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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Pub on the corner

 No prizes for guessing that the one we're talking about is the Rats' Castle.  Against the odds by a substantial number of property owners – though not necessarily their tenants – it received its licence in 1927, roughly 85 years after the first building which farmer and land owner Thomas Kinder allowed to be built on the edge of his farm.  Kinder was a trustee of the Reading and Hatfield (R&H) Turnpike Trust, of which Hatfield Road was part.  A number of road users discovered they could make use of the road without paying a toll by taking an alternative private track, now Sutton Road, without passing the toll house at the Peacock PH at the edge of the town in Hatfield Road.  Around 1840 Mr Kinder agreed with his fellow trustees to erect a simple toll house; a map shows it to have been a small cross plan rather like a four-bay barn form familiar to farm environments.  From observations made at the time it appears to have had a straw roof, and probably had a central fireplace with a chimney emerging from the highest part of the roof.

The road crossing the map between left and right is now Hatfield Road. The private farm track
leading to it is on the edge of Beaumonts Farm.  The pink cross-shaped building was the toll 
collecting building on the side road, which, today, is Sutton Road.  MP was the location of the mile
post halfway along where Bycullah Terrace would be built c1900.  A few years later the post was moved further west (so therefore not strictly accurately placed).  This map is from 1879.

As it was intended to catch toll evaders rather than regular traffic it is likely that the tollkeeper's presence was intermittent.  Further,  closure of toll charging was widely anticipated, possibly up to a decade in advance, and the R&H Trust was not known for its diligent  record keeping the toll house may have been empty for some time.  However, it was at least standing when a map in 1879 was issued.

By common knowledge the roof spaces were occupied by rats and by the 1880s the local landmark was commonly known as the Rats' Castle, and the field in which it stood was equally well known as Rats' Castle Field.

The enumerator's route description for the 1891 census.  In the centre of the red circle is the
name Rats' Castle (with a following apostrophe) identifying both the former toll house
and the corner of the field in which it had been built.

The old tollhouse had been demolished as soon as Mr T E Smith's nearby printing works arrived in 1897; an opportunity for Mr T Cooke to take advantage of the site for a house and shop, which was known as Primrose Cottage.  It is possible plans by Smith for shops opposite the works were unknown in the public realm, but Mr Cooke and then Mr Percy Stone both sold beer and spirits in addition to  stocking a range of grocery items.  Swiftly businesses and homes grew up in the Fleet Ville district; a number of their owners objected to the sale of alcohol.  In the case of spirits only large bottles could be purchased anyway, beyond the pockets of most residents but possibly not their landlords or employers!

Primrose Cottage shop when it was managed by Percy Hector Stone.  He would later move
across the road to trade from Bycullah Terrace.  This building had a short life of less than thirty years.
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Two well-known businesses had already attempted to open hotels and public houses: Trust Houses and Benskins.  Animosities occasionally flared up between vested groups through to the 1920s.  Benskin's had a "Plan B"; it acquired the ownership of the corner shop because it had already secured its off-licence shop and spirits supplier from the previous occupant P Perkins, and installed its own tenant, C Griffin and then George Hopkins.

Finally, Benskin's received its full on-licence in its own right, and engaged local architect, Percival Blow to design the new building, the frontage having distinct echoes of Primrose Cottage and shop.

The 1920s public house which replaced both the toll house and Primrose Cottage.
Somewhere on the site there will probably still be evidence of a well.  Architect: Percival Blow.

"The Rats" as it became known to regulars, has never been short of clientele.  Benskins at one point during the 1970s decided that the rodent might put off possible customers, and an adapted hanging sign  went on display with the name The Castle.  The new name did not last long, thanks to some sterling defence by regular customers, and even Fleetville residents who would not normally take up such a cause.  Within a few months the traditional title returned.

The short-lived hanging sign for The Castle –
without a rat in sight!

But one aspect of the sign never wavered; the artists, presumably under company instructions, have never included an apostrophe, when a following apostrophe would be expected by default, a singular rat not being sufficient to sustain a population of the rodents to maintain the story, which may remain unique in the UK – but it would be great to have this confirmed.

If the Rats' Castle is on one corner of Sutton Road we might think Ballito was on the other.  Next time we will discover whether that was true.