Fire, fire!

The work currently in hand to bring to life, once more, the photos which had previously appeared in the Herts Advertiser, has reached the 1920s.  Anyone needing to read, for research, issues from that time can only do so via the microfilm reels at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) or St Albans Central Library.  While it is possible to read the stories themselves, the photographs which accompany them are extremely dense or appear as black rectangles.

The houses behind are those in Hill End Lane, near its
junction with Colney Heath Lane.  HERTS ADVERTISER

The re-photographing project has enabled the original pictures, as printed, to be restored.  In reaching December 1928, the story of a serious fire at a brickworks was published.  Separately, on the back page, were two photos, now clearly revealed, of the devastation the conflagration caused.

There were two brickworks in close proximity.  One belonged to Owen's, a Wheathampstead company, on a site now occupied by an industrial estate in Ashley Road.  The other, a smaller business, fronted on to Hill End Lane, near the former railway branch line crossing at the double bend in the lane; and was known as the Hill End Brickworks.

Both were created to supplied bricks for local building needs, but the smaller yard was not profitable and was taken over by Owen's in the early 1920s, although its original name was retained.

In the knowledge that small ventures such as these have a limited life, many of its buildings were of timber construction.  Given that fires were also required nearby for the kilns, there must always have been a risk to the temporary buildings on the site.

The photos demonstrate how complete the destruction was.
HERTS ADVERTISER

The site then appeared to remain derelict for some time, and a former resident recalls, as a child, walking from Hixberry Lane, across the railway crossing and taking a path skirting around the old buildings to Hatfield Road.  The path would have followed the route we now know as Longacres; and when redeveloped it became the site of Marconi Instruments Ltd.  Now that further redevelopment has taken place, the houses of Marconi Way occupy this space between Fleetville and Oaklands.

There is one conundrum to the brickworks fire.  The report indicates that hoses were laid from a hydrant in Hatfield Road, across a back garden on that road, and across the railway.  But the railway track is beyond this brickworks site, although the Owen's brickworks are, from Hatfield Road, beyond the tracks.  Did the newspaper reporter muddle his facts.  Surely the fire engine did attend the correct site!  So, where did the description of laying hoses across the railway come from, unless the supply was taken from the Hospital instead of, or as well as, Hatfield Road.

What shall we do about Hatfield Road?

We can only imagine what Hatfield Road was like in the seventeenth century, but by the mid-eighteenth sufficient angst had built up to warrant improvements by making it a toll road.  Unfortunately, tolls there were but how much improvement was made to the highway cannot be ascertained as detailed accounts from 1868 to 1881 no longer exist.

Then came the early local authority period.  Still a narrow road with passing places.  Some of that narrowness exists today near the Crown.  The road was subsequently widened to become the double-lane size it still is today; although still unmade until the teen years of the twentieth century.

As the number of motor vehicles increased, and in recognition of it being a shopping street with direct access to the city centre, the thirties brought some welcome relief when the bypass road from Roe Green to the Watford road encouraged traffic with no business in St Albans to miss it out altogether.

At Smallford some further widening took place, and the bend at the rec was shaved to provide a better sightline.  Otherwise, the road today is the same as it was in the 1960s.  It is not that there was no ambition on the part of the County Council.  Two proposals from that time may linger in some people's memories.  The first, and most radical, was to bulldoze the "straggle of shops" out of existence, replacing them with clusters of shops and residences further from the road.

The second was to make the street into a local road, and divert through traffic on its own mini bypass as a dual carriageway on the route of the former branch railway between Camp Road and Smallford.  The report did not state whether there would be access junctions at, say Sutton Road, Ashley Road and Hill End; nor did it acknowledge that a four lane highway is rather wider than the railway, even though there was sufficient width for two tracks.

Neither of these schemes, as we know, went anywhere, and since then a further fifty years have passed with its inexorable increase in traffic and parking demand.  But at least Morrison's has provided some additional parking.  What is surprising is that, as new buildings have sprung up on the south side through Fleetville, no allowance was made in the planning applications for future widening.  And at the worst section of all, no additional lane was provided for buses outside Morrison's.  What were the authorities (not) thinking of?

Smallford, towards Hatfield.  The tollhouse on the left (where the paddock
is today), with the Four Horseshoes beyond.  On the right, the cottages are
no more.  But the road IS wider.

Whose error?

Last week I posted details of some confusion over a field at Beaumonts Farm which the farmer, Mr William Moores, had been instructed to plough up near the end of WW1.  I will not repeat the details here, since the blog entry can be referred to directly.

During the course of the week I took the opportunity to view the original file of documents – mainly copies of letters between the County War Agricultural Committee and Mr Moores.  As a result I have to make a couple of corrections.  One of the errors was, regrettably, mine!  I had understood the name Fleetville Field to mean a specific field.  In fact the email I received referred to "a Fleetville Field"; not the same thing at all!  So Home Meadow, between Beaumont Avenue and the present Beechwood Avenue south of Farm Road, was probably still named as such; and we can ignore all references to the Grammar School Field next to Hatfield Road Cemetery.

But there was some incompetence on the part of the Committee.  There was, in the end, only one instruction: to plough up one field.  The Committee knew which one, since someone had presumably made a field inspection, but they just couldn't get it right when corresponding with Mr Moores.

The first letter from the Committee detailed the pair of field numbers (included in which he was also asked to grub up the trees in the intervening hedge).  Mr Moores replied in a carefully worded letter, that he was not responsible for those fields.  The Committee admitted that these were part of Mr Titmuss' land at Winches Farm (between Beaumonts and Oaklands).  I noted there was no sign of apology in the Committee's response.    The Committee then sent another letter instructing that Mr Moores plough up another field which actually was part of Beaumonts Farm.  It was known as Heath Field, fronting onto Beaumont Avenue and Sandpit Lane.  This time Mr Moores had to tell the Committee this field was already being cultivated.  Again no hint of apology, but the Committee then made another attempt to correct itself.  This time it was the field 821 (Home Meadow) mentioned in my last blog, where the farmer was unable to plough because of the number of people using it for recreational purposes.  There is no further correspondence, but a short while later the work of the Committee was transferred to the County Council.  As we often say in texts when we have made a mistake over a rather trivial matter: oops.

Cemetery wall
At the time the Hatfield Road cemetery was created one of the proposed construction elements was a boundary wall, but since no early photo of the cemetery from Hatfield Road exists, except for the ornate entrance, it is not possible to illustrate the rest of the boundary to its extremities as it was for around half a century.

In the 1930s Hatfield Road was widened at this point and the Herts Advertiser stated that the front wall was moved back 12 feet and rebuilt.  So the question has always been, what happened to the outer sections of wall (assuming they had been built in the first place)?  Did the Council sell the rest of the stone, replacing it with less expensive railings?

A file of documents at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) reveals that a contract was awarded to Mr Charles Chamberlain of Bedford Road, St Albans for the construction of a boundary wall at the cemetery, 600 feet long and 6 feet high,   with piers, 1 foot 6 inches square, placed every ten feet.  Materials were to be “good, hard, well-burned grey stocks of the neighbourhood.”  I take that to mean that it is a brick wall.  The contract price was £142 and was signed off in December 1883.

This is the first evidence that a wall the full length of the Hatfield Road frontage was constructed.  The reason why the wall was not reconstructed when the road widening took place in the 1930s, was undoubtedly the cost of reconstructing a wall in brick.  In any case, by that time there was a significant shrub and tree screen.  Today, the railings are not the dominant feature; instead, we enjoy walking beside a rather attractive mature hedge.

Your error, I believe

History is a record of the facts, right?  So, what happens when facts are recorded incorrectly?  I have just been alerted to information, which if it had been written correctly, would have become lost in the general melee of statistics, and part of the story of Fleetville would not have been resurrected one century on.  Here is the account of that error; it being passed to me as a straightforward summary of a communication lodged in a file at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS)  by a University researcher.

During WW1 it was the role of the County War Agricultural Committee to ensure that all farming land was being fully utilised for food production.  At the time members of the Committee visited Oaklands Farm, the tenant farmer, Mr William Moores, was also responsible for Beaumonts Farm.  The committee noted that one field at Beaumonts had been left as pasture and with no evidence that it was being grazed.  It requested that Mr Moores plough it for a wheat crop.

Mr Moores was puzzled because the 8-acre field in question and named as Fleetville Meadow was not part of his farm.  However, Mr Moores did admit that one of his fields, also of 8 acres and numbered 821 (on the 1898 OS map), is also a meadow.  He had been trying to plough this meadow for the past four years, but "the people of Fleetville have made it a regular playground."

Home Meadow was to the left of this picture of
Beechwood Avenue.

So what was the error the Committee had made in writing to Mr Moores?  The field he was responsible for was known as Home Meadow, yet the Committee had referred to it as Fleetville Field.  At such an early date, and probably even now, Beaumonts Farm could not be said to be in Fleetville; the field was generally a wedge shape, lying between Beaumont Avenue, and the present Farm Road and Beechwood Avenue.   Clearly, either the Committee had been confused geographically, or had made a copying error.  The only field in Fleetville which was not yet committed to development was a linked pair of pastures still owned by St Albans Grammar School (now called St Albans School) where Fleetville Junior School and its playing field now are.  Together, these fields are 8 acres in size and one of its field numbers was 811.  Could a clerk have recorded 811 instead of 821, and from there used a look-up list to find the name Fleetville Field?  This area of ground is more likely to have been neglected during the war since it was not part of an existing farm, though it may have been grazed intermittently by Oakley's, a local dairy business based in Camp Road.  The Committee has therefore, unwittingly, given us the name by which people had come to know this patch of land in the early 20th century, a name which could not have existed before Smith's Printing Agency arrived in 1897 and named its little hamlet Fleetville.

The other fascinating piece of information lies in Mr Moore's reply.  "The people of Fleetville have made it a regular playground."  The Fleetville Recreation Ground had been donated to the city in 1913 by Mr Charles Woollam, but inevitably nothing was done to improve this stub of a field straight away.  Indeed, one or two residents proposed that the council plough it up for residents to tend as allotments.  Before the war, and possibly for some time after, part of 12-acre field, opposite Nicholson's in Sutton Road, was used as a football field.  A pasture, Home Meadow, right on the edge of the built-up area, was inevitably going to be an attractive playground for local children and families.  Clearly it was popular if Mr Moores regularly found himself unable to plough it – and he doesn't appear to be making an excuse.

Home Meadow therefore is revealed as a previously unrecorded public open space for the inhabitants of the eastern districts on both sides of Hatfield Road.  A fact which has only come to light because of a mistake made by a committee, and which required a written response from the accused farmer – and, of course, the diligence of a researcher in passing on what had been discovered.

A tank came to stay

There are many stories which are part of Fleetville's history, and not all of them are probably true.  One of them has possibly risen in credibility recently because of an article published last week in a Broxbourne local newspaper.

Several people have told of a military tank which was apparently parked on the recreation ground in Fleetville, after the end of WW1.  Now, you could be forgiven for confusing a tank with a device for storing water, given that that kind of tank came to be a feature of the rec during WW2.  In other words there may be versions of the story where the meaning of 'tank', though clear to the teller might be confused in the mind of the listener, and that both might have been inferring WW2 when they meant WW1, or the other way round.  We all get confused at times.

The common thread in all of the stories is that a tank stood at the corner of the rec at the junction of Hatfield Road and Royal Road.  Presumably, if a military version, petrol had been siphoned out first and the distributor cap removed in case a couple of under-the-influence regulars from the nearby pub attempted to drive it home along Harlesden Road.

                                                                  Hertfordshire Mercury

As a sculpture we all might ask what its function might have been?  A trophy, maybe; or perhaps a warning.  Or a cheap piece of games equipment for the youngsters to play on.

I want to know where it came from, and whose decision it was to place it there: put your hand up the parks department of the council – but not the present lot, of course.  Just as important, when did it go and who gave authority for it to leave?  Did it remain long enough to be carted off for scrap at the next big argument across the Channel, or did we all get fed up with the rusting hulk after a couple of years.

I should think there was a feeling of emptiness following its departure, because when I was a nipper in short trousers I played on the swings in that spot.  After the removal of the tank, you see, we had no equipment at all to play on, and I suppose the council could only think of swings (they certainly didn't let us have a Witch's Hat – far too dangerous for the nice kids of Fleetville).  Today, it's a different story; a child could play on a different piece of play equipment every day of the month, and they are a darned sight more colourful.

Which brings me to Broxbourne.  Well actually, Cheshunt.  The article opens: "A relic of the First World War, which once stood in a Cheshunt park, could be commemorated with a new sculpture.  An empty plinth in the corner of Cedars Park marks the spot where a tank once stood."  Interesting.  The Cheshunt people know more about their's than we do ours.  It was a British Mark 5 tank, gifted to Cheshunt Council in 1921 and it remained for nearly 20 years, after which the council made a profit of twenty-seven quid when they sold it in 1940!  Now that is cunning.

Anything to add to our bit of war metalwork, anyone?

Fifty years on

What were we all doing fifty years ago?  Those younger than that do not need to answer!  I was away from home, furthering my education and planning what would turn out to be my only long-term career move.  Living a few months at a time in "rooms"  I would still be fifteen years away from owning my first home.

What, then, was happening back in St Albans?  In 1963 I couldn't go online to view the e-edition of the Herts Advertiser, but it came to me just the same; the family's copy wrapped in one of those paper collars with the words "Newspaper Rate" emblazoned down one edge.  There were similar local newspapers delivered to the house in the same way from places such as Mountain Ash, Cheltenham, West Ham, Portsmouth and Hull.  Local news came to Birmingham the old-fashioned way.

So, during the next few months we will dip into what was happening in St Albans' East End during that year, fifty years ago.  The website will have a dedicated page to 1963.

Meanwhile, here are two advertisements from that year.  Unfortunately, the quality is not good as they come from having photocopied the microfilms, but they serve their purpose.

Where the land between Smallford and Colney Heath Lane is now packed with factories and warehouses, it had, before WW2, been worked as part of Butterwick Farm; and the name Butterwick Wood lived on as the name for the formative industrial estate.  Apart from the James Halsey timber yard,  the first firm to arrive at the Smallford end was Tractor Shafts, a company run by the Hobbs family, developing agricultural machinery.  The firm wasn't directly advertising for new employees, but it chose to place an 'ad' in a special engineering supplement in the Herts Advertiser one week in April.

In the same supplement a much older factory company also placed an advertisement.  As the renamed Salvation Army Printing Works, the Campfield Press in Campfield Road announced the range of publications which it would print for clients.  Among this range you will not find the staple diet of the works when first created: Bibles, hymn books and sheet music for the Army bands.  Instead there is a list of more commercial requirements of a modern business community, including circulars (junk mail?) and brochures.


Old advertisements are one of the ways we can recall businesses which once thrived in and around the city, but have either outgrown their former locations, been taken over by rival firms, or closed because they had served their purpose.

A Pitiful Figure

Camp had a beer house from the late 18th century; the Crown Hotel opened its doors around 1900; Oaklands obtained a license in 1947 and Marshalswick in 1962.  Fleetville might have received its license a good deal earlier that 1927 had it not been for well-orchestrated campaigns by groups and the owners of factories in the area.

From a 1924 edition of War Cry

Although the Salvation Army HQ is in London, the print works which spewed out huge quantities of its official weekly newspaper,  War Cry, each Friday, was in Campfield Road, St Albans.  In a 1924 edition the Army presented a disturbing article about young children spending long periods of time on the steps of public houses while their parents were downing drinks inside.

"Certainly it was a terrible thing for children to be taken into bar parlours, there to be contaminated by all the coarseness and devilry that alcohol engenders.  In winter it is a still more terrible thing that children should be left on the pavement outside, perhaps for hours at a stretch, helpless and uncomplaining against a fate which leaves them faint, tired, hungry, and very likely cold, wet, and piteously unhappy."

The writer was explaining the unintended effect of the government's then-recent amendment of the law relating to public houses, and the imposition of a minimum age for entering a pub.

Reputed to be young women
involved in Bryant & May's
match strike of 1888.

No sooner had the social conscience been pricked on children collecting in pub doorways than some parents began to leave their children at home.  Incidents, often involving grate fires or candles, claimed the lives of children left in their homes on their own – which would later mean a further revision of the law preventing children from being left in the house without an appropriate adult.

The War Cry article is detailed and emotionally written, but it is not the words which have the greatest impact, but the photograph which accompanies it.

I wonder whether there are any other period photographs in our shoe boxes, which also have a story to tell, especially of the social conditions confronted by ordinary people at the time.  Often they appeared in magazines or newspapers, but were also often sold as postcards.  If you have such a photograph which might have an impact in its own right, or as part of the story to which it relates, then do let me know.