Court playing tennis

I have made good use of the past two weeks, sitting in front of the television with the remote control, attempting to keep up with various tennis matches on BBC1 ("this match continues on BBC2"), BBC2, the ubiquitous red button and online.  So, by the time the annual yellow-ball-fest came to a close, I still had just a few small strawberries left to savour.

While devouring these my mind began to wander to all those locations I once knew in the our East End where it was possible to play tennis.  On Sundays there was once a council regulation about enjoying oneself in one of its open spaces.  If you were caught you might have had to present yourself at a court of the legal variety – a couple of young men playing an informal game of footy in Camp Road were apprehended by a well-turned-out police officer and were delivered a fine for breaking a bylaw.

Courtesy St Albans Tennis Club

To play tennis "properly" you took your wooden racket in a frame, plus a couple of off-white or grey balls to the man at the booth in Clarence Park.  Until Mr Samuel Ryder paid for the grass courts – where the all-weather pitches are today – you could play on the football field which was marked out for the purpose in the summer months.

Three other opportunities opened up for play.  In the 1930s the County Council decided to install courts at its secondary schools.  But generally this meant when schools were in session, or by arrangement with a member of staff and the caretaker on Saturday.  School courts were, and still are, largely unused throughout the summer holiday period.

Then there were the private clubs, such as the Salisbury Tennis Club (still extant), and Trinity Church Club in Camp Road, now Ulverston Close.   Or those belonging to factories.  Hence the former Ballito sports ground at Smallford, or the Peake's courts in Cell Barnes Lane.  There was also a court or two to one side of the Campfield Press.

A pre-war garden court, when there was space.

Finally, several of the more substantial houses in the district had their own private courts: Sandpit Lane, Marshal's Drive, Jennings Road and Beaumont Avenue were among the roads where various surfaces were laid in the rear garden; maybe even sharing the space with a neighbour.  Today there are probably no garden courts left; householders lead busy lives and we have left the period of the leisured well-to-do behind.

Instead, garden courts have been replaced by modern clubs and sports centres, such as at Jersey Lane and Cell Barnes Lane, which cater for tennis players, among others.  The gardens have become grassed spaces for the children to kick balls around, and when they have left home, the occasional garden party and a zone for today's golfing dads to practise potting a few holes.  Come to think of it, we did that at home when we were children; only then it was a game called clock golf, and played on the same worn lawn on which we also played French cricket, which was safer than English cricket, which kept our's, and the neighbour's windows in tact and saved our parents' embarrassment when it came to an apology and compensation.

One hundred blogs

Summer months are busy months, and as regular visitors to this blog site have realised, there was no post last weekend.  Which was probably a pity because we then reached our centenary.  One hundred posts.   The St Albans' Own East End main site contains a feature called One Hundred Objects (which represent the East End of St Albans).  It is therefore about time that an index to the blog stories is included.  That is something for the autumn; and having briefly celebrated the blog birthday, it is time to move on.

At the end of June each year Fleetville celebrates with a community event under the Larks in the Parks brand, or Larks on the Rec.  The 2014 event, last Sunday, was doing some celebrating of its own.  Larks was ten years old.  By general acceptance there were more activities, more visitors and more entertainment.  While a number of visitors arrived for a spell and then left, lots of people spent the whole day Larking, even picnicking under the trees.

The rec itself was also celebrating a birthday.  It was in 1913 that Charles Woollam purchased the field from the trustees of T E Smith's estate, and gave it to the city "for the recreation of the people of Fleetville".  The city council ensured the space was adequate enough to use by the following year, and installed a boundary fence.  The rec was therefore available for recreational use, which makes 2014 the centenary of the rec.

Another open space is even older, and its benefactor, Sir John Blundell Maple, ensured that the section of Clarence Park devoted to organised sporting activity, was retained as such for the people of St Albans, through a trust deed.  Because the southern section of the park was "ornamental" and not used for sporting activity, the trust deed was not considered necessary  there.

This disparity has exercised the minds of the council in recent years, to ensure that governance of the whole park is more simply structured, making it easier to apply for funds to improve and upgrade facilities (toilets fit for purpose would be a start!).

The football club also announced that it was considering upgrading its facilities, either in the park or on another site.  News that its lease would shortly be reviewed, as well as the above-mentioned governance issue, were in people's minds at the same time, alerted nearby residents to possible changes over the way the park may be used in future, or the way the traditional Edwardian space may look.

Thus were born two new organisations.  The first was a residents' association for the home occupiers of the roads surrounding the park.  And the second was the Protect Clarence Park group, open to anyone who has an interest or concern for protecting the park as an open resource for all.  The residents' group is now a member of the City Neighbourhoods Committee.

Issues of concern currently include lighting, the state of the pavilion and lodge,  temporary closure of a footpath, the renewal of the football club lease, and the agreement between the council and Verdi's, which may or may not be part of the park, depending on your historical definition of the boundary.

Between the various groups and the council it should be possible to keep a guardian watch over the well-being of the park and its many users.  And all of us will be grateful for the work they have set out to achieve.

The Way We Were

Many of us were attracted recently by the marketing of a DVD by the St Albans Review newspaper.  Called St Albans: The Way We Were, it was a collection of stills and movie clips from the history of photography, almost all taken in St Albans.

We  called out the names of places we recognised, and reminded ourselves that particular events were also shown in previous presentations – on videotape then – called Bygone St Albans and St Albans: a City to Inspire.  This new DVD enables a new generation of residents to see the familiar city back through time.

In the package was a second DVD, one in a series taken from national newsreels, of events through a particular decade.  This one was the Fifties – or "50's" as the titling insists on labelling it.  For those still puzzled, 50s does not require an apostrophe!

Naturally, The Fifties made use of a wide range of newsreel footage and told its more specific story in greater detail.  The screen lingered on buildings, on people and on incidental happenings.  After all, the film was being shot and edited by professionals on professional film, mostly in colour.

On the St Albans DVD, the concentration was on film taken much earlier, even including a few shots by Arthur Melbourne Cooper himself.  These were from rescued films shot by amateurs, mainly on basic amateur cameras and smaller gauge film stock.  Maybe the comparison is unwarranted, but it does highlight one aspect of our archiving of still and moving pictures.

It is only possible to archive what is available.  While professional newsreel camera operators are filming to order, according to a company's requirements; the rest of us film and photograph what pleases us.  And in St Albans, what pleases us most of the time is Verulamium Park, the Cathedral, Clock Tower, St Peter's Street and the market.  That material forms the basis of archives.  If no-one films the building of a public toilet, or the arrival of the bin men on Friday morning, these subjects will eventually be absent from the archives.

There were delightful scenes from George Street, High Street and anywhere else in the Cathedral Quarter; but this is only part of the city.  There was one brief shot of women working on shell casings at the former Ballito factory.  Nothing else to represent the busy and densely populated eastern districts of Camp and Fleetville, for example, key industrial centres.  There was nothing to represent the schools, nothing for the farms around the city.  It was interesting to note, however, that the little family picnic "somewhere at Marshalswick" survived another outing, having been previously shown on the videos (see above).

The producers of the DVD worked with what was available, and it is a reminder to us all that for future generations to have a clear idea about St Albans today, it is today's photographers and film makers who should be recording a wide range of events and scenarios in preparation.

We can still make some recompense for the past, however.  Many of us still have movie film and  photographs which we have held on to.  For those pictures not strictly private, is it time to give them
an airing, sharing the scenes with others?   This website and the local history group Fleetville Diaries have frequently called for us to look through our photo boxes.  And when we have done that, just email saoee@me.com to tell us what you have found!

Starting nursery

Children attending a nursery group had always been a reality if parents could afford the fees.  But this was outside the remit of the county council which was responsible only for children of legal school age; 5 to 13, 5 to 14, 5 to 15, and so on, as the Government progressively raised the leaving age.

One major event changed all of that for a number of years: the Second World War.  The Government could not accept that women could simply stay at home and bring up their children.  There was huge pressure to encourage them to "do something for the war effort".  In Fleetville that included working at the Ballito factory, a hosiery mill where Morrison's supermarket is now.  Production of stockings gave way to manufacturing shell cases.

The car stands where once one of the ramps led below ground.  On top
the former wartime nursery building is now Fleetville
Community Centre.

However, that posed a problem: what to do with the employees' children.  The Government ordered hundreds of concrete section buildings from a firm in the county, and councils were able to claim a number of them for wartime nurseries.

Between 1938 and 1940 tunnels had been dug below ground at the recreation ground, both for the public and for the children at the school, all capped with a concrete "lid".  On top of this, in 1942, was placed one of these concrete buildings, which was fitted out as a nursery.  At each end the city council constructed brick surface shelters in case of an air raid.

All three buildings, incredibly, remain in use, in spite of the main building initially having a useful life expectancy of no more than a decade.  Since 1983 they have been the home of Fleetville Community Centre.  Before that time, the nursery continued in the period of postwar peace, and increasingly as an overflow for Fleetville JMI School.

One of the former surface air raid shelters is now
converted into useful storage space.

Unfortunately, we have no photographs of the building in use during those early years.  The author can remember walking along Royal Road from school and seeing the ramps disappear under the nursery building, and the locked metal doors preventing entry.  This scene we took for granted and did not question what was behind the steel.  My friends from other classes sometimes came from rooms within the building to join us in the playground.

But in the thirty years the nursery building was open for use did no-one take a photo or two?

If you were a young mum delivering a pre-school age child to the nursery do you have recollections you could tell?

As a pupil at Fleetville JMI school, did you have your class in one of the rooms at the nursery, and can recall what it was like to be part of the school, yet separate from it?

Do email any information, even if you think it is not terribly useful, to the author at saoee@me.com

Central School pupils identified

If you were thinking of spending an hour at the Museum of St Albans browsing the Discover Sandridge exhibition ... well, I'm afraid you have missed the opportunity.  The doors closed this afternoon for the final time.  Tomorrow (Monday) the displays will be moved out to make way for a First World War-related exhibition.  There is no doubt that Discover Sandridge has been popular; every time I have called in several visitors have thronged the little alcoves, and left  messages indicating how much they enjoyed the experience.  There is no indication yet, of where the exhibition will reappear – it was intended to visit various locations as a pop-up for the remainder of the year.  If and when this information is received you will find it on the front page of the SAOEE website.  However, one decision made is for the original files (from which the info-panels were formed) detailing the Marshalswick, Jersey Farm and Newgates areas, will appear permanently on the SAOEE website later in the year.

Some considerable time ago I received a photograph – in five sections – of the pupils and staff of the Central Girls' School in 1931, the year in which they moved from their inadequate premises in Victoria Street, to Hatfield Road.  These are the buildings now occupied by Fleetville Junior School.  Unfortunately, they had to appear on the website without any names.  However, another former pupil from that year also still has her copy of the same photograph, and has submitted a selection of names of the children she remembers.  These are now added to site, on the second School Groups page, together with the names of the teachers and their specialist subjects.  Now that a start has been made, perhaps others may be prompted by a pupil now recognised, and come up with one or more class mates or personal friends.

Part of the former track near Camp Road, now a footpath
behind the houses.

The guided walk along Camp Road last Thursday evening proved popular, with a full turnout for a street-based event.  Beginning at the junction of Campfield Road and Camp Road, we climbed Camp Hill, discovered the former rubber factory, and the location of the former beer house on The Hill; then there were the first two Camp shops, run by Mr and Mrs Eastall and Mr Gear; the dairy farm run by the Oakley family, and a taxi and coach enterprise owned by Mr Crain.  When we reached the school we realised it had opened, in 1898, without water, gas, electricity or mains drainage.  By the time we reached the eastern end of the road we had counted four triangles in different contexts (you will have to join the walk next year to find out more about these).

The shop now called Dearman Gomm's in Camp Road was once
owned by the Tuckett family.

The next walk is on Saturday afternoon 28th June, the first of three ambles with stories in the grounds of Hatfield Road Cemetery, under the general heading of Laid to Rest in Fleetville.  The first event is subtitled The Baker's Dozen.

The following day Fleetville celebrates its Larks in the Parks at the Rec; which is a convivial day supported by entertainment, food and activities.  Fleetville Diaries will have its marquee, within which this year's Camp exhibition will pop up for the day.  June and July both prove to be busy months for outdoor events.

Was it really two years ago that the Olympic Torch came along Hatfield Road?  How time flies!

Books – and golf

In 2008 four contributors to a 48-page book they gad been working on, saw their publication go to  print. It was titled Marshalswick: the story of a house and its estate.  From the cover shown below right many St Albans people will recall seeing it on sale.  Because of its restricted funding, the volume quickly sold out.

Now, those joint authors, Brian Adams, Clare Ellis, Elizabeth Gardner and Helen Leiper, have reached an agreement with the Sandridge 900 Organising Committee, by which the latter has funded a reprint, copies which now on sale at the Museum of St Albans.

Of especial interest to anyone who was unaware of the existence of a large house sitting in extensive grounds to the south of Marshals Drive, it is also a great relief to all who had intended to purchase a copy and then discovered stocks had become exhausted.  Well, now you can.




It may come as a surprise to another author, living in St Albans, that his book, not only features on this website (and now its blog), but is an artefact at the Discover Sandridge exhibition currently running at the Museum of St Albans.

Allen Nicklin wrote an unusual fiction book in 2012, called Winning the Benevolent Cup and Reaching First Base.  I came across it in a shop called Raindrops on Roses in High Street, St Albans. It is an unusually-written story blending some eyebrow-raising accounts of teenage life in a fictional St Albans with events which we all knew about at the time through the national press.  I say fictional, but most of the places can be identified, roads, bus routes and other places are named correctly; even the main character in what is clearly an autobiographical account has a name too similar to that of the author!  Only the name of the school, which features strongly, has been changed, but it is clearly the formerly-named Marshalswick Boys' School.

The book is of special interest to me, quite apart from its entertainment value, as Allen attended that school just a few years after me, so I could tick off the same people, events and locations which he weaves into his chapters.  If anyone reading this knows Allen Nicklin, perhaps you would ask him to get in touch.   Whether there are any copies left I am not sure, but I think it may now be available as an e-book.

A recent trawl through the 1911 census returns recently revealed a place I had not previously known of.  At the hamlet which was called Horseshoes before WW2 (now Smallford) was living Frederick Simpkins, a general labourer.  With his family were staying two boarders, Charles Prickett and Frank Legg.  Their occupations, respectively, were Green Keeper and Golf Labourer, both at the Hatfield Road Links.  Yes, the Hatfield Road Links.  Further along the road at Ellenbrook lived William Parrott, a horse driver at the Hatfield Golf Club, and Edward Henderson was a professional golfer at these links.

This place does not feature on any map of the period, and if the road has been named correctly it would be located somewhere west of the former Popefield farm homestead.  It is possible, however that what was meant was St Albans Road west, which the main road is named from Popefield to the centre of Hatfield.  Great Nast Hyde is in this section, as were a number of large detached homes on the north side of the road at Ellenbrook.  All of those have now been demolished.

Does anyone have knowledge of golf links along Hatfield Road, and how long the facility lasted?  Or was it Hatfield Golf Links, not Hatfield Road Golf Links?  Suggestions?  Remember, this was in 1911.

Finally, in this blog of miscellaneous content, what a wonderful sight yesterday afternoon at Fleetville Rec.  Shortly after the schools were finished for the week, parents and young children could be heard and seen on that part of the rec near Royal Road and the Beech Tree Cafe.  Enjoying each others' company, children were using the varied items of play equipment or simply the open space, while parents, mainly mums, chatted and enjoyed a drink.  It was a scene of unfettered joy for all.  The rec has never been such a popular honeypot.

School before the corner

During the 1950s the farmland purchased by the council in the 1930s and continued in use as "chicken land" since that time, revealed its new function, becoming the London Road Estate.  A proportion of its homes were offered to London boroughs to ease their waiting lists, even though St Albans had a seriously long list of its own.

On a rectangle drawn on a map of the time was the written label site for school.  Next to it was a broken line labelled proposed new road – which later became Drakes Drive.  The rectangle did not quite reach London Road as there was a house and garden (no longer there) fronting London Road and standing next to Hill End Lane; in the 1950s this was the only route between London Road and Camp Road.  The rectangle was drawn so that Hill End Lane went through the middle, the idea being that the new road would replace it.

Francis Bacon School under construction in 1963.
Photo courtesy CHRIS NEIGHBOUR.

The county council had some success in negotiating with key London schools, in which spacious sites would be offered, enabling them to sell their metropolitan plots and move out to the countryside.  Parmiters and Clement Danes schools were among those which arrived as a result.  The two Central Foundation Schools in Islington and Bow were also aiming to rebuild their institutions in Hatfield (boys) and St Albans (girls).

For the county council this move would prove extremely useful, partly as some funds for school buildings could be diverted elsewhere.  It was also in an embarrassing position regarding the Eleven Plus selection system.  In St Albans there was a woeful shortage of grammar school places.

However, by 1959, the Central Foundation Schools decided to stay where they were, and the county council had no alternative but to proceed with the new school on its own.  The only way to launch a new school in the short term was in existing accommodation.  Dependable Alma Road was the answer, but part of Marshalswick School was billeted in the old board school building in 1960, waiting for the completion of its new buildings at The Ridgeway.  So Marshalswick was removed early and Francis Bacon Grammar School installed and born, only moving to its permanent site in 1963.

Very close to Drakes Drive the school under construction in
1963.  Photo courtesy CHRIS NEIGHBOUR.

The former Hill End Lane continued to separate the buildings from the sports field as a public right of way for many years until officially closed and diverted via Drakes Drive.

No longer a grammar school, Francis Bacon School recently changed its name to Samuel Ryder Academy, became an all-age school (in a throwback to the old elementary school system?) and has just completed extensions and a new 14-classroom primary suite.