Roads Which are Part of Us

September may be the tail end of the outdoor activities season, but it surely is the best time to review what you have achieved during the Spring and Summer months.  As with five summers before 2016, the local history group, Fleetville Diaries, has arranged a number of guided walks around many of the roads in the Fleetville district.  Also part of the programme have been story walks meandering around Hatfield Road Cemetery.

Walks attract a fair number of guests, but fortunately not too many, given the limited amount of standing space at key stops such as junctions and narrow footpaths.  The maximum the organisers can accept for street walks is 25.  One guest's dog has also joined us on several occasions and appears to have taken a keen interest in his surroundings, if not to the speaker.

Wellington Road in c1954

The most recent addition to the programme was walked for the first time this week as an impressive number turned out to discover more about the Camp estate, particularly Cambridge Road.  This is not simply an opportunity to peer into people's front gardens and how they cope with cars and bins.  It is a trace through time, from when the streets were fields with hedges and streams, locked into the annual cycle of producing food for the table.

So is revealed the origins of at least some of the street names (we are still considering Wellington and Beresford roads), the many styles of house design helping us to locate where early gaps were later filled with newer homes.  Being a residential road well back from Hatfield Road's shopping mile, we can marvel at the number of shops which opened here in the first half of the last century; most no longer open for business

Guests are usually given location maps and laminated photographs to compare an earlier scene with the present day.  Such afternoons or evenings are a pleasantly social experiences, where talks become meaningful discussions.  Everyone has something to offer, and everyone goes home with a newly recalled memory or fresh information.

A story walk in the "Laid to Rest" series,
Hatfield Road Cemetery

As for the story walks, the organisers are frequently surprised by the number of guests for which this would be their first venture beyond the splendid main gates.  Among the thousands of burials in such green and peaceful few acres, stories about a small number have been researched and presented.  Of course, most people lead private lives and their stories are unknown to others.  But if we are to include those which Fleetville Diaries members will be working on during the coming winter, there are nearly fifty stories, told a dozen at a time.

Local history comes in many forms and a tramp around the streets is no bad way to discover more about our patch.  After all, these roads, and the people who live or work in them, are part of us, and we are part of that same community.

A story with gaps

Recently I was reminded of a story I had been attempting to follow up for a number of years.  It concerned a school known as St John's Preparatory.  I have notes on over thirty private schools operating in the city during the late 19th century through to the 1950s, though not all at the same time.  But those about St John's are extremely brief.

St John's was one of a very few on the eastern side, at least east of the railway.  And it may have begun elsewhere before re-locating to St Albans.

Let's start from the year, 1899, when the first part of Beaumonts Farm was sold off for development.  Mr H Adey, of the brewing family, had acquired the brewing interests of Mr Thomas Kinder, and when the late Kinder's trustees sold some of the farm land Mr Adey was first to move in, having a large house built at the north end of Beaumont Avenue.  The name was Avenue House, but by the time the Misses Blackwood moved in its name had changed to St John's.

Beaumont Avenue, northwards to Hall Heath.
Avenue House shown as the only house in 1915 between
Salisbury Avenue and Sandpit Lane.
COURTESY HALS

Sisters Emma Mann Blackwood and Elizabeth Stewart Blackwood were born in Edinburgh and appeared to live much of their lives in Lothian.  Unmarried, both moved to St Albans and set up (or continued) a school in the Beaumont Avenue house which they purchased.  The sisters were both approaching seventy when they purchased the house.

Elizabeth died in 1932, aged 86, and Emma in 1933, aged 83.  One-time councillor and mayor William Bird then became the owner. In 1934 a new house built in Jennings Road, later becoming number 75, was named St John's and then St John's Preparatory School.  Living there was Mr R Pritchard.  Why, we may ask, might the school have pitched up in a new home?  It is possible that Mr Pritchard was assisting with the administration or specialist teaching under the Misses Blackwood in Beaumont Avenue.

When the school finally closed is so far unknown,  but fortunately I have been contacted by one former pupil from its time in Jennings Road.  He writes: "Thank you for providing some very interesting information  regarding this little-remembered school. I thought that all recollections of it were long lost in the mists of time.  I certainly remember attending this school in the early forties, at the end part of the war. We had mauve blazers , mauve  and silver horizontal striped ties.  Unfortunately it is here my memory fails me.  I didn't seem to be there for long, moving on to Fleetville School in 1944."

We therefore know that the school was in existence up to 1944; we know what the school uniform was like; and we know who ran the school, and where.  There may, though, be some personal recollections, a book or account – even a photograph – somewhere, if only it could be found! Until then there are, as can be observed, many gaps in the story.

In particular, I have never seen a picture of Avenue House, St John's.  It is, of course too late now, for St John's and its neighbouring property, The Grange, was demolished in the 1960s, being developed as St John's Court.

If you have a photograph of the old house, or know someone who has, you know what to do!

The democracy of desire

Every city, town and village has its own footprint shape, created as a result of  encroachment onto the undeveloped land around it.  You'll know what I mean as new housing on the edge avoids a river, old quarries, an outlier hill or protected green belt land. The boundary is irregular,  but the shape of the settlement is unmistakable to those who live there.

There is another unique footprint: the pattern of roads which enable us to get around (or pass through) our home town.  These veins, as a complete network, form unique patterns.  For the most part we don't need to know the names of those roads; the pattern they form is sufficient to identify where we are, or to pick out our town from any other.

There are road patterns, often associated with new towns or development towns, which have been largely designed into their place; superimposed on the landscape.  In many places, however, the road patterns, especially close to the town centre, appear disorganised, and it often seems impossible to tidy the pattern without the democratic opinion of residents getting in the way.  The great fire of London in 1666 did produce a grand opportunity to do just that – to start again.  Several plans were submitted in the years following the fire, all of which came to nothing, largely because there was no equivalent of compulsory purchase and land owners had no intention of giving up their precious plots for no compensation, just for a better road.  So today's City roads are not so very different from those before the fire, 350 years ago.

Footpath crosses a field near Smallford.

Former field footpath retained near Kingshill,
Marshalswick.

Now, let's move from the town streets to an ornamental park, or woodland, or even expansive open grassland.  The precursors to the town's muddled streets are here too.  Finger signs point us to footpaths, byways, bridleways and tracks, most of which have been worn through time to link settlements or individual dwellings.  While a proportion of them follow field hedges or lines otherwise fenced off, many ignore these boundaries, and some of the easier topography too.  Narrow routes have been democratically worn into the landscape over centuries and have now been accepted as a permanent part of the Ordnance Survey map.  Even where towns have spread and enveloped the muddied lines, they have been protected in the new developments as alleys (in some parts of the country known as ginnels, snickets or twittens).  They can't be obliterated or altered except through a very public legal process.

Aerial map reveals a network of paths across the former Butterwick Farm,
including a circular pathway around the willows and pond.

The most democratic of all these desire lines are worn by pairs of feet whose owners decide they will take the route they perceive to be the easiest, rather than the path that is intended they should use.  A community football pitch may, over time, also reveal where walkers between matches have crossed the field diagonally to reach a facility, or another route, on the other side.  Open parks with designed elements – mown grassed areas intersected with grids of prepared paths – will always show public use very differently as grass is worn along diagonals.  Angled paths nicely surfaced with red or green macadam are routinely ignored as grass, or even flower-bed corners, are worn with irregular use.  A short path of trodden soil or flattened grass reveals where casual users really wanted their path.

These tramplings are the most democratically created of all routes, where, as long as people are not trespassing or causing criminal damage, they decide their preferred route.  The decision made by that first pair of feet, is added to over time as yet another desire line across the landscape is forged.  Some will be short lived, but others may be reinforced over time, their status enhanced.  One day they may become a meandering city street and future generations may wonder why the road was not created straight!

Being part of the story

Read almost any book which tells the history of a place and you are being told the story of people of some significance.  There is the possibility it might include detail of an individual whose record only appears because of a single event.

That's the problem; a history is not unbiased, it is not fair (as in, "you've only heard his side of the story" – and it usually is 'his', not her).  And it most certainly is not complete.

To try and fully understand the complexity of a recorded history of a person, a place, an event or a time period, we will begin with an individual: you, or me.  We have many opportunities each day to make our mark.  We email or text others, we take photographs, we complete forms (some for ordering products and others for banks and to record official events, such as births).  Our belonging to groups may include records of membership, decisions made or newsletters of our contributions. Who knows how many records are made of our employment, our health, our travel, our pensions.  We may write a letter, and if it is to a newspaper or journal, that and our name may be published and may form part of a dialogue.

Our daily lives are recorded in so many ways, most of them with at least some of our personal details.  Whether it all gets left around to be picked up by historians in five hundred years time will depend on how effective our descendant communities are in sifting and keeping; passing on our records or stories for future generations.  Who knows how permanent our digital records will turn out to be.  And if our photos are so personal to us why are we so casual about storing them, unsorted and unlabelled on our phones?

If we have impressed so many marks on history, just from our everyday lives, what about Thomas Blackmore and Elizabeth Fetty?  For the sake of this article I have to invent their names because they were just two of a small group of people who lived between St Albans and Hatfield in the early 1500s.  There is no record of their lives at all, not even their names.  It might be reasonably argued that therefore they did not exist at all.  But homes do not get built without a need for shelter.  Land is not tilled without a need for  food.  The continuity of a settlement is not sustained without children to form the next generation.

Thomas and Elizabeth, and others like them, were used to moving from one place to another, but we do not know whether they knew each other, married and had children, or whether they lived their lives as strangers.  They represent the wide base of a pyramid of  sixteenth century existence in every part of the country and in those parts of our east end of St Albans at that time occupied.

The point is, Elizabeth and Thomas survived and lived out their lives while others made the history we read about.  They were, of course, part of that history, but it was not recorded, even in the most rudimentary ways.  If only the voice recorder was available to Thomas, just as it is to us, so that he could speak his thoughts at the end of each day, or when some unusual event occurs.  Wouldn't that give us a more complete view of the period in which he lived?  Elizabeth's life was transitory, each day's existence wiped clean by the next.  Without an ability to read and write, or the opportunity to buy a medium on which to record thoughts as words, and a secure place to keep them safe, Elizabeth's life was not even worth to others the equivalent of an inscription on a park bench.

So, who gets to tell the paragraphs, pages and chapters of our collective history?  Power, influence and education have counted for most of the contributions, and our knowledge of the history of these islands have been dependent on the parts of the story they chose to tell us.  Those parts played by all the Elizabeths and Thomases down the ages are largely absent.  If we were aware of their evidences, surely that would provide us with a much more rounded account.  As it is, a democratic process it most definitely is not.

Do we need a bank in 2016?

Although no official statement has been announced by the company, a number of Marshalswick residents think they know that one of The Quadrant's two banks, Lloyds, is to close.  Whether they have made an assumption, base on the bank's latest national intention to close two hundred branches, on top of the branches in the current closure programme, may simply be speculation.  Lloyds' website only lists the tranche of branches being closed under the existing programme.  It states that after that programme "90% of its customers will still be within 5 miles of their local branch".  It is, though, a moot point whether a branch which is five miles distant can be considered local.

Barclays and Lloyds occupy opposite ends of a side block at
The Quadrant.

Even if every customer used online banking and cash machines (ATMs) there would still be a need for banks.  Cash which businesses need to deposit, or any of us, come to that; cash which we need to withdraw for our own use (and for which uniform £10 or £20 notes are not satisfactory; the advice and help branch staff are able to give, face to face, more satisfactorily than via telephone calls to service centres; ditto after online problems have grunged up our systems or been interfered with by malicious strangers.  If banks wish to add to their customer base, they need to invest in their customers.  Remember when banks universally opened weekdays only from 9.30 to 3.30?  Then they tried Saturday mornings with limited services. Then they closed again, leaving an ATM in charge. Now many have 9 to 5 opening and extended Saturday business for a full range of services.  Is this the time, then, to shut customers out and force them to travel out of their local area?

Barclays opened a branch at The Crown before World
War One.

Until World War One all of the banks in St Albans were in the centre of the city.  But then you could probably draw a circle a mile around the Town Hall and enclose almost everywhere, except for Fleetville and Camp.  Barclays was the first to open in the east, with a branch at Alexandra House, on the corner of Hatfield Road and Clarence Road, and there it remained until around 1968 when it moved to the corner of Sandfield Road.  The Midland arrived in 1922 (now part of Tesco Metro).  NatWest opened nearby in c1970, where the Grove charity shop is now, and moved to the other Sandfield Road corner five years later.  Lloyds pitched up at the Harlesden Road junction, now the home of City Glass.

Barclays moved more to the centre of its Fleetville
customer base in the 1960s.

Although NatWest and Lloyds seem to have arrived late on the scene, all of them recognised the huge mix of business potential in Fleetville – which would include Camp, given that no Bank existed along that road.  But today there are no banks in Fleetville, although there are broadly the same number of businesses and even more families.

Marshalswick has been served by two banks ever since The Quadrant opened, and since 1960 the eastern districts have continued to grow outwards.  It is not as if modern (i.e. online) banking has reduced the waiting time if we require counter service or need to speak with an adviser – meaning a member of staff who could make decisions, a role which used to be known as the Branch Manager.

Dare it be asked, that could the decline in banking availability be arrested by requiring us to pay for our accounts?  Should we have a right to complain if our account is serviced for free?  Maybe there is no room in the market today for two banks at The Quadrant.  Just as long as the one which remains doesn't "up-sticks" and disappear into a vortex as well.  And in order to spread a little banking happiness would it be too much to ask for the bank which leaves The Quadrant (if, indeed, one does) could not return to its old haunt in Fleetville?

1966 And All That

If there are two historical dates which it is thought everyone would consider significant, maybe we might choose – and both appropriate for this year – 1066 (William of Normandy/Battle of Hastings) and 1966 England uniquely win the World Cup.   They were 950 and 50 years ago respectively, and in the case of the World Cup it was 50 years ago this weekend.

In case you are wondering what the BoH and World Cup have to do with St Albans, well, the first doesn't specifically of course, but there was another event fifty years ago which connects with the World Cup and was specifically do do with St Albans and with a specific city in Germany.  That country is key, because of the team England was playing in that rather special game of football.

To start at the beginning – or maybe it should be the end; a group of people living in St Albans at the end of the Second World War heard from friends returning from the industrial city of Duisburg on the River Ruhr, Germany, about the dreadful conditions a large proportion of families were enduring.  They were holed up in basements, or the remains of bombed out buildings, with meagre supplies of firewood, food and clothing, and many suffering seriously deteriorating health.  Volunteers in St Albans collected clothing, food and simple medical supplies, and several lorry loads were taken across land to Duisburg, gifts which would be most welcome in winter. The exercise was repeated for two more years at least.

St Albans meets Duisburg and its mayor at Duisburg, Germany July 1966.

In the summer of 1948 the first group of Duisburg children arrived in St Albans by train for an extended holiday, paid for by the people of St Albans.  It became an annual event and later young people from St Albans stayed with Duisburg families, but this only became possible when living conditions there were much improved.  For our young people it was an exercise in healing wounds, even if our knowledge of German was poor.  Visits included to Cologne Cathedral, the Krupp steel works, the industrial energy of the Ruhr port, and a visit to the reality of the Ruhr dams.

The organisers were not to know who would be playing in the World Cup in the summer of 1966, and the visit of St Albans young people to Duisburg was planned ahead as usual.  We were already staying with our hosts when the teams playing in the final became known.  No visits were planned on Final day and we spent the day and evening with our host families.  For some the atmosphere was a little tense.  In my host's house there was a gathering of a number of my host's relatives and friends, and the atmosphere was relaxed.  Food and drink were prepared and I had the distinct feeling the spread was for an expected victory.

In a large and crowded sitting room everyone sat where they could; I sat on the carpeted floor, leaning against the arm of a settee.  There was much animated excitement throughout the match, and part way through the second half, realising I was the only Brit in the place, I did the unpatriotic thing and in my head I hoped Germany would win (I thought that might be the safer option).  But that goal at the match's conclusion which secured a win for England against Germany, taught me something wonderful.  Instead of a ribbing, even in jest,  every one of the fifteen or so family members in the room shook my hand and said, either in German or English "Well done".

I know that not every one of our party had the same positive experience in the homes in which they were staying, but it was a very uplifting experience for me.  A St Albans east end 22-year old had an experience that day which was more that just a result in a rather important football match.

A Tramp's Life

Last alive in 1946, not many days or weeks pass without, in some context or other, without mention of the name Tramp Dick.

News of his death was featured in the Herts Advertiser in the issue of 15th March 1946, with the sub-title, "Death of a St Albans Recluse".  Most people who have lived most of their lives on the eastern side of St Albans, and who were born before WW2, will have a story to tell about this vagrant.  But if you were born in the 1940s or 50s you are more likely to have known someone quite different – with a trench coat, beard, swept-back hair and big army boots.  So, wasn't that Tramp Dick?  Well, no, but many children at the time, including me, called him Tramp Dick anyway, having picked up the name from our parents.  And he occupied the same corrugated iron hut in Jersey Lane, used by his namesake.

Another confusion: Tramp Dick – the real one – wasn't thought to be Richard at all, but Thomas, or Tom.  Tom Whiting.  But he had a brother called Richard.  Richard Whiting was the manager of the Gaumont Cinema, formerly in Stanhope Road.

Tom Whiting, aka Tramp Dick, sitting on a wall in Fleetville.  Are
there any other photos of him?

We make judgements about people all the time; it was just the same with Tramp Dick.  It comes as a surprise to many who knew something about him, to learn that he was intelligent, and although he liked to keep himself to himself, he could contribute confidently to conversations.  As to why he chose the open air life of a vagrant there is no firm evidence.  The legend has it his life collapsed after the breakup of a relationship with a young lady many years previously, but as with most legends the evidence is in short supply.

He was also said to have received an allowance, but who from, no-one is quite sure. But he was able to pay for his everyday necessities.  Since 1939 he had his own ID card and ration book, kept for him at a shop in Fleetville.  His income, other than any allowance, came from casual work on farms or from selling flowers or berries – which also earned him the sobriquet Blackberry Jack, even though his name wasn't Jack either.  Of course, it is possible that name  really belonged to someone else.

One fact is certain, according to those who knew him: he did not beg.  If he was given an item, a coin or some food, Tom would ensure he repaid the favour.  A very moral tramp.

Tom was found at home (Jersey Lane) by a resident of Long Acres.  He was thought to be 68 year old.  After a simple funeral, he was buried at Hatfield Road cemetery.