Our November meeting followed Remembrance Sunday and continued the theme with a talk about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Brian Wingate is a local volunteer and one of his activities is to visit local grave sites to report on condition.
The CWGC was set up to record the names and graves of the fallen in WW1 and subsequently extended to WW2. Parliament set the dates of death for WW1 as 4 August 1914 to 31 August 1921 whilst for WW2 the Allies agreed on 3 September 1939 to 31 December 1947. The time lag after 1918 Armistice day in WW1 and VE Day and VJ Day in WW2 allows for individual countries Peace Treaties to be signed and for the effects of gas in WW1 and PoW treatment in WW2 to be a cause of early death. It is funded proportionally by the six sponsoring Governments of UK, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa and covers deaths from Military and Auxiliary groups. Sir Fabian Ware was the driving force behind its creation. In 1914 he was commanding a motorised Red Cross Section in France and started noting the graves of soldiers when out on his rounds, so that next of kin could be informed. A Royal Charted in 1917 was the start of the Commission and its founding principles were that each death should be commemorated by name on a headstone or memorial, it should be permanent and uniform design. The Headstone has a standard layout of Regimental Badge, service rank, name and number, date of death, Religious emblem and a personal inscription – to be requested by the family and limited to 26 characters and charged at 3½d per character. With the end of WW1, the battlefield burials were concentrated in set sites. If more than 40 burials a Cross of Sacrifice was erected and for over 1000 a Stone of Remembrance. For the half a million Missing, specific memorials on the main battle fronts were designed. The three most well known today are Menin Gate (54000) and Tyne Cot (35000) on the Ypres Front and Thiepval (72000) on the Somme. The UK has 306000 burials and the CWGS website has a map of the locations, so you can see that for our area, in Hatfield Heath there is 1 grave at the URC and 4 burials at Holy Trinity whilst in Hatfield Broad Oak at St Marys there are 4 graves. Little Hallingbury has 2 in St Mary’s and 3 in the Old Burial Ground. It is remarkable how quickly defined objectives and then how the Main Architects contributed individual components (Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance, Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice in 4 sizes, Kipling’s quotation ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’ and the Headstone design) within the plots boundary wall gave instant recognition of the structure, but each cemetery is unique for its location. With 1.7M names recorded, the bulk of the names are in Europe (1.2M) but it is a global commitment in Africa, Asia and Pacific. For this it has a staff of 900 which includes 500 gardeners, as the range of sites means it major horticultural business with different planting regimes for all the climate zones to give the effect of an English country garden. With most cemeteries/memorials approaching their centenary, maintenance is high on the agenda. The Thiepval Memorial has just completed a 2 year restoration scheme and the Menin Gate restoration will commence in the spring. They also must contend with war damage in Iraq and have only recently been able to start restoration work there. It was sad to learn that in some places the copper sword on the Cross of Sacrifice is a target of metal theft and alternative materials are being considered. A straw poll at the end of the meeting indicated the audience had family connections to cemeteries/memorials in Belgium, France and Italy, so this wide ranging talk that touched on history, politics and gardening was much appreciated by our members. We have no meetings in January or February but wish our readers a peaceful and safe New Year. Quentin Spear
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With the recent record temperatures and lack of rain, it is just as well we are no longer dependant on the village pump for water supply. Both our villages have a village pump that is Grade 2 listed and noted as mid 19th century age.
There is also a record of the pump borehole depth in the British Geological Survey Memoir ‘The Water Supply of Essex from Underground Sources’ by Whitaker and Thresh, published in 1916 (available in Google books). Both records were provided by Mr George Ingold of Bishops Stortford who dug many local bores. He was a pump maker and well sinker who inherited his father’s business in 1864 and died in 1899. Hatfield Broad Oak village well at Cage End was bored in 1892 to a depth of 27 feet (8.1m) in Boulder Clay deposits. There are also records for two wells on the Green and several outlying farms. In 1901 it notes there was a spring feeding three public standpipes in addition to the wells. In Hatfield Heath the village well was bored in 1893 to a depth of 23 feet (6.9m) in Boulder Clay deposits. There are also records for a private 20’ deep well (6m) for Mr Bowyer and at The Brewery a well about 100’ deep (30m). For both villages there would be many more private wells, as borne out by the number of wells/pumps recorded by Frank Walsh in his 2013 book ‘The Wells and Pumps of Hatfield Heath’, which lists 42 wells and 17 pumps (copies available at £5 from David Parish on 07483 276543). This is a very favourable survival rate as Bishops Stortford Museum has an original pump on display but there is only one pump still in its original location. By 1913 there was a piped water supply to the parish from the mains of the Herts and Essex Co. There are similar records of wells for the surrounding parishes of Great Hallingbury, Little Hallingbury and Matching. Adjacent to the Hatfield Heath village pump is the village post box and that was yarn bombed at the beginning of July. Featuring Holy Trinity Church on the top and village activities, it was fun to spot our society represented with our HRLHS initials adjacent to URC where we hold our meetings. After our summer break, we resume our meetings on Tuesday 20th September 2022 at 7.30pm in the Hatfield Heath URC Church Hall. Our speaker is Patrick Roberts returns to talk about aspects of Oliver Rackham’s work (1939-2015). He was a Cambridge academic who revolutionised the study of ecology, management and development of the British countryside, especially trees, woodlands and wood pasture. A prolific author, one of his books is ‘The Last Forest – The Story of Hatfield Forest’. Quentin Spear A Saturday in October walk around Hatfield Broad Oak. As a follow on from the Exhibition the previous week.
Led By Mark Ratcliff with a bundle of A4 size laminated post card views to show former times and Edna Halls adding her memories of locations and residents, we had an informative 2 hour stroll, starting at the village Pump, progressing down Cage Lane, and spotting the buildings used by Robert Lumley as the street scenes in The Gingerbread Man. After the Village Hall story, it was along Cannon’s Lane to Broad Street and the villages oldest house – the thatched Sack House. Pausing outside the Dukes Head to envisage houses that were shops and the location of the village fire pump, it was up the High Street. Past the Chapel built in 1868, the Village School with the access to the WW2 cellar air raid shelter just visible and on to two locations of doctor’s surgeries at Bury House and The Old Forge. The Chalks is the recently refurbished former Vicarage that in the 1890’s the Rev. Galpin had the top floor added to allow accommodation of his musical students and presumably some of his 600 ancient musical instruments. We finished at the old Post House with some musing that a visit to The Cock might be in order on another occasion to view its painted walls and perhaps some liquid refreshment. Well done Mark and Edna. Our next meeting will be on December 13th at 7.30pm in the Hatfield Heath URC Church Hall when Christopher Parkinson returns and will talk about ‘The Nativity in Stained Glass’. Quentin Spear At our October meeting we had a talk from Martyn Lockwood on A Policeman’s Lot – Policing Essex. After serving in Essex Police for 30 years he is now a trustee of the Essex Police Museum in Chelmsford and on the Police Memorial Trust. The Essex Police Force was formed in 1840 after Dunmow petitioned for a force to replace the Parish Constable system. They were rewarded with the first purpose built police station for the county force, but a covenant on the land purchased precluded the inclusion of cells in the station. The Metropolitan Corporation Act of 1835 allowed 5 Essex boroughs to have their own independent force, but they gradually joined Essex, the last being Colchester in 1947. The first Chief Constable was John Bunch Bonnemaison McHardy (1840 – 1881) who was a retired Naval Commander who rose to the rank of Admiral during his tenure! Initially the force consisted of 100 Constables (on 20/- per week) and 15 Superintendents (on £80 per year) to cover the county. Working hours were long at 12 hours a day, split 8 hours of daylight and 4 hours at night, for 7 days a week. A rest day allowance was only introduced in 1914. Hatfield Broad Oak tended to have 2 Constables based in the town and Hatfield Heath one. Whilst they were issued with a uniform they did have to provide their own white cottons to perform cutlass drills in, just in case of major civil unrest! The Museum does have a good selection of records going back to the first constables allowing names to be allocated to faces when Collar Numbers are clear on photos of station group photos. These records allowed Martyn to highlight some constable’s problems with discipline and pick out names of those resident in both our villages, noting that Maurice Lee was in Hatfield Heath in 1937 and transferred to Chelmsford in WW2 only to be killed in a bombing raid. The Home Office forced Essex to introduce women police officers in 1947. This was an informative and entertaining review of our police forces early history.
Quentin Spear. Our return to meetings in September saw Patrick Roberts, a former villager, come to talk about Hatfield Forest, based on texts from Dr Oliver Rackham’s book ‘The Last Forest – The story of Hatfield Forest’, published in 1989.
Dr Oliver Rackham was a distinguished Cambridge researcher in the Botany Department but his interests covered a wide spectrum, allowing his books to cover not only the trees and plants in an area but also the interaction with animals and human activities. Hatfield Forest is made up of Coppices and Plains. Eleven coppices survive out of seventeen originally whilst the Plains have grass for deer & cattle grazing and scattered trees that are pollarded, thus keeping the new growth out of reach of the deer. The Forest boundary is defined by a ring of farms and their houses but the area covered by Forestry Laws is much greater. Whilst popular teaching had that the King liked to hunt in his royal parks and forests, there is little written record of this happening, e.g. Henry III is only recorded as visiting Hatfield Forest once. The records do indicate that the king ordered professional hunters to supply the palace with venison, with Henry III ordering 334 carcases from Hatfield Forest over a 41 year reign and 125 deer as gifts to stock parks. Justice was another area with its own complex set of rules, regulations and bureaucratic appointments. Locally the Keeper of the Forest of Hatfield was a hereditary office belonging to the Barrington family. It is the records from the Eyre court, that met every 20 years or so to review the cases from the lower courts, that details of transgressions tried. The records from the lower courts do not survive. Hatfield Forest’s most famous tree was the Doodle Oak, one of England’s three stoutest oak trees, with a circumference of 60 feet in 1813. It died off after 1860’s but a bough remained into the 1900’s. The Broad Oak, after which the town was named by 1136, was likely to have been on or near Hatfield Heath, but no records of its size remain. The evening was an interesting delve into a very readable and informative book. Our next meeting is on 15 November at 7.30pm in the Hatfield Heath URC Church Hall, when Brian Wingate will talk about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is 105 years old this year. Following the success of the exhibition held at Hatfield Heath for the Queen’s Platinum Anniversary, on October 8th our Vice Chairman Mark Ratcliff curated another exhibition in Hatfield Broad Oak to highlight that villages history. With an eclectic set of topics ranging from village fairs and Fire Fighting, artist Robert Lumley’s use of village buildings and people to illustrate Ladybird books in the 1960’s, Rev Galpin’s 600 ancient musical instruments that have ended up in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and a tale of a Foundling who experienced the worst and best of foster care in the village before a career in the Royal Navy, there was much to hold your attention. The comments from some of the 80+ visitors would indicate this was very much the case. Well done Mark. Quentin Spear
Our first event in October is an exhibition at Hatfield Broad Oak Village Hall on Saturday 8 October 2022 from 10am to 4pm. This will include items from the Society Archive and concentrate on aspects of Hatfield Broad Oak history. Do come along to browse or chat. On Tuesday 18 October our regular meeting at 7.30pm in the Hatfield Heath URC Church Hall will have a talk by Martyn Lockwood on A Policeman’s Lot – a light-hearted look at the lot of the policeman in Essex from 1840-1945. Quentin Spear With the recent record temperatures and lack of rain, it is just as well we are no longer dependant on the village pump for water supply. Both our villages have a village pump that is Grade 2 listed and noted as mid 19th century age.
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