Tuesday 17th May 2022 at 7.30 pm At United Reformed Church Chelmsford Road, Hatfield Heath Presentation by PATRICK STREETER Highlights of the History of Matching and the Lavers, together with an account of Daniel Quare, the clockmaker, and his descendants of Matching Green Admission: Members free Guests £4.00 Come and join us - all are welcome For more information call Frances Smith Secretary: 07773 580900
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Our March AGM covered the years activities, re-election of the Chairman & Committee and overview of the new seasons program of 6 meetings and an outing.
With the annual subscription kept at the Covid reduced rate of £5 for the year, this is a bargain! Contact David Parish to join (07483 276543) with full details on our web page. All official business was completed within 15 minutes allowing plenty of time for the ‘Memories of Hatfield Heath’ conversation with four villagers. The speakers had all grown up in the village in the 40’s and 50’s and have happy memories of events and people. Robin Whitbread was the senior boy, having arrived in the village in 1937 when aged 2 years, his mother having taken up the position of District Nurse. They lived in Mill Cottage with a hand pump in the yard for water, no electricity (so paraffin lamps and candles for lighting) and an outside toilet. During the war, two ladies worked in the upstairs room making ladies stockings for the armed forces. Robin learnt to play the cornet in the village band under Gilbert Hutchin and this ability allowed him to join the Welsh Guards band in 1952 when called up for National Service and he ended up staying for 8 years. His first main parade was the Coronation. John Faulkner was born in 1942 in Ilford* but the family soon moved to Hatfield Heath and lived at Hockleys Cottage with 13 others! His father had employments at Browns Bakery as a Roundsman, which enabled the family to move into the tied cottage adjacent to the Bakery (located between current day The Thatchers and Broomfield). Ill health meant his father died after a few years and the family had to move out – initially to Mrs Whitbread (Robins Mother) before getting a council house. His mother worked in Browns Bakery shop and he remembers they had two Germans working in the bakery post war. John Brown was also born in 1942 at 26 Ardley Crescent before the family moved into a tied cottage in Audley End and finally to 1 Bentley Villas, only leaving the village on his marriage in 1964. He was in the same village school classes as John Faulkner and then on to Stansted School. He remembers helping an electrician who was wiring up Ardley Crescent for mains electricity and this experience caused him to become an electrician. For many years he worked for Emery Electricians in Sawbridgeworth. David Brown is Johns younger brother by 4 years. He grew up playing in the village football and cricket teams, only moving out of the village in 2000. Village team selections were posted up in the Beehive shop for 6d per week but those outside the village received a postcard notification. Selection required you lived in the village, were born here or had married a local girl. He remembered that the Fox Inn as the only pub with a Juke box. The memories of village bonfires ‘was sparked’ by recalling the largest ever built was for the end of the war, with a central air vent that you could walk through. There was intense rivalry between Broomfields and Ardley Crescent for building the best bonfires post war but eventually they combined before the Council stopped them in the late 60’s/70’s. Also punishment for being caught collecting conkers in the Vicarage garden was 4 hours locked up in the Vicarage cellar! With additional contributions from the floor by John Smith and Andrew Passfield the time soon passed with many more comments than I could catch (being a newcomer!). A very enjoyable evening. Our next meeting is on 17th May at 7.30pm at the Hatfield Heath URC Church Hall when Patrick Streeter will be talking about Daniel Quare (1648-1724), a respected London Clockmaker and his descendant farmers of Matching Green. Quentin Spear Panel: David Brown, John Brown, Mark Ratcliff (Chair), Robin Whitbread, John Faulkner. *Correction post meeting. John was actually born in Writtle but the family lived in Ilford. He assumes that his mother was visiting her sister in Chelmsford at the time and was caught out over timings! With the ongoing discussions on the future development of the Prisoner of War Camp 116 in Mill Lane, last summer Mark Ratcliff organised some walks around the perimeter of the camp (the developer not wanting to allow access into the camp grounds).
Over several afternoons and an evening, nine groups totalling 90 villagers and locals enjoyed a stroll down tracks few had visited before with a knowledgeable commentary from Mark for 90 minutes. These walks also caused further memories of the camp and its inmates to be aired. Bob French wrote in to say that growing up in Sheering, he remembers that once after his father had returned home following Demob in 1946 (when Bob was about 4 years old), he walked the family up to the camp one summer Sunday afternoon to see the German prisoners from the adjacent field to say that was the reason he had been away fighting in the war. His second memory was at Christmas in 1949 when the 1st Sheering Wolf Cub pack was taken by their Akela (Peggy Austin) one evening to sing carols to the Irish workmen who were billeted there whilst helping build Harlow New Town and could not return home for Christmas. They stayed for about 1½ hours. Jacqueline Jackson remembers her father, Malcolm Jackson, told her that as a young child growing up on Ardley Crescent, he saw the Italian working parties marching off to work at Down Hall. The Italians loved children and used to hand out sweets to them and he was given a woven belt and a ring fashioned out of a coin. One Italian was seeing a lady on the crescent and if he was able to get a pass out for the evening then he would tie a hanky to his stick on his shoulder to indicate to her that they could meet that night! Its good that even now after all the passing years we are able to record new tales of the camp. ---------- Gladwyns and The Invasion of 1910. In looking on Google for images of Gladwyns to illustrate a previous article, a reference to a book ‘The Invasion’ was flagged up and looked to be of local interest. ‘The Invasion’ by William Le Queux was written in 1904 with serialisation in the Daily Mail and belongs to the genre of books warning about the unpreparedness of Britain to resist any invasion, such that the increasing military might of Germany might indicate, should the Navy not stop any fleet approaching the coast. Today ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ by Erskine Childers is probably the most well known of such books. Having the backing of Lord Harmsworth, Le Queux was requested to include as many towns as possible from the Daily Mail’s readership heartlands! The events are set in 1910 and the Germans manage to make unopposed landings on the east coast on Sunday 1 September, with their agents cutting telephone wires and blocking the rail system, particularly in East Anglia. The main landings were at the docks of Lowestoft and Yarmouth but also at Weybourne and Cromer and Kings Lynn. Further landings were made on the Humber at Hull, Goole and Grimsby and in Newcastle. The story concentrates on the German advance on London from East Anglia with an additional landing at Maldon, leading to a major battle at Colchester before continuing their advance. At this stage Hatfield Heath and Hatfield Broad Oak enter the story with British defences along a line from Hyde Hall - Little Hyde Hall – Gladwyns – Sheering - Harlow. Night time advance patrols from both sides had clashed at Hatfield Heath crossroads. ‘It was still profoundly dark when the Rifles at Hatfield Heath heard a dozen shots cracking through the darkness to their left front. Almost immediately other reports sounded from due east. Nothing could be seen beyond a very few yards, and the men of the advance company drawn up at the cross roads in front of the village inn [Fox and Hounds pub, now Nursery on the Heath] fancied they now and again saw figures dodging around in obscurity, but were cautioned not to fire until all their patrols had come in, for it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe.’ A skirmish with an advancing German patrol in semi darkness occurred at the crossroads and after half an hour the main battle was joined as dawn broke. ‘Twelve guns opened with a crash from Hatfield Heath, raking the Gladwyns enclosure with shrapnel, whilst an almost solid firing line advanced rapidly against it, firing heavily. The British replied lustily with gun, rifle and maxim, the big high-explosive shells bursting amid the advancing Germans and the houses of Hatfield Heath with telling effect. …. In the midst of this desperate fighting the Leinsters, supported by a Volunteer and a Militia Regiment, which had just come up, assaulted Hatfield Heath. The Germans were driven out of it with the loss of a couple of their guns, but hung on to the little church [URC church], around which such a desperate conflict was waged that the dead above ground in that diminutive God’s acre outnumbered the “rude forefathers of the hamlet” who slept below. …. At this time the positions were as follows: One German battalion was hanging obstinately on to the outskirts of Hatfield Heath, two were in possession of the copses about Gladwyns, two were in Sheering village or close to it and the sixth was still in reserve at Down Hall.’ Thus Hatfield Heath featured at the start of William Le Queux’s Battle of Harlow and the British retreat to Epping and then London. He had done his homework on the local terrain and likely German tactics to carry his story and message forward. It is interesting that come the Great War a decade later, the Government took the prospect of invasion on the east coast seriously and set out evacuation instructions and defined which roads were for military use only (in Hatfield Heath’s case all five roads into the village were military ones) and which roads and lanes the local population should take to evacuate to the Oxford area. The Dunmow Museum has a copy of the instructions on display. In WW2 the Home Guard defences were also geared towards holding up attackers from the east taking the road to Harlow with three spigot mortar positions along the south edge of the Heath, two of which are still extant. Luckily the village has only had to contend with paper plans of invasion and destruction. ……………. Our next meeting is the AGM on Tuesday March 15. Details of time and location to be announced. Quentin Spear Our December meeting not only had a change of speaker (due to our CWGC speaker getting Covid whilst working out in France) but also reverted to a zoom meeting due to the revised Covid restrictions. This did not detract from an excellent talk by Christopher Parkinson on the History of Stained Glass, concentrating on examples from Essex and our locality.
After a brief review of how stained glass windows are designed and manufactured, he talked about the two traditional methods of blowing glass to make panes and also on how to insert colour and the problems that this can lead to in the following decades. We were then treated to a tour of church windows, starting with Saxon and Romanesque churches whose long thin windows that are best suited to a profile of a figure or a stack set of square designs, such as at Rivenhall dating from c1170 and then on through the centuries. Whilst Essex does not have large numbers of examples from all ages it does have good quality ones. Some windows have a history of getting moved about, perhaps starting out in a local hall and then as fashion changed being donated to the parish church. One example started off at Waltham Abbey before going to New Hall, then to Copt Hall and finally ending up in St. Margaret’s, Westminster. He also highlighted the problem for restorers of windows smashed by iconoclasts and trying to recreate the design – do you insert coloured glass to complete the design or just insert blank glass? He showed good and poor results for both options. As with many areas, it was the Victorian period that we have the most prolific cover of designers and manufacturers and these were highlighted in the local churches at Hatfield Broad Oak (Hardman & Co., Henry Holiday, Ward & Hughes), Little Hallingbury (Bourne Jones design) and Hatfield Heath (Powel & Co.). We even have an international connection with the WW2 airbase memorial window in Little Easton church being designed and manufactured in America. A fascinating talk and excellent photographs of the windows that probably benefitted by being viewed on the computer screen. …………………………………………………………. There is no meeting of the History Society in February but our AGM will be in March, details to be announced. Quentin Spear In a change to the advertised programme, the November meeting welcomed Dr. Mark Carroll from Epping to talk about ‘Life and Death in the Workhouse’, as reflected in his family history researches.
After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the responsibility for looking after the poor was transferred to the local parishes, with the first Poor Law being passed in 1606. In 1834, a new Poor Law required local parishes to form Unions and provide a centralised facility for the area. Thus began the building of the large Victorian Workhouses, as immortalised in Dicken’s writing. In researching family history, it tends to be the Death Certificates that indicate someone was in the Workhouse and then, if Admission Registers are available, you can gain an understanding of how often a person was resident or duration of stay. The Death Certificate gives useful information on age, place of death and cause of death – with descriptions ranging from Doctors formal medical terms to a Managers pragmatic ‘Decay of Nature’. Dr Carroll mentioned three Workhouses that his researches touched on, each with their own facet of understanding. Leytonstone Workhouse was renamed Central Home Leytonstone to counter the stigma of the workhouse branding and in 1926 was costing about £100,000 pa to the local rate payers. At Haverhill in Suffolk, the Risbridge Poor Law Union straddled the Essex/ Suffolk boundary and a search result was initially ignored as he was expecting a London or South Essex location and not Suffolk. He eventually found a connection of a married daughter living in a village close to the workhouse in question. His final workhouse was at Stanway near Colchester where the daughter of the Workhouse Manager wrote of her memories of growing up in the building, with details of the routines and meals. An interesting talk and showing a different perspective of the Workhouse system that can become of interest when researching family history. …………………………………………………………. Quentin Spear Please Note: There are no meetings of the History Society in January or February. The October Zoom meeting saw Quentin Spear give an overview of the Official War Artists Scheme and a look at the work of Eric Ravillious. Started in 1916 to provide non photographic illustrations for overseas war propaganda articles, a sceptical War Office allowed 2 artists to be on the Western Front at any one time. Muirhead Bone was the first artist appointed and his pencil sketch of a tank in action was a major success. Followed by Francis Dodd doing portraits of senior officers and Eric Kennington sketching ‘Tommies’ in the field, the scheme gradually developed to engage artists with various styles and techniques whose work was reproduced and exhibited. The end of the war saw the accumulated pictures handed over to the newly established Imperial War Museum. When WW2 started, Sir Kenneth Clark (head of the National Gallery) lobbied for artists to be ‘used and not killed’, resulting in him chairing the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), who appointed artists to the services. This time the Army initially had four artists appointed – Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, Reginald Eaves and Barnet Freeman. The Navy chose Muirhead Bone, but other appointments soon followed, including other former WW1 artists Eric Kennington and Paul Nash. By the end of the war the WAAC had 5570 paintings/sketches and this time the IWM only took a representative sample of them, allowing other museums and provincial art galleries to have sets. There was then a 30 year gap in commissioning work until a request to cover aspects of Northern Ireland (1972), Falklands War (1983 with Linda Kitson), Iraq (1991), Bosnia (1993), and Afghanistan (2016). For local connections, three artists were mentioned. Henry Moore at Perry Green with his London Underground Blitz shelter’s; Edward Bawden of Great Bardfield who covered the Phony War in France and Dunkirk, Middle East and Italy; Eric Ravillious of Great Bardfield/Castle Heddingham. Ravillious was raised in Eastbourne before getting scholarships to Eastbourne Art College and then Royal College of Art in 1922 and becoming a known upcoming artist before WW2. He was commissioned as a War Artist in 1940 and initially worked on Naval subjects at Chatham and Sheerness, Grimsby, Norway Campaign. He had time off to complete a set of lithograph prints on Submarines, having visited the training establishment HMS Dolphin at Gosport. Following this he requested work closer to home as his wife Tirzah Garwood was ill, this resulted in him being based at RAF Sawbridgeworth in 1942. Here he painted the planes, hut interiors and the Pigeon Loft. A painting of a training session ‘Demonstrating a Machine Gun’ was left unfinished due to a posting to Iceland. The day after arriving, he went up on a patrol looking for a missing plane, only for his plane to become another casualty and Ravillious was the first of three Official War Artists to die in WW2, on 2 September 1942. The Fry Gallery at Saffron Waldon has an extensive archive of his work. For our next face to face meeting at the URC Church Hall in Hatfield Heath is on Tuesday 14th December at 7.30pm. Quentin Spear
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