Opportune moments

Some of us will have recalled childhood days at the seaside in the early post-war period.  Many families will have taken a camera with them – a few fortunates may have acquired an early cine camera.  Anyhow, our purchased roll of film, whether 8, 12, 16, 24 or 36 exposures, may have been made to last all week, bearing in mind the additional cost of processing will have to come from our pocket money when we returned home.

COURTESY MARGARET GOWER

There were always commercial photographers who wandered along the promenade, looking out for personable family groups or individuals.  They would take a picture, give you a numbered ticket and let you walk on your way.  The following morning you would race to a notice board on a wall somewhere, and if the print was appealing, and you had spare money, you may have bought it.  One advantage, apart from it invariably being a better picture than any we might have taken, was that it would probably have been the only photograph featuring the entire family.  When (usually) you struggle to find father in the photographic record (it was usually father) and years later wonder whether he was even there at all, you come to realise he was always behind the camera!

COURTESY ALISON MANN

A few years ago I was given a copy of the photo, above right.  The old Camp Road bridge is behind the lady purposefully walking along Camp Road near Campfield Road junction.  It is a well composed image and the lunchtime picture is taken on a sunny day.

I then came across two other photographs, one taken at the same junction and a second near the junction of Hatfield Road and Woodstock Road South.  Recently I was shown a copy of yet another photo, left, taken at the same location.

This was surely not coincidence.  Was it possible that a commercial photographer recorded local street scenes in the same way the seaside photographer did?  Could it have been a Fleetville photographer?  Unfortunately, I have copies of the original, not the original itself,  and so any photographer's printed stamp on the reverse is missing.

So here is another mystery waiting to be solved.  Does anyone have an original photo in their collection in a similar style – an individual person, couple, family, pair of shoppers – walking along a local street.  Is there a photographer's stamp on the reverse?  Is the location identifiable.  Do please email saoee@me.com if there is any information you can offer.  This may have been a regular or occasional open-air trade operating in Fleetville, Camp, or even the park.

Where's here?

We all need to know these things occasionally.  So let's start by asking the question, "What do they call this place?"

Painted by John Buckingham shortly before the Midland
Railway arrived, from a vantage point near Grimston Road.

We'll assume the year is 1868, so this will be a historical question.  We've been walking (quite a common pursuit in 1868) towards St Albans, but we're not there yet.  We have dropped down towards a small stream valley, possibly a winter bourne, and we pass on our right an open space with, behind it, a farm homestead and a cottage next door.  On our left we note a lane coming uphill to meet the road, and stretched out across the lane and between two posts, is a metal chain, next to which is a tiny house.  Here lodges the guardian of the turnpike road, the route we have been walking.

After waiting for a young man on a loaded cart to pay his due, and the toll keeper to lower the chain, the cart driver bumps over the chain and turns toward the town where there is some feverish activity as dozens of gangers are piling subsoil onto the road in readiness for a bridge which will carry the road over the railway being constructed.  They are calling it the Midland Railway.

The toll keeper's house was where the posting box is today.

There is no further traffic for the toll keeper and so we engage in general conversation.  From my vantage point I can see back in the direction from which I had travelled, with hedges on both sides of the lane.  I now have a better view down the track from which the cart had arrived, and I can just see the bright new brickwork of another bridge recently completed, for a different railway.  Turning to look up the hill I spot the fresh brickwork of a new institutional building receiving prisoners from much older accommodation.  To its right there is a line of activity as the Midland Railway works continue, with a third bridge and the building next to it which will shortly open as the station.

Between there and the toll house are fields of barley rippling in the gentle breeze.  Cattle graze in another field.  Finally, a long field on the right of the turnpike road is bright with colour and noisy with people enjoying themselves at a temporary fair set up for the town's people – and for me when I get there!

"So, where are we?"  I ask the toll keeper.  "What do they call this place?"

"Don't rightly know, officially.  Don't think it has a proper name," he responded.  "But I know what some of us call it.  The Chain Bar, because that's the most important thing here.  If you've got animals or a cart, you have to stop and pay.  Some call it the Fete Field, because that's what sometimes happens in the meadow opposite.  Course, it's not an official name, just what folks call it.  If someone asks me where I work I tell 'em I collect tolls at the Chain Bar opposite the Fete Field.  They know where I mean."

By 1915 we got to know the place by the name of the
public house and hotel at the roundabout: The Crown.
Yes, there was a roundabout here in 1915!
COURTESY ST ALBANS MUSEUMS

Today, if you haven't guessed, we have a part of St Albans which still hasn't an official name.  You might think an official name is even more necessary today, given the large number of homes hereabouts; the same point (Chilli Raj, or rather the posting box outside it) might be located at The Crown.  Because it is a complex road junction, and that needs a name, just as the toll keeper's house did, and the place where people went to enjoy themselves.  Yes, and we still go there to enjoy ourselves, but today, instead of going to the Fete Field, we'll tell them we're off to Clarence Park.

Cambridge Friends in Smallford

Right Up My Street

For the past twelve months a small team has been working to create a history of Cambridge Road.  The members have been collecting photographs, local press items, details of former shops, lists of occupiers of all of the hundred or so houses, when new homes appeared – and sometimes disappeared.  House deeds have been scoured for detail, the origin of street names of nearby roads discovered; and how the road came about in the first place, having originally been a part of Beaumonts Farm.

Most satisfying of all have been the recollections resulting from oral interviews, now transcribed and collected into folders.

Although the project is not yet complete, current residents of Cambridge Road joined former occupiers and other members of Fleetville Diaries, coming together last week to hear and see the highlights of the last twelve months' work.  And what an evening it was!  The room was alive with enthusiastic conversation, surprises when old friends were met, and promises to exchange further information still in private albums, boxes and envelopes.

This blog has also played its part.  Recently a call went out to locate a plaque which had been presented to the road's enthusiastic residents' association, for the standard of street decoration in the celebratory year of the Queen's Jubilee, 1977.  Apart from an article that year in the Herts Advertiser, nothing more had been  discovered.  Now we can reveal that the plaque is still in the hands of the family it was originally presented to, and who once lived at number 16. Its members, with others, were a driving force in the formation and life of the residents' association.  Job done!  It is hoped that a photo will be obtained of the plaque, its owning family and a representative of the current team.

Friends

Those of us who were members of the social site called Friends Reunited will have heard recently that it is to close, having been re-acquired by its original owners. FR was, in many ways, ahead of its time, launching before Facebook and others of its genre.  Not only did it put former friends in touch once more, but it provided the facility to exchange photographs and recollections.  So school friends, work and club members and street occupiers were enabled to bring parts of their past up to date.

FR in turned spawned other groups as the remit of local history widened.  Hundreds of local groups have been formed since the launch of FR, not so much to copy what FR was itself doing, but having been inspired by the notion that groups of people living in a given area could set up small projects which brought them together.  St Albans' Own East End was one of them, of course, and from that  developed Fleetville Diaries.  Rather later came the Smallford Project.

Friends Reunited was a brilliant concept; what has been even more stunning have been the community groups which followed.

Butterwick industry

The extensive commercial site which is Lyon Way, Acrewood Way and Alban Point in Hatfield Road between Oaklands and Smallford, only developed from the 1960s, but it is sometimes confusing to trace how it developed; which companies arrived and left, and when.

Meat store on the right, timber supplier on the left.  Who, in 1951, owned the
new-looking buildings bat the top of the picture?
COURTESY BRITAIN FROM ABOVE

Until the mid 1960s most of the land between what is now Alban Way and Hatfield Road, and from  the end of the houses near Ryecroft and the stream known as Boggy Mead Spring, was woodland – Butterwick Wood.  But industry had begun to locate in a small cleared section before WW2.  Halsey's the timber supplier had been there since the late 1920s, and in 1939 appeared a substantial building essential to meat storage and distribution during the course of the war.  There is not much evidence of anything further until c1960 – other than Tractor Shafts (Smallford Planters) which was further east at the Lyon Way end.

Two additional buildings had been erected by 1950, as shown in this 1951 photograph.  But so far, their owners are unknown.  If any reader of this blog can point us in the right direction we would love to know.

The above was posted on Sunday 31st January.  As of today, Tuesday 2nd February we have an update.  The newer buildings at the top of the photo undoubtedly belonged to Frankipile Ltd.  So, query sorted!

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.

Showing off our collection

Children enjoy collecting things.  I use the word 'things' because adults like to consider their children are sufficiently sophisticated to theme their amassed boxfuls of oddments in their bedrooms.  Forget it mum!  Children are magpies  Where they are sophisticated though is in the perceived valued of individual items in their box under the bed.  They will happily trade one of their treasures for another, coveted from the collection of a friend.

There is something about that first item which makes it special – unpartable. Old bird's nest, toy soldier without its head, polished stone, a twelver from last year's conker championships in the playground.  In my case it included a cow horn, pig's trotter and a horseshoe, because our house was built on a former farmyard.  Because of the collection's tradability the contents are also fluid: sell three items you've lost interest in, and acquire one really special showpiece which last week belonged to a classmate.

Every so often you decide to impress your world of friends and hangers-on by holding an exhibition; maybe in the garden shed, or in the open.  Anywhere which will keep your collection safe and show it off to best advantage.  Naturally you yearn to hear your visitors express envy!  All too often you are vexed by criticism.  But there may be one object which impresses all; which makes the effort all worthwhile and you can close up your little event happily.

Of course there is a grown-up version of this ad-hoc display of collected objects, and grown-ups have interesting ways of managing the opportunities available.  The closure of the Museum of St Albans in Hatfield Road recently, became a critical step in the project to open the new Museum and Gallery at the Old Town Hall.  So the archived collection in almost permanent storage was swollen by artefacts from almost permanent display, now carefully wrapped in newspaper for the duration – though I doubt it is actually newsprint, more likely some acid-free technically-specified wrapping!

During the interregnum between one museum and the next, St Albans Museums is arranging occasional pop-up events.  You may remember one in an empty shop at St Christopher Place.  The next opportunity to discover a pop-up museum is, rather cheekily, at the Town Hall itself; probably one of the final events before work begins on the exciting new museum project.  Next weekend, 23rd and 24th January you can enjoy inspecting someone else's collection from their "box under the bed".  Seventy choice items selected by the wonderful volunteers who are at the heart of Museum activities.

Surely this is the best and most exciting way of discovering the Museum's range.  It places the responsibility on us to make a visit during
its 'two days only'.  The hall will be busy – very busy – and there will be wonderful conversations afterwards.  And if you take your young children or grandchildren I'll bet it will spawn other miniature pop-up exhibitions at home by our inventive junior magpies.

This is 1977

Festalban 77 brochure

There have been many Carnivals in St Albans, but the first, managed by the Round Table, was in 1977.  The event came about in that year as a result of the Diocese celebrating the centenary of its formation.  The period of events was given the name FESTALBAN 77.

There was another major event in 1977, this time a national celebration: the Silver Jubilee of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II.  What with the diocesan and the national celebrations, 1977 and the years which followed, there are memories of street parties, carnival floats and decorated streets.  The carnival floats continued to be a feature of the St Albans Carnival scene until fairly recently.

The best decorated street award for
Cambridge Road in 1977.
COURTESY THE HERTS ADVERTISER

In conversations recently among present and former residents of some of the Camp estate streets – especially Cambridge Road – there have been several references to a plaque awarded to Cambridge Road, although the details of where it was sited and the reason for its presentation to the street, are mixed and rather vague.

It is now possible to shed more light on this award as a result of a little 'sleuthing' among the pages of the Herts Advertiser, when on October 21st 1977 – when the cover price was a modest six pence – there appeared an attractive photo, shown right, of the plaque with three smiling youngsters.  Do you know them; are they readers of this blog?  Sarah and David Gilder, and Caroline Mundye.

The plaque was sponsored by the Herts Advertiser for the best decorated Silver Jubilee larger street in St Albans; Dickens Close also won the award for smaller streets.

The plaque was presented to the road's organiser, Mrs Pat Newman.  It is thought that Mrs Newman was also instrumental in the formation of the Cambridge Road Residents' Association at about the same time.  Perhaps this event was the reason for the Association's formation.

There are recollections of the plaque being on show, but not specifically where or for how long.  So, we are left with three interesting questions:

Residents aboard the 'Jolly Cambridge' pirate ship, the theme of
Cambridge Road's carnival float.
COURTESY PAUL ELAND.

1.  Was the plaque fixed to the front of a house in Cambridge Road, and if so, which one?

2.  When was it removed?

3.  What happened to it, and where is it now?

Of course, if there are any surviving photographs of these street partying, float-building, plaque-awarding days forty-eight years ago, would you be willing to share them with the present generation of Fleetville and Camp residents?

This brings us back to a recurring topic: former shops in and around Cambridge Road.  Number 16 was a sweet shop.  Is there here a connection with the Newman's?

One for the Album

Those of you who read the blog post Going to the Shop recently will have been reminded that there were several shops at the Sutton Road end of Cambridge Road.

Cambridge Road

It was partly as a result of an interesting community project nearby that the photograph shown in that post came my way.  For the past year a small group of people who live, or have previously lived, in Cambridge Road and Camp View Road, came together to discover more about their roads and the interesting people who have lived there.  I have been taking an interest, not because I have ever lived in Cambridge Road, but because I walked the road almost every day when I was a child, on my way to and from my grandmother's house.

Juliet at her retirement,
from the Herts Advertiser

Just as I was beginning to recall vague details of people I knew of – including the shopkeepers of course – and recalling a particular person who lived in one of those pairs of semi-detached homes on the hill above Maxwell Road, I received an email about the very same person.  For me Miss Juliet Haddon was just someone I knew of who ran a photographer's studio in Victoria Street,  and who happened to live in Cambridge Road,.  But to Nicholas, who emailed me, Miss Haddon was his great aunt.  Her reputation for producing excellent photographic studies, and working closely with her subjects, was widely known and respected.  What Nicholas lacks is examples of her work.

Juliet Haddon

Juliet was born in Clapham, south London, the daughter of a skilled artist.  While living in Cambridge she trained with a firm of studio photographers and then set up her own studio when she moved to St Albans.  Miss Haddon created a studio in part of what is now Addiktion Cycles, number 101 Victoria Street.  There were always examples of her work displayed in the front window space.  She continued to run her business until the age of 75, when he finally decided to 'call it a day'.  The Herts Advertiser ran a feature article in 1976 to celebrate her significant career and her retirement.  Miss Gertrude Juliet Haddon died in 1986.

I am sure there are residents, or former residents, of Cambridge Road, who knew her as a friend.  If you have any recollections of Juliet I would be delighted to know.  And if you have any photographs taken by her which you would be willing to share, Juliet's great nephew would be delighted to see them; I will pass them on.  The email address is, as usual: saoee@me.com