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.
COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

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.

COURTESY NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND

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.
COURTESY GOOGLE EARTH

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.
COURTESY ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

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.
COURTESY GRACE'S GUIDE

First Pictorial Record

Armistice
The first photographs to appear in the Herts Advertiser coincided with the preparations for the First World War, and through the war years there were a very few portraits of local men who had been killed, injured or honoured.

Although the number of pictures appearing gradually increased during the Twenties they were all what photographers called exterior images.  There was just insufficient light for pictures to be shot indoors.  I suspect church service pictures would have been frowned on at this time. Especially the Armistice, later Remembrance, services which took place in the Cathedral.

The first Armistice-related pictures date from 1920 when side-by-side photos of the recently completed war memorials at Welwyn and Wheathampstead appeared in the edition of 6th November, and although Remembrance articles appeared thereafter it was 15th November 1924 before photos of representative groups marching to the Cathedral appeared and a picture of the Mayor laying a wreath at the St Peter's Street War Memorial.

These were the days when photographs were taken by others and handed in to the Advertiser office, so articles were rather randomly illustrated.

Peering into a hole
Random reports of holes have probably appeared in various locations for as long as it has been worthwhile reporting them.  Last week it was the turn of Oaklands where, rather worryingly, a large hole opened up beneath the foundations of Cedar Court, just east of Longacres.  Speculation that it was the result of digging clay for the nearby brickworks (on the site of the modern Marconi estate) can, I think be discounted, as Hardy House, which previously occupied the Cedar Court site, was also constructed without its builders being aware of fill material, often including rubbish.

A clue might be in the name of the Hill End Farm field on which later developments were built: Chalk Dell Field.  Small chalk pits were common in the area, and men employed to dig out the chalk for liming fields.  They were generally not very deep and early pits may have been gradually filled by the soil lying nearby.

What is of concern, whatever the cause (and it definitely wasn't heavy rains this time), the bottom of the hole would have been twice as deep as it appears today by peering in, as the soil and subsoil had fallen into a void below.

We will all be intrigued to discover more details about the Cedar Court hole, especially the residents whose homes hover over the newly opened space.

Meet Me at the Drill Hall

In our, sometimes traumatic, re-living of the First World War and the churning over of the ethics and morals, inhumanity and desperation, we have reached, with much relief, close to the end. Not that anyone was in a position to confirm that at the time.  Nor was The End anything other than the the Armistice and the laying down of weapons.  There are always consequences, and for countless families it was barely the beginning of new struggles in the lives to be lived in the future.

There used to be a building in Hatfield Road, almost opposite the Marlborough Almshouses, called the Drill Hall.  Drill halls were part of town life all over the country and became the headquarters of the local defence corps, now known as the Territorial Army.

As we observe from an advertisement which appeared in the Herts Advertiser in April 1918, Captain Charles Dunning of the 23rd Herts Volunteers implored every able and willing man up to the age of 60 to meet him at the Drill Hall.  This was one of many such calls even at this late hour for men to fill a variety of duties, for fighting and for support.  The battle was not yet won.

For those who came to meet Dunning or other officers, and signed up for active duty at or behind the Front, there would then be, perhaps two or three months of training undertaken locally and then in centralised camps in other parts of the UK.  By August recruits, whether volunteers or conscripts, and both from a steadily depleted pool of available men, were fully on duty.

One such man extracted from that pool in April and sent to the lines in early autumn was Thomas W Carter, who was living with his wife and children in Hatfield Road.  Since 1916 he had successfully appealed against conscription on several occasions.  He ran a successful business.  In his defence he continued to stress his work as agricultural, a key term given the extreme shortage of some foodstuffs.  In peacetime it had been a nursery and garden contracts business – and would be again – but in wartime the emphasis had changed.

Ada and Thomas on holiday after the war.
PHOTO COURTESY MARK CARTER

Thomas' luck ran out in April 1918.  At his final appearance at the Tribunal the latest appeal was turn down. By autumn he was in France, and the active part of his duty lasted barely a fortnight.  Within days of November 11th, Thomas' wife received news of  injuries to her husband's thigh, neck and arm.  His right leg was amputated below the hip.

Following treatment he was returned home; the business of Sear & Carter continued and was later taken on by his children.

The Drill Hall focused people's attention on their collective duty as they perceived it, and the decisions they made on the day they signed up.  But the consequences were far-reaching for all.

Playground Closed

It's been going on forever; someone buys a piece of ground on which to build a house – or something else – and brings the materials and tools for the building.  At the end of day one he leaves for home, and then returns for day two.  The process continues until the structure is finished.  From time to time people pass by, show an interest or stop to chat, and then move on.  Occasionally a piece of wood or metal which has been discarded as waste will lie nearby, and an informal permission will be obtained for its removal to be used elsewhere.

Before WW1 part of a field in Fleetville was stacked with bricks brought for use in nearby house-building.  A number of children who were swiftly populating the district used the space around those brick piles for informal games of football; maybe even borrowing a few bricks for temporary goal markers.

In the 1930s, married couples in search of a new home wandered the building estates on Sunday afternoons, entered the partly completed homes through spaces which would later become front doorways, and assess the possible suitability for them and their growing family.

Families who had come from London at the end of the Second World War, and whose children had become used to playing on bomb sites, saw the partly finished Fleetville homes as just another playground site; and so we all discovered the joy of exploring, climbing, jumping and leaping, making inventive use of the levels, spaces and materials at hand.  No-one was given permission, but on the other hand, no-one told us not to, or if they had we had  discovered the art of selective hearing!

Open building site at Jersey Farm
COURTESY CHRIS NEGUS

Naturally there were occasions when an accident occurred and a child returned home with a cut knee or even a fractured arm; and there were Monday mornings when the builder called the local police station to report a door missing, or a couple of planks of wood that had been present the previous Friday.  No doubt the police would have advised the builder to lock items away, and almost certainly the retort would have included the phrase, "it's a building site, not an occupied house."  

It probably did not happen quickly, but there began a time when building sites were found with chain link fences around them, and wide gates with padlocks.  Possibly under pressure from insurance companies.  Then signs warning of hard hat regulations.  More recently one or more people  on site did no building at all; this was the security department; no-one passed in or out except via security and their signature forms and walkie-talkies.  All very efficient, but children's adventure was denied.

Marketing panels in Sutton Road.

But have you noticed?  Many building sites have become artistic marketing devices for what is being constructed, whether for apartments, offices or shopping opportunities.  The old-fashioned chain link fences are now replaced by solid – and often higher – panels with colourful designs, pictures or sales advertisements.

Night watchman.
COURTESY TOTTENHAM-SUMMERHILLROAD.COM

Everyone is shut out; safe and healthy has become health and safety.  Even the old-fashioned night watchman and his hut and brazier has disappeared.  Youngsters out in the early summer evenings, or walking back from friends or events might have stopped to talk to him.  But there are now far fewer of us who remember such transitory individuals occupying our neighbourhood.  Every building site is now most definitely a no-go zone.