seems no time was lost in the Nissen hut being used as part of the structure for the large building firm of Tacchi & Burgess.

Two builders' huts brought back into use c1948 as a public house: The Bunch of Cherries 
at Oaklands.

Originally a station yard in Jill End Lane, it was occupied by pre-fab homes, and then 
park homes on the same site.

Scouts have always been adept at bringing in temporary buildings as troop/group headquarters,
The original Salway Hut in the foreground and a re-use of the former Bunch of Cherries pub behind 
for the 2nd St Albans Group.  Now the site of houses in Liberty Walk, of Camp Road.

Another scout building, now much upgraded for the 9th St Albans Group in Sandpit Lane. 
Formerly a basic timber structure on railway land.

A former chapel for Astwick parish in Coopers Green Lane, no longer standing.

Temporary structure in Ashley Road used by voluntary organisations.  Now replaced by
modern housing.  It is probably the last remaining plot formerly a nursery garden originally
a section of Beaumonts Farm before homes were built in Castle Road and Burleigh Road.

Many temporary buildings could be found in Kingshill Avenue, Sandpit Lane – one of which is still there and much improved, Ashley Road – of which there were at least four – Oaklands College, formerly the Agricultural Institute, and at Beaumont Schools.  Readers will undoubtedly remind us of others.

All of these sites, and others, have had their time or are still being adapted for further uses.  But our research has identified where they are or were, and the stories which have resulted from their existence.