‘A Vanished Past’ by Clare Marchant is a series of volumes describing various aspects of village life in Horley throughout the 20th century. Book 5 is now available – see attached flyer for more details.
‘A Vanished Past’ by Clare Marchant currently comprises 4 volumes describing various aspects of village life in Horley throughout the 20th century. For more information about these books and how to purchase them, see below.
Two new volumes (3 and 4) of ‘A Vanished Past’ Horley Oxfordshire by Clare Marchant are a now available. You will be able to view and purchase them at our fabulous Christmas Market this Saturday (December 3rd).
Volume 3
Work and Our Surroundings : by Clare Marchant
Price £17.50 Shaftesbury House Publishing 2016. ISBN 978-0-9932788-2-2
Volume 4
Horley School and People at Leisure
Price £17.50
Price £17.50 Shaftesbury House Publishing 2016. ISBN 978-0-9932788-3-9
Watch this space to see extracts from these books and enjoy a further dip into Horley’s past after Christmas….
If you are unable to attend the fair and are interested in purchasing the books please contact Mike Patching on 01295 730039 or mike.patching@btinterest.com or
Contact Clare Marchant, 15 Circus Street, Greenwich, London SE10 8SN or marchantclare@hotmail. Cheques payable to Clare Marchant.
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
The pattern of their life was indelibly laid down even before they were married, partly through Jim spending all his working life in the same job, and also because lack of money set strict limits on the choices available to them, in common with many other people. War or peace made little real difference.
Their day began very early and by 5.30am Lucy had made the morning’s first pot of tea. Jim collected the buckets of water from the tap before he went off to work, that is unless the weather was so cold that the tap had frozen. Fortunately that only happened in the worst weather, and if a hard frost was predicted the previous evening, then it was provident to fill the buckets then rather than wait for the morning, otherwise there would be no water for the early morning tea, no bottle of cold tea for lunch, and no water in which to wash faces or hands or do the breakfast dishes, let alone the week’s washing if it happened to be a Monday.
Jim went off on his bike down the village and stopped half way up the steep hill that rose up on the far side of the brook, where the Ironstone railway bridge crossed the road. As he and the other Ironstone workers arrived they hauled their bicycles up the steep embankment and onto the railway line to wait for the small tank-engine that pulled the van for them and their cycles the short distance to their work place.
Once Jim was away, Lucy’s day was her own until he returned at 3.30 for his dinner. The first thing she did was to cope with the daily chores. She started with the breakfast dishes and got ready for the Co-op milkman’s call. This sit-down-with-a-cup-of-tea visitation not only brought in the milk, but the news of the condition of the roads and the weather, and most important, details of what had happened locally in other villages overnight. It gave Lucy a head start in the exchange of news and in the circles of those who like her had an insatiable curiosity about local goings-on. Armed with her news she would barter with it later in the day.
Lucy was lucky to have one of the four village taps outside her front garden gate. Others who lived further away had to carry their pails as far as 75 yards – and this alone must have provided motive for not washing clothes more often than necessary.
Since Lucy had no sink she washed up in an enamel bowl. The water had to be boiled in a kettle and then some soda added to make the hard Oxfordshire water a little softer, and to dissolve the fat more easily. She never rinsed the dishes, for that needed extra water, but simply dried them and put them away with an invisible veneer of chemical still on them. The water was kept for a while in case there should be a further use for it.
Next the fire had to be cleared out, the ashes riddled, and the fireplace laid with screwed up newspaper, sticks and finally coal ready for lighting later in the day. This job had to be done before the rest of the house was cleaned because it raised so much dust. Once completed the rest of the cleaning could proceed in earnest.
The floors in Lucy’s house were ancient very uneven flagged stone, but she covered all her floors with shiny linoleum that was easy to clean with a mop. She had rag rugs, made from bits and pieces of hard-wearing fabric (men’s trousers and overcoats) sewn or woven together by women in winter evenings, which were cheerful in front of the fire, and they were simply shaken out now and then in the garden to get rid of the accumulated dust. In the early 1950s Lucy took a great step forward by putting down a fitted carpet in her living room. It was not new, but bought second hand from Mrs Cherry, farmer’s wife in Hornton who was moving house. Jim laid it and it ‘fitted where it touched’, but it was considered very grand by all of us. Lucy had no vacuum cleaner or Ewbank so the carpet was brushed with a hard broom to clean it. The carpet added a feeling of warmth, even if it did go up and down over the lino covering the irregular undulating flagstones.
Lucy did not have a great deal of furniture, so there was not much polishing to do. She had an ornate ebonised glass-fronted sideboard in her sitting room given her by the Davieses at the Firs over the road, a Pembroke table, a pretty set of balloon-back chairs, and a wonderfully painted grandfather clock. These all had to be polished with wax polish, since there were then no spray cleaners. By way of decoration she had a few watercolours, a stuffed squirrel in a glass case, and a large print of the Stag at Bay. A duster flipped across these served well enough, and the only other items in the room were the two armchairs that she and Jim sat in by the fire every evening. She exchanged these from time to time, swapping one for a chair thrown out by one of the people she worked for, or buying one that somebody was selling for half a crown. Lucy re-covered them when they got worn or when she was able to buy a cheap remnant from one of the market stalls in Banbury. Her upholstery skills were rough and ready, and the material was pulled across the most important parts of the chair and sewn in place, leaving some of the chair showing the old material. These parts were covered up by turning that side of the chair to the wall or covering the gap with a cushion, but the chair looked clean and new.
There was little to do upstairs. Before she had a sprung mattress the feather one needed shaking up to get rid of the lumps, but apart from that she had only to empty the chamber pot. Chamber pots, (sometimes called Jerries) along with wasps and a former boyfriend, were things that Lucy could not abide. She was happy enough to have a pot under the bed to use in the depths of night rather than go downstairs and out into the garden to use the earth closet, but she did not like to empty them.
This routine was generally how Lucy coped with her housework, but the pattern varied according to the weather, the time of year, the day of the week or other activities which took over. Like most people, Lucy did her washing on Mondays. That is unless it was pouring with rain. Then it had to wait until the weather turned, but if it was fine the process began by placing a big pan of soapy water and clothes on the paraffin stove to boil. Since it was dark in the kitchen Lucy did her washing in the garden, in a large bowl on a stool. Because of the effort of boiling all the water, one lot was used for many clothes and rinsing was kept to a minimum. A drubbing board was used and the action of rubbing the clothes across its ridges made Lucy’s knuckles red and the clothes clean. When the clothes had been pummelled about for a while, they were rinsed and wrung out, first by hand, twisting them hard to get most of the water out, and then put through the rollers of a mangle to extract the last drops. Finally the sheets and clothes were hung out to dry, held in place by pegs sold by the gypsies – made of split thin branches of wood from which the bark had been cleaned. It was at this stage that disaster could happen as the damp sheets trailed on the earth, or shirts got blown off the line by a gust of wind. The clothes had to be watched for fear of rain. As soon as the skies looked dark there were worried trips to the window or back door and as soon as it started spotting with rain, the washing, only part dried, would be hastily unpegged and bundled indoors with much tut-tutting and wondering ‘When am I going to do it now? Dratted weather’. If she got all her washing done by the end of Monday, she was doing well, and the ironing was generally left until Tuesday.
Washing and ironing for Lucy were not nearly as difficult as it was for women who had children, though Lucy found it trying enough, particularly the ironing which was fiddly. Heating the heavy flat irons on the grate needed judgment: hot enough to vanquish the wrinkles, not so hot that they would burn the clothes. Then speed and skill were needed to do as much of the ironing as possible before the iron lost all its heat and became useless.
By the middle of the week, with a good deal of housework behind her, Lucy took time out. She visited her family once a week cycling miles through country lanes to Hook Norton until she ‘took ill’ in middle age and used the bus instead.
Once a week she also visited her mother-in-law in Hornton – as long as they were ‘talking’. Old Mrs Eadon was sharp-tongued and intolerant of Lucy’s foibles, and did not soften with age.
Market day in Banbury was on Thursdays and Lucy always caught the Stratford Blue bus at 8.45 to go and do her shopping. A trip into Banbury needed some organising for there were few buses, and any activities in Banbury had to be fitted into these times. The buses moved very slowly, but Lucy enjoyed the chat and the news from the other villages when she was on the bus, so it was worth the effort.
Since Lucy’s day started so early she had usually completed a great deal by lunchtime. At about half past one, when she had washed up the lunch dishes and had a cup of tea in whatever house she happened to be, Lucy’s thoughts turned towards Jim’s dinner that he had at half past three after work. Everyday Lucy prepared a generous meal for Jim: tender roasts or tasty casseroles finished off with a pudding, and each day he ate but a miniscule portion. Lucy on the other hand did herself proud whether or not she had already had a midday meal. She did not hold with people ‘going without’ – and neither did anybody else at that time. The shortages of money in the depression, and the rationing of food during the war had raised people’s anxieties about not having enough to eat. No one worried about eating too much and when supplies became available everybody was delighted. Lucy and many of her generation put on large quantities of weight. It became a norm, particularly for women in their forties and fifties, and was called the Middle Aged Spread. Nobody talked of its being unhealthy or unfashionable, it was just how things were and the women affected seemed very comfortable with their size.
The Evenings
Once Lucy had washed up after their main meal about 4pm her activities depended on the time of year. In summer Jim’s evenings were spent in the garden and Lucy might join him and potter about with the flowers. Jim was an excellent gardener and had long, neat rows of perfect vegetables. He grew sweet peas and chrysanthemums for Lucy to cut for the house during the summer and into the autumn. He also grew in addition to the normal green and root vegetables and legumes, shallots, Jerusalem artichokes and just a few black potatoes. If she felt like a stroll Lucy might visit the Astells to look at something Mary wanted to show her, or go and put some flowers on a grave in the churchyard, stopping on the way back to watch an evening cricket match, or even in later years, very daringly, have a drink in the pub if she had a friend with her.
Lucy did not normally go out in the winter evenings, not liking the dark. She enjoyed the cosiness of the winter evenings at home, particularly the long sit-down at the end of the day in the flickering dim light of the paraffin oil lamp. In the great open fireplace Lucy had hung up her collection of brass plates, horse brasses and kettles that caught the light of the fire and shone in bright contrast against the black beams where they were nailed. In front of the fire was a big bold steel fender with fire irons. But however cosy and traditional it looked, the fire gave out heat only immediately around it, so that unless you sat in Lucy’s or Jim’s chair on either side of the fire, you caught the draughts that swept down the chimney and eddied round the house. So, with the curtains drawn, and sitting by the fireside, she would write letters to the innumerable friends that she liked to keep in contact with, or read the women’s magazines which had been passed on to her. Once the BBC began to broadcast The Archers, she and Jim listened to it every day, and to the news that followed it on the wireless. Jim read his thrillers and histories, stuck stamps in his album and looked through the newspapers. If visitors called they stopped, and the caller was presented with a plate of cakes to eat, accompanied by a glass of South African sherry, or some homemade wine. Sometimes Jim enjoyed a game of cribbage or draughts in the winter evenings, but their days ended early and by nine o’clock Lucy was preparing Jim’s supper of pickled walnuts or onions to eat before he went to bed.
By nine thirty Lucy and Jim were in bed for the night. With the advent of electric lighting in about 1955, the process of retiring was made much easier than it had been with the candle which made shadows leap around the old bumpy walls, sloping ceilings and irregular beams.
Once in bed they slept, and there were not many nights when either one of them was still awake to hear the Church clock strike ten.
Lucy’s good works in the village
Although the pattern of her life was governed by housework, it was not Lucy’s first love. However often she repeated, ‘Oi loikes ter see it toidy’ she was relieved when it was done and was not above brushing the odd bit of dust under the carpet saying, ‘No-one wont notice that little bit’. As soon as things in the house were straight she would go out and ‘see to things’ in the village, which was her real passion in life. The lure of conversation and the promise of swapping news hastened her step.
Lucy had a heart that overflowed with kindness. If anyone needed a hand or wanted looking after she would be there offering help and food. She single-handedly looked after the needs of the oldest inhabitants of the village, doing their washing and shopping, undertaking their spring cleaning, collecting their pensions, and even decorating their rooms. Lucy also ordered their bottles of sherry or brandy from the wine merchants, for once they had a choice of the much lauded home-made wine or South African sherry they all opted for the latter whatever they said about the excellence of the former. The older women, Mrs Walden, pronounced Mrs Woaldin and Mrs Chapman were dependent upon Lucy’s unstinting generosity, time, and effort, and both were remarkably ungrateful for her kindness, chiding her for trivialities and calling her a ‘giddy thing’. They instinctively understood the extent of Lucy’s compliant nature. They promised to remember her in their wills but nothing ever came her way.
More rewarding was the work Lucy did with families who were much more appreciative of her willingness to save them from crises. Any slight qualms about her inquisitive questions were more than counterbalanced by her energetic goodwill. Before she worked with our family she had been cook at The Manor for the Stocktons, seen the Astells through their difficult and motherless years, helped the Blythes of The Firs in the 1940s when the four children were small, as well as lending a helping hand with the Rumps and even acting as midwife for an early birth. Lucy always became part of the families she was helping: she bustled around the house cleaning, scrubbing, dusting, hoovering, beating the mats ferociously on the washing line with the handle of the broom, washing and ironing. She did whatever there was to be done with never a second thought. She was unlike any other person in the village. It was a community which placed a very high value on privacy and was also very class bound, yet she was intimately involved in half a dozen homes from quite different classes and whether they were church or chapel made no difference. For some work she received wages, but often she did not. Lucy could never resist the urge to respond to a crisis or a cry for help, and she spent much of her time in this way.
Saturdays and Sundays
Saturdays and Sundays had routines all of their own. Saturdays meant shopping in Banbury in the morning and catching the half past twelve Sumner’s bus home. Afternoons were the time for village activities which anyone could join in such as fetes, jumble sales, decorating the church, doing the teas for cricket matches, and weddings. For Jim it meant the gardening, and doing the odd jobs that had accumulated during the week. Saturdays was the day when the earth closets were emptied. But this was only part of Jim’s Saturday activity, and he was usually found rummaging around his garden, straightening things up, or tying in the sweet peas that grew in profusion in his garden and gave off one of the most fragrant smells of summer. All activity ceased at 4.30. and by a quarter to five Jim was sitting alert in his armchair with a pencil poised to check the pools as the football and racing results were read over the wireless. Jim’s Saturdays were his own, but the same could not be said for Sundays.
On Sunday mornings Jim cycled to Hornton where he saw his parents for an hour or two and helped do the odd jobs that his mother had lined up for him during the week. After cycling back to Horley, he went for a drink in the pub with Harry Walden, who came to call for him, before coming home for his roast Sunday lunch. In the afternoon he read the papers while Lucy had a sleep, and after tea it was time for Lucy to get ready for Church.
There were two places of worship in Horley: the beautiful early English Anglican church at the top of the village on the hill, St Etheldreda’s, and the small, Victorian, Hornton stone Methodist chapel that was attached to the Eadon’s house.
Congregations in both church and chapel dwindled in the fifties, but there remained a core of loyal attenders. At St Etheldreda’s Charley Varney the verger, Lucy and her friend Mrs Tom Allington, the two churchwardens, the school teacher’s family, The Vicarage family and The Manor family. The religious convictions of the believers varied. At one extreme was Miss Gwladys Ball, a bluestocking aesthete, gaunt and gothic in her worship. At the other extreme was Lucy whose knees prevented her kneeling when praying and whose spiritual commitments did not prevent her sucking Mintoes during the sermons, unwrapping them noisily and glancing uneasily over her shoulder to see if anyone was looking.
From time to time Lucy’s thoughts strayed wistfully towards the Methodist chapel next to her house. Her Sunday evenings would have been easier if she worshipped there. They sat down a lot and she would not have to climb the hill up the village. It was cosy in the chapel, unlike in the church which was cold and draughty despite the huge fire roaring in the massive and antique stove at the back of the church. They sang rousing hymns in chapel and as it was a small building it made a cheerful noise.
Going to church also meant having a good look at who was there, and if they were not, the opportunity to speculate where they were and why. All in all the discomforts were worth tolerating; and there was the added bonus of feeling righteous as she walked down the hill with Charley Varney and Mrs Tom Allington, sucking Mintoes together.
Lucy was a very regular attendee at church. Her only absence was one Sunday when Donald Peers, heart-throb of the early fifties was on the wireless. She stayed at home and was thrilled to hear him sing ‘There’s a little white duck swimming on the water’, but she felt the guilt and did not do it again.
After church on Sunday there was only time to sit down for a while to tell a disinterested Jim who was at church and what they were wearing. Then it was time once again to wind up the machinery for the next week.’
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Mrs Lucy Eadon’s role in the life of The Vicarage family was important in the 1960s, particularly to Honor who was young and said: ‘she kept our body and soul together – she had all the essential qualities for those times: she was cheerful, energetic, laughing and she counterbalanced the underlying sadness in our family.’
Frederick Jim Eadon 1903-1972 – Elsie Ethel Eadon 1907 -1975
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
Lucy’s house, by village standards, had much more spacious rooms than most cottages. It was older than many of the buildings and had stone mullions over the windows. At some time a piece of the garden had been sold, and a Methodist chapel built adjacent to the house, so that on Sundays the singing of hymns could be heard through the walls of the house. The remaining garden curled round the chapel, so that much of the garden was more private than it would otherwise have been. The house was thatched and had thick walls and small windows. The entire house consisted of four equal sized rooms, two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. There were no fitments of any kind other than a grate in the living room. The front and back doors both opened directly into the living room as did the stairs, which was not much more than a short wide ladder hidden behind a third door. The fourth door opened into the flagged kitchen which had four distempered but unplastered bumpy stone walls, and two windows, one wide one looking out onto the front garden and the village street, and the other a tiny one-paned window set into the thick wall and overlooking the kitchen garden, shedding a beam of daylight into an otherwise totally dark corner.
There was no running water, so there were no taps, no sink, and no bathroom. Since there was no drainage there was no flushing lavatory either inside or outside the house, and neither was there anywhere in the kitchen to empty away any dirty water. It was all thrown onto the garden. But since the water all had to be carried in buckets from the village tap out in the main village street, people were very economical in their use of water, and there was not much to throw away. There was no electricity either and consequently Lucy had no electric kettle, cooker, vacuum cleaner, or lighting. Refrigerators were in any case uncommon and freezers were unknown to us in Horley at this time in the fifties and sixties.
Nonetheless the kitchen had its own delights for us and was a most comforting place to be. Since people’s basic needs have always been the same, housewives then had their ways of making life comfortable even though they managed it differently. The appliances that Lucy had which were crucial were those used for cooking. She had three means of cooking. In Victorian times her living room had acquired an open, cast-iron grate with brass fittings that had been set into the wide chimney that still rose straight to the sky, so there was always a danger in wet or windy weather that the fire would be put out. Part of the grate was an oven for slow cooking which served nicely for casseroles with thick gravy, and meats that needed gentle roasting to make them succulent. Lucy had clever ways with game and meat, and was not afraid of larding joints liberally. Her greatest skill lay in traditional fare: pies, meat puddings, roasts and stews, and she understood how to use her ovens and make even the humblest food taste delicious.
Her other oven was a paraffin cooker which looked like a tin box with a door, perched precariously on a paraffin burner. This cooked roasts and stews faster than the grate, and was always used for tarts and cakes. Lucy also had a separate burner for the kettle or for cooking vegetables. Cooking a meal meant an intricate series of moves and cooking vegetables in sequence – but Lucy had long learnt this pattern of moves and accomplished it with deftness and speed.
The storage of food was less easy. Like everyone else, instead of a fridge Lucy made do with a meat-safe, which was a small wall-cupboard with perforated doors to allow air to circulate around the food stored in it. It helped keep the food fresh, particularly in summer, and kept out the flies and mice. Even so it meant a twice-weekly visit to the butchers in Banbury if one was to eat meat or fish daily. Many of the vegetables were taken directly from the garden in season, so their storage presented no problem, although Lucy had a small wooden barrel in the corner of her kitchen in which she stored potatoes during the winter months. Onions were hung up from the beams in the shed outside the back door, alongside the garden tools and washday equipment. Other vegetables needed storing inside the house or they would have been eaten by the rats, but even in the kitchen care had to be taken to keep food away from the ever present if hidden armies of mice.
Along one of her bumpy distempered kitchen walls, Lucy had a large waist-high apple-green cupboard with a wide top. In the cupboards below she kept her stores of jam and pickled onions and walnuts. On top she made wines in large wide enamel and china bowls – usually the discarded basins of washing sets when the jugs had broken. Here the fruits fermented below the pungent yeast-laden pieces of toast that floated on their frothy surface, before they were bottled and stored for the winter months.
Against another wall stood a 1930s sideboard that she had been given (Lucy never bought any furniture save the spring mattress for her bed). This stored her cooking utensils, her hair sieves, mincer, wire-whisk as well as numerous pie, cake and meat tins. On the top of this sideboard stood five tins: three cake tins and two biscuit tins, each of which had something inside. At any one time Lucy had two cakes on the go: the remains of one, and a fresh one, which might be a fruit cake or a Victoria sponge flavoured either with coffee, or chocolate, or orange or occasionally one sprinkled with cherry and walnuts. In the third tin were jam tarts or little buns. Sometimes these overflowed into the two biscuit tins, which might contain custard creams and digestive biscuits, but they were not much favoured in view of what else was on offer. Lucy allowed us children to help ourselves to whatever we chose: ‘ʹAve what yer want’, ‘Finish that hoff for me Hhonor’, and ʹAve another one. Goo on’, were her instructions. Since Jim ate so very little, all this baking was solely for Lucy and her visitors to eat, and not surprisingly her generosity and open hospitality meant that she had many callers, who, in exchange for food and her friendship gave Lucy what she prized most of all – the news.
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
The first months of the war passed largely unnoticed in Horley. It was not until the high summer of 1940 that the reality of war became apparent. Jim’s work on the opencast iron mining was a reserved occupation, so he did not have to enlist in the army, but the threat of invasion in the summer of 1940 alarmed the nation and affected everyone. A Committee was set up in Horley, as in every other village, to draw up strategies for coping with the imminent danger, and it focused attention on the frightening possibilities of invasion. Jim and Lucy both did First Aid courses, and both passed their tests. Lucy was inordinately proud and even years later told everybody ‘I got me cers-tificate’.
So there were compensations and excitements in the war effort for Lucy but Jim was a nervous jumpy person, and being at war did not suit him at all, but along with all the other men in the village who were in protected occupations, not medically fit, or past the age of recruitment, he joined the Home Guard. This was probably the most demanding and traumatic activity in which he ever participated.
At the beginning of the war when a German invasion seemed imminent, the Home Guard organised night patrols around the village, and men who would have to be at work early next morning forsook their beds to wander in the Oxfordshire fields in search of the invading enemy. Jim did his shift with Charley Varney who was as pragmatic about this intrusion into his sleeping hours as about everything else, and determined to put his duty time to good use. One night he took Jim rabbiting, but Jim cared even less for rabbiting than for patrolling, and as soon as Charley had bagged his game and stowed it safely inside his jacket, Jim was anxious to be back in the village where he thought he would be safe from the night and the Germans. Jim did not feel much happier in the village than in the fields, for the dark and quiet of the early hours gave it a new and unfamiliar feel. Normally he and Lucy were in bed by half past nine.
On their way back Jim’s worst anxieties were confirmed. On Plot Hill a long low sound at regular intervals was carried to them on the night air from the direction of the village. Neither of them could make out what it was. Would they need to raise the alarm? They were still two hundred yards from houses. When they reached The Green and paused to listen, they identified the source was Dooky Jelfs’ cottage: Dooky’s snoring drifted out through the open window. Laughing with relief they could only have a sneaking admiration for anyone who could emit such stentorian cannon-like roars. They enjoyed the moment and started composing the tale they would tell. But the laughter was short lived. Something more immediate diverted Jim’s attention. There was a scream from Charlie. The rabbit, which had been stuffed up his jumper, at that moment involuntarily emptied the contents of its bladder down his front!
Charlie decided to throw in his hand for the night. Apart from his own discomfort, Jim was telling him in a thin, weary voice that he was ‘very near frit [ frightened] to death’. They bewailed their respective misfortunes all the way down the village, neither listening to the other, and parted at Jim’s house. Charlie walked on to his home Marine Cottage about forty yards further down the village, and Jim could hear him talking about the alarms of the night and the evils of rabbits until he reached his front door and closed it behind him, shutting out the traumas of the night.
This taste of the Home Guard was enough to convince Jim that it was not for him, and henceforth he went to enormous lengths to find a means of disentangling himself from it all. It was not an easy matter to get out of the Home Guard during the wartime – you could not just drop out because you did not like it. There was pressure to stay in – everyone resented it to some extent, but of course patriotism won out.
After the problems of the Home Guard all other difficulties relating to the war faded into insignificance. On the scale of things, the return of Mrs Herbert from London to Horley to reclaim the cottage where Lucy and Jim were caretaking, was more of an inconvenience. The Germans in the autumn of 1940 seemed to have abandoned the idea of invasion in favour of bombing the large cities. London was subjected to intense night bombing raids and the days were spent extinguishing the fires and removing the injured and dead from the rubble before the raids began again. An Oxfordshire village must have seemed a haven of safety.
After initial consternation Jim and Lucy found no real difficulty in finding a new home. There was plenty of accommodation in the village and the house that stood next to the Methodist Chapel stood vacant and was ready for letting. The Astells helped the Eadons move their heavy furniture by providing a cart. It was at Chapel House that Lucy and Jim spent the rest of their long and happily married years, and where we as children grew to know them after the war.
I choose this final story to show how much has changed and yet how somethings never change:
It is about Lucy whose family came from Ireland (to Hook Norton) when she came to work as the live-in Cook at The Manor. She married Jim (from Hornton) and they moved to a cottage in the Square, they then moved in to Chapel Cottage where they lived for the rest of her lives.
Their story touches on how much slower and simpler life was and yet how much harder; such as fetching your own water and milk. Whilst today we rush in and out of Horley without giving it a second thought, we get frustrated if the broadband is slow and expect to be able to buy any type of food online and then get it delivered to our doors. We have so much more today that we take for granted.
“A Portrait of a Country Couple” by Honor (Morgan) Berry for her children Felicity and William when they were young, so they could know something of her childhood.
Mrs Lucy Eadon’s role in the life of The Vicarage family was important in the 1960s, particularly to Honor who was young and said: ‘she kept our body and soul together – she had all the essential qualities for those times: she was cheerful, energetic, laughing and she counterbalanced the underlying sadness in our family.”
(Lucy) Elsie Ethel Eadon 1907 -1975 Frederick Jim Eadon 1903-1972
Honor’s story about Lucy and Jim and will be posted over the next five days in these parts:
You can view all the posts on the Modern History Page (under Village) :
Hope you’re enjoying these glimpses into Horley’s past? Some aspects have really changed and yet there is something enduring about our village community that still prevails today.
I have worked with Clare Marchant to “look inside” her book and share an overview of the contents, contributors and the stories of life in Horley earlier in the last century. Remember these are just glimpses, that we thought might interest you but there is so much more. It would make a wonderful Christmas present. Rgds Debra.
The fact that he was part of a large well-connected family with a wide circle of acquaintances may account for the surprising fact that at some time the Rev. Harold Buxton had in his care at Horley Vicarage (he told us so – though it seems more likely to have been Essex Cottage) the young child Valentine Dyall, with his father Franklin.
Valentine Dyall was to become a well known actor with a famous sepulchral voice. He cornered the market in ghoulish parts intended to create dread and is best known for his narration of the radio horror series Appointment with Fear. He was the English equivalent of the American Vincent Price. Bishop Buxton told us that he bathed Valentine every day in our bathroom. It was hard to imagine a miniature version of the frightening Valentine Dyall slipping around in our old- fashioned bath. Valentine Dyall went on to give his son not only the name Christian, but also the name Jocelyn, which may have been a reference to Harold Jocelyn Buxton.
In 2010 the BBC produced an audio CD of the only surviving episodes of Appointment with Fear in the BBC archives: ‘four gripping episodes from the famous 1940s BBC horror series’. They were hugely popular and ran for ten series. Apart from his connection with Horley, and the thrill of the extraordinary rich deep voice of Valentine Dyall, they are wonderful examples of radio drama in the war torn years of the 1940s, and the post-war period.
Bill Griffin (grandson of the Bagnalls of Horley Manor) gave me a copy of Harold Buxton’s four pages of autobiographical notes about coming to Horley. Harold Buxton says:
‘I arrived in Horley with quite a little party. Two special friends, who were glad to be out of London because of the risks [this was during WW1], volunteered to come as ‘paying guests’ to my temporary residence in Essex Cottage. The Vicarage was then occupied by Belgian refugees.
First there was Franklin Dyall, who was a noted person on the stage, mainly in Shakespeare. He was a widower with a small boy of three or four years, Valentine or ‘Val’ Dyall (who himself became an actor and broadcaster in later life). Franklin Dyall was in London during the week but the other friend, Charles Dalmon, the poet, had lived with the Dyalls and was virtually ‘nurse’ to the small boy. Happily Franklin Dyall was with us at the weekends, and always read the lesson at Evensong. His wonderful voice and dramatic reading brought many extra visitors to hear him. Charles Dalmon was known as a modern ‘Herrick’ and came originally from Sussex, the land of poets. He regarded England as the real ‘Arcady’ and I made him poet-laureate of Horley!’
Somebody else also had the laureate idea, and the Horsham Museum and Art Gallery have published a short book, Charles Dalmon, the poet laureate of Sussex by George Cockman. I think Harold Buxton was a romantic. Dalmon was a poet, though not well known and most poems I have found online were written around 1904 (published in The Harper’s Monthly) and discreetly erotic. He was likely gay, and although that is not stated he was a friend of Noel Coward and is reputed to have said ‘my ambition is to be crushed to death between the thighs of a guardsman’! It would be interesting to know if Charles Dalmon wrote any poems when he was in Horley.
Although Franklin Dyall was a well-known character actor having 26 films to his credit and many more plays – he was not a Shakespearean actor – I cannot find any Shakespearean play he was in; and he was not widowed as Harold Buxton says – his wife Phyllis Logan had left him. There are some exquisite photographs of her by her future second husband Cavendish Moreton dated 1909 held at the National Portrait Gallery, and which can be viewed on line. They had male twins in 1911. The nice thing for the Horley Church congregation was that they had the pleasure of hearing the pure tones of the man who quite often read the news on the radio, reading the lesson in church.
Harold Buxton’s curacy in Thaxted was at an interesting time. It cannot be co-incidental that his cousin Conrad Roden Noel became Vicar there in 1910, and Harold Buxton became his curate almost immediately. Conrad Noel was known as the ‘Red Vicar’ and was a Christian Socialist. He created a storm of protest by raising the Red Flag and the Sinn Fein flag alongside the flag of St George on the church. Cambridge students attacked the church in what was called the ‘Battle of the Flags’. The matter was only resolved when the Consistory Court forbade the hanging of both the Red Flag and the Sinn Fein flag. Conrad Noel also gathered around him figures from the world of arts: his father was a poet, the composer Gustav Holst was a friend and parishioner, and I believe there were others.
I have wondered whether by sharing his home with the Dyalls and Dalmon, Harold Buxton was hoping to emulate his cousin, or whether the general culture of his family included supporting the liberal arts and artists.
Horley church has a charming watercolour painting by a difficult-to-trace artist Frank W Carter. I believe he was another friend in Harold Buxton’s artistic circle. Weight is lent to this idea because Frank Carter painted a striking portrait of The Red Vicar which now hangs in Thaxted Guildhall. There is also a painting of the interior of Thaxted church on the cover of Conrad Noel’s biography – which has striking similarities to the Horley water colour.
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The decline of the village – In 1951 there were about seventy houses and 213 people in Horley. Once the village had been far more populous: it had about twice the population a hundred years earlier[2]. But since the mid 19th century village people had begun to drift away from farm labouring to better paid jobs in Banbury, or metropolitan areas, some emigrated, and the population decreased.
As families left the village there were fewer people to live in their vacated homes, and once they were left unoccupied the fabric of the building and thatch deteriorated until eventually, with the help of a few hard frosts, windowless and doorless, the buildings tumbled into untidy heaps.
At the bottom of the village where the course of the Sor Brook had been altered to create a millrace, stood the ruins of the old mill. It had been constructed in the last century and had become no more than a precarious pile of Hornton stone, its windows barricaded with rusting corrugated iron that now flapped in the wind. We sometimes played dangerous games, leaping the terrifying race before it plummeted down its waterfall.
A few yards further up the street Phlox Cottage was tumbling down. This is where Old Mrs West lived until she died just after the war.
A little further up the road, just north of Enfield Cottage were other stone buildings that had neither roofs nor upper floors. The people who had lived there had long since been forgotten and they were now the ghostly homes of people only identified by headstones in the churchyard.
A cluster of buildings in The Square had become run down and empty. These had been bought up by ‘Dooky’ Jelfs. The walls of the old houses bulged unsafely and rotting planks criss-crossed the gaping windows in an attempt to prevent curious children playing inside.
Other houses in The Square were fast disappearing: next to The Red Lion pub a cottage facing the road was knocked down to make way for a new car park for the pub. Behind it a whole row had gone, including the village bake house, where once the village people had taken their Sunday joint to be cooked, if they had one.
At the top end of the village behind Orchard Cottage a wheelwright’s workshop and cottages had been abandoned and left to fall down since there was no reason for anyone to buy them when their owners moved to Banbury. Derelict properties, overgrown with elderberry trees and other shrubs littered our village. Indeed the old were not far wrong when they said Horley was not half the village that it had been.
The Impact of the two World Wars – It was more than the changes in farming which changed our village life – the wars affected almost every aspect of our community. The loss of young Horley men in WWI maimed families and the community, and the experience of the trenches and fighting left many of the survivors scarred for life.
WWII came only 23 years later, and war-weary fathers saw their sons and young neighbours called up for duty in one or other of the armed services, and leave the village.
The Evacuees and other Strangers –The war years saw influxes of strangers. I doubt the country, including Horley, had experienced such a mass movement of people. There were several waves of London evacuees that needed accommodating. Local airfields at Shenington and Gaydon brought new blood in the form of RAF personnel. Later, American airmen appeared in Banbury from a large American base in Upper Heyford. And from 1941 Horley experienced another wave of new people when Horley House was requisitioned to accommodate Prisoners-of-War (POWs). The Italians were the first to arrive followed by the Germans. Finally came the Displaced Persons, all lone men, from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, I believe.
Agricultural mechanisation – In our time fewer and fewer men chose, or were needed, to work on the land. There had been pointers for many years before the outbreak of war that farming was in decline. The introduction of new methods and more sophisticated machinery continued the pattern already developing, and farms became less labour intensive.
Conditions and pay were better in industry and the importance of the multi-skilled farm labourer diminished as mechanisation took over on the farm. And so the rural culture died. The harvests although important were no longer the only topic of conversation of the summer months, and the Harvest Home (or Harvest Festival), though still an occasion, was no longer a celebration of a good harvest that was critical to the well-being and health of the whole community in the following months.
Traditional ways of life were vulnerable to these changes. It was not just the effects of war that challenged the traditions. With the importance of the Aluminium Works in Banbury, and the Ironstone workings in Wroxton, the next village, there was a choice of employment, improved wages and an opportunity for advancement.
With greater control of their employment and changes in the distribution of wealth, the days of the village hierarchy and power structure were almost ended.
Thatched roofs – It was during the post-war period and 1950s that roofs which had previously been thatched were tiled. The village lost a lot of its soft curved appearance for a more angular but tidier look.
The Arrival of Electricity, Water and The Main Drain – Electricity came to the village. Amidst heated controversy five street lights were installed. Then the Church, the School and the Chapel put lights on their buildings. In a very short space of time we had become a 10-light safety-conscious village. But the most significant change that dramatically affected everybody’s life was the coming of mains water and mains sewerage. The process was drawn out and the village reduced to chaos for long periods. The work continued for so long that people began to talk of a Golden Age when Horley had been a beautiful place to behold, but in truth, however untidy the earthworks were, Horley had never been a chocolate-box village.
When the project was complete and pipes connected the work in the home for both men and women was greatly reduced and life became easier and pleasanter. Within a short time the village cottages became desirable residences. The risks to health had been significantly reduced. But with the benefits of these state funded services came dilemmas. Cllr George Pratt and his colleagues on the Rural District Council were faced with ethical issues about the proper level of state intervention when they considered the proposal to put fluoride in the water to improve the health of teeth, whether people wanted it or not.
As the course of the war began to reach its conclusion there was growing recognition that after the disruption and hardship of war people both wanted and deserved better. It was felt that those returning from war had earned their place in a ‘Better Britain’. The Beveridge Report called for national welfare systems that would protect us all ‘from the cradle to the grave’, and the Labour Government of 1945 brought it about.
Inevitably the scene was set for changes, and from those returning from the war certain individuals came forward to take a lead. George Pratt was, in the post war years responsible for promoting many of the practical developments that took place in Horley. Having in the early years of the war organised the Home Guard in the area, he had spent the latter years of the war serving as an Army Officer abroad. It gave him opportunities to see a bit of the world, and a great deal of life away from the confines of his previous experience, as well as being able to reflect on the future possibilities that life in Horley held. He valued community life, and his commitment to serve his fellow parishioners was heightened by his experiences of war. On his return he found others returning from war were of like mind – those that had left as boys returned as men with new perspectives on life and they were keen to make the most of the peace.
In the years immediately after the war our community – dying though its traditions were – had a brief reprieve. Village life underwent a period of energetic regeneration as the moves to get Britain back on its feet were felt everywhere. One of the first institutions to establish itself was the Horley Cricket Club. It proclaimed its establishment by acquiring its own cricket-field. Glyn Morgan the Vicar had realised that a cricket team and/or a football team could be a unifying, purposeful and enjoyable activity for the community especially for young men. George Pratt, a natural leader, rallied a cricket team, and before long the Club built its own pavilion. Our father, Glyn Morgan laid the pavilion’s foundation stone on a wet Coronation Day in the summer of 1953.
Apart from the Cricket Club there was still a Pig Club, a thriving Youth Club run by a series of people including George Green of Midhill, and a Mothers’ Union that met on the first Tuesday in each month in The Vicarage sitting room with an interesting speaker. The Church Choir, run by Matt Blythe, had choir practice early on Friday evenings. A strong contingent of men belonged to the British Legion, which met outside the village, and there was a Girls’ Club. In addition to this there were the meetings of the Parochial Church Council (the PCC), the Parish Council and the School Managers.
Secondary Education – t was a period of advance. From January 1948 for the first time Horley’s young people over 11 received their education outside the village. It must have been a wise and timely development and expanded the educational curriculum, but it also weakened the village socially and there was less commitment to village activities and relationships, as young people widened their friendship networks, and increasingly spent their leisure time outside the village.
The piles of stones from its derelict houses gave Horley an air of abandoned untidiness. It was still a working village so there were always reminders of the herds of cow that passed through the village several times a day, as well as clods of earth or straw that had fallen from carts and tractors. During the winter the village was a great deal tidier than in the summer when the grass grew high along the verges of the roads into the village and down the sides of the main street. The Council made some provision for the grass to be cut by roadman Charley Varney, but he liked to collect it once it was ripe for hay that he could use in the winter, so he had a vested interest in waiting until it was ready. Our village had a certain overgrown charm during these summer months.
Flowering cherries were planted from The Square down to Phlox Cottage. This was part of the 1953 Coronation celebrations and was very new for Horley. It proved very difficult to stop the boys swinging on the saplings and accidentally breaking them – they did not seem to belong to anyone in particular, and were counted fair game. But after a few years the trees became established and eventually flowered. People were surprised and pleased with them and the first step had been taken to open our eyes to the way we wanted our village to look.
There was a clear class divide: the war softened its manifestations to some extent, but it was evident, and it depended on where you were in the hierarchy whether you minded or not. Robert Pearson writes:
‘The covertly oppressive nature of the hierarchical nature of society peculiar to Britain was, of course, fissured to some extent by the First World War (1914-1918) and shattered by the Second World War (1939-1945).’
The nature of village hierarchies meant that most formal leadership roles had long been the responsibility, possibly privilege, of the middle classes (squire, Vicar, any landowner, large farmers and sometimes teachers) – people with some money or influence. A good deal of village problem-solving and philanthropy was expected of them, and mostly they responded. It is easy to see how very dependent most communities had been on the prosperity of these better-off families to generate work and maintain law and order. Working families hitting hard times relied on their charity in the absence of any welfare state. Any lack of commitment, or absence, or failure to act benevolently could make life difficult for the village. Although jealously guarded, these roles were not always diligently filled and that lead to grumbling by discontented people.
When things went wrong people complained until the Vicar, or someone the equivalent of the squire did something to correct the situation. Even after all they had given during the wars, older village people still did not feel a sense of power or equality and continued to behave as if the squire, who no longer existed, should run village affairs. Some referred to their ‘betters’ and a few nervously said ‘I know my place’. However as the village squirearchy vanished and was superseded by the Rural District Council, the phrase “You’d think Mr Stockton/the Vicar would do something about it” was replaced by “Why don’t the Council do anything about it?”
There were several factors which may have contributed to subsequent change such as ready access to their elected Councillor, improved complaints systems, and most importantly, the increasing availability of home telephones enabling some people to take matters into their own hands.
The New Council Houses. In the early nineteen fifties the Rural District Council planned to build some new houses in Horley. It was part of the National Housing Programme to improve living conditions, and all over the country new council housing estates were springing up. The new houses were to have both bathrooms and modern kitchens, and most important of all they were not accommodation tied to a job as were many of the homes in the village. The new council houses were built just off the Big Lane, below Park Farm, in what was to become Lane Close.
Before the new council houses were built, Lane Close was a small narrow meadow that we had to cross to reach the cricket field. The announcement that twelve new homes were to be built there – ten semi-detached houses and two bungalows came as an exciting surprise because it meant a great deal of brand new accommodation for some lucky people. There was speculation as to who would eventually live there, and who deserved to. We all examined the houses as they went up. My mother feared they looked very small inside, and there appeared to be no front doors, but it was very difficult to imagine amid the wet mud what they would eventually look like. When the day came and the allocation of houses was announced one of the new homes went to Maurice, and later another to Dennis Jelfs, Fred Jelfs’ sons, who both had young families. They left tiny terraced cottages in Varney’s Yard (now Ivy Cottage).
The Greens with four children Reggie, Doreen, Lawrence and Carol who had always lived in the village moved from their cramped little cottage (the further of the two cottages which became Midhill). They and other families moved home by carrying all their furniture and goods bit by bit from one home to the other. The children took a major part in the move and trundled handcarts up and down the village lane between the two houses. The mixture of excitement and physical exhaustion took their toll by the end of the day. One teenager burst into tears when a pot of jam slipped from her grasp and broke. Her tears mixed with the rain in The Square by the telephone kiosk. My mother, Elma Morgan, coming out of the Post Office found it impossible to console her: the weather was awful, it was late in the day, everyone was tired and the precious pot of jam was what she had bought as a treat for tea.
The Hicks family was given a house too and they were able to move from the damp deteriorating Jasmine Cottage into the real comfort of a brand new home. When our father, Glyn Morgan the Vicar, visited them to see how they were settling in, a joyful George Hicks flung open the front door, extended his arms as though to embrace him and welcomed him in with a dramatic flourish. With great pride George bade him “Come into the drawing room, Vicar”.
The rest of Lane Close also seemed pleased with their front rooms, but it was not long before the gilt on the gingerbread began to wear thin. Not all the houses had gone to Horley people. The Wrights at Number 1 Lane Close were Londoners by origin but had not returned after the war and had some difficult experiences in the early days in Horley. Their neighbours the Hemmings were a Hornton family and would have much preferred to stay there. The people with only two bedrooms would rather have had more, the doors stuck in the wet weather, and nobody much liked the Rayburn stoves that had been installed in the living room by an unimaginative/over-imaginative architect on the grounds that country people had been used to kitchen ranges and would therefore welcome a similar sort of heating and means of cooking. Nonetheless the gardens soon began to bloom, and with exceptions were all kept in glorious order.
The children from the new families swelled the numbers attending Horley School, and combined with the post-war baby boom known as ‘the bulge’ ensured the survival of the school for another generation.
The rest of this volume and part of volume two are about the families who experienced the changes in our village during this period.
[2] 392 residents in 1851 and 425 residents in 1841
Clare Marchant, June 2015
The is an extract from A Vanished Past Volume 1, each Volume is £15 +P&P or you can buy both for £33 incl. p&p.
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Clare Marchant was born in Horley Vicarage, Oxfordshire in 1941 and spent her formative years there until 1965. She now lives in Greenwich, London
First published in 2015. All rights reserved. The rights of Clare Marchant to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the consent of © Clare Marchant. Copyright for each image rests with the contributor.
William Cole Bagnall of the Manor and later Holly Tree Farm and David England (with trilby) Courtesy of Bill Griffin
David England (1866-1945). David worked on the land all his life, variously as a carter’s boy, a cattleman and an agricultural labourer. He could probably turn his hand to most things, as workers on the land were expected to do.
[A carter was a driver of a horse-drawn vehicles used for transporting goods, they usually drove a light two wheeled carriage]
He had been born in Radway in 1866, into one of the many England families living there. David’s parents moved to Drayton for a decade or so, but by 1911 he was in Horley with his widowed mother, with whom he lived. He supported her until her death in 1929. She had her roots in Gloucestershire.
David England has been mentioned by several people as a ‘character’. Bill Griffin writes:
‘David England worked for grandfather [William Cole Bagnall] at The Manor as also shown by him being in the haymaking photo. I can just remember him working in the garden and on the farm at the little house [Holly Tree Farm]. I thought him rather quaint and old fashioned in that he often wore corduroy trousers which had plenty of material in the legs and he had a piece of binder string tied round the calf of each leg to stop the bottoms getting too dirty. (Binder string was the string used in the binder, the machine that cut the corn and tied it into sheaves. It was used for all purposes on the farm, usually second-hand after being cut from the sheaf at threshing and saved) The string tied round the legs used to be regarded as something done by the labourers and was used in cartoons etc. to denote a country yokel.
It just suited both parties that he came, was told what wanted doing, and just got on with it. It was, of course, a seven day a week job as there would be a couple of cows to milk, a couple of calves, a few pigs and some chickens to feed. But stockmen accepted that the job was a seven day job – they just did not expect days off every week as happens now. Times change but I am sure they are not so satisfied with their lives now as they were then.
I remember he was very good at handling bees. There were three or four hives in the orchard [at Holly Tree Farm] and David used to tend them and deal with the swarms. Grandmother also used to tend the bees. One of my treats of having tea at Horley was to have honey direct from the comb as I was very fond of the wax! I believe David was a bachelor who lived on his own after his mother died (not certain of this). Herbert Rump (a truly great character) took over when David stopped.’
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