Mine's a pint!

My topic in this post is about milk which used to be delivered in fat glass milk bottles from years ago. You know the ones with the cardboard tops? What prompted me to write was an email I had from Roger Miles who wanted to let us know about one of these milk bottles that he found on Bernards Heath which he thinks had been unearthed by a fox or maybe a badger. He says that the old claypits were used to dispose of St Albans' rubbish at one time.

Etched on the bottle, as you can see, is Sopwell Home Farm, W.G. Brown and on the base it has E. WIGG moulded on it. Well I knew about Sopwell Home Farm. It used to be attached to Sopwell House. W. G. Brown was the farmer. Ten years ago, I interviewed the lovely 90 year old Betty Terry for the Sopwell Project who told me that her father was the cowman on Brown's Farm in the 1920s - 1930s. Her family lived in Sopwell Gate Lodge but because of a dispute between her parents and Mr Brown over working in the dairy, they were kicked out: Sometime after we’d been there, Mr Brown wanted my mother to do the milk, sterilise it or whatever they do with it. The room was cold and damp and he wanted her to stay there and work and she had three young children to get ready for school in the morning so she just could not cope so they had a row, my Dad and Mr Brown, over it and he got the sack. Cos the house went with the job so we were homeless really. Mr Brown doesn’t sound very friendly.

I have seen bottles like this before. When I was doing my research for the Sopwell Project I visited Sopwell Mill Farm off Cottonmill Lane where the tenants showed me some of their milk bottle finds on the property. I was fascinated to learn that the bottles came from the three different dairy farms in Sopwell: Sopwell Mill Farm, Sopwell Home Farm and St Julian’s Farm. The farmer at Sopwell Mill Farm was Frederick Coaker who residents recall delivering the milk on his horse and cart. Apparently he wasn’t a very nice man either. He was described as a bit crotchety. The Muirs ran St Julian's Farm – the farmer was Archibald Muir and they also delivered their own milk. So all three farmers delivered their own milk. They must have shared each other’s bottles too.

Has anybody else found any of these bottles and does anyone know anything about E. Wigg from Watford? Google didn’t. Please share if you do by writing a comment. 

 

Brick walls – they go up, they come down

It’s been rather too long a time since I have written anything for the Sopwell blog. All I can say is many apologies. It’s not as though there has been nothing to report. There has, but I have not been able to get down to writing anything. Now, being in lockdown from the dreaded virus, I have made an effort to get going.

Sopwell’s landscape has changed over the last few years. Betty Entwistle House has been pulled down and a larger more functional dwelling for the elderly has been built in its place, called Eywood House. Also our only pub for years – until the Hare and Hounds became part of Sopwell – the King Offa, has also been demolished. As yet, nothing has been built on its footprint but it looks like it will be replaced with housing. For years the SRA had hopes that Sopwell might get a community centre out of it. Not so, although, it looks like the Marlborough Pavilion will be given this role thanks to the sterling work undertaken by the Cottonmill and Sopwell Hub (CASH) team to raise awareness and money to make this happen. And out of the gasworks site, we will have an Aldi and other retail outlets.

The most exciting thing to report is that some of us have become involved in another research project: St Julian’s.

Now some of you will say that St Julian’s is part of Sopwell. True, but St Julian’s boundaries start outside of Sopwell. Much of it is on the other side of Watling Street in Verulam ward and stretches as far as Greenwood Park in Chiswell Green.

If you recall Abbot Geoffrey, who was the Abbot of St Albans, founded a leper hospital c.1130 and dedicated it to St Julian (or St Gillian as it given on the 1666 map). The hospital was described as being built by the side of Watling Street and near the wood called Eye Wood. We know that it was situated almost opposite the entrance to Vesta Avenue in Watling Street.

After the dissolution of the monasteries, the land was granted to Sir Richard Lee and remained with his descendants until 1649. Then it was taken over by John Ellis who demolished what remained of the hospital and built himself a house, also called St Julian’s. This house had a walled garden and it was part of this wall that kicked off our research, as part of it still exists today as the boundary wall to some of the properties in Gillian Avenue on the Tithe Barn Estate.

A team of researchers from SAHAAS (St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society) has been investigating all of the St Julian’s area. This includes, the leper hospital, St Julian’s Mansion and St Julian’s farm, St Stephen’s Church and surrounding lands etc. It’s very exciting. We are discovering lots of new information. One of the tenants of St Julian’s Mansion was a lady called Mrs Ashurst who stayed there for 50 years. She kept an account book in two volumes of all her purchases of goods and food from 1738 – 1785 until she died. All the pages have been photographed and we are kept very busy transcribing all the data. So far we have found out that she seemed to consume an awful lot of meat and was always buying mops!

The outcome of the project will be a publication, so watch this space.

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Sandy Norman

Blasts from the past

Our Sopwell Memories website has had nearly 100,000 visits since we launched in 2014, 97,928 as I write. It is good to know that it is well used. In case you haven’t had a look at it lately, there has been a small flurry of new stuff which should interest you.

There have been several changes to Sopwell over the past year or so: Betty Entwistle House was demolished to make way for a new development presently under construction and also we have lost The King Offa pub. I have posted about Betty Entwistle and am waiting to see what happens on the King Offa site before I publish. We have also acquired several photos of living in the prefabs in Tavistock Avenue. Thanks to Michelle Mackenzie and family for letting me use them.

Back in 2011, while researching material for our book, I interviewed a lovely chatty lady living in Boleyn Drive, called Margaret Brown. Margaret was born in 1928 and lived on the Mentmore Estate since she was eleven, so she had plenty of stories to tell of her childhood growing up in the Cottonmill area. I put some of these stories in the book but I was denied permission to select extracts from the audio recording to put on the website. As I said in my previous blog, Margaret is no longer with us. However, permission has now been given by her family to use the material, so seven extracts of Margaret’s memories are now up on the website. I hope you will have a listen to them.

If you or members of your family have photos of the Sopwell area from long ago, I would be delighted to receive permission to include them on the website.

Enjoy the rest of the summer!

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Sandy Norman

RIP

Over the past few years we have lost some of the lovely people interviewed for the Sopwell Project. It is inevitable, I suppose, given the age of some of those interviewed, but there are others who have been taken from us far too soon. I thought it would be appropriate to do a sort of memorial to their memory, although their stories will always be with us either in the book or on the Sopwell Memories website.

Before the book was published, we lost Betty Terry, which I regret to this day as she was really looking forward to seeing the book published. Many of you will remember the agonising we went through to find the money to put our research into print. I feel I should have tried harder. Betty was 90 when I interviewed her. She was one of my first interviewees and she was as enthusiastic as I was about the project. I found her through her son who saw a piece in the Herts Advertiser about the Project. As well as all her stories, she gave me several of her photos to copy and even drew me a map of where she used to play down by the river near Sopwell House. Such a lovely lady.

Then, soon after the book was published, we lost Tom Edgar. His late wife was buried in St Stephen’s churchyard and he shared some photos with me of her childhood in Tavistock Avenue.

Betty Cutler was a treasure trove of information, a lot of it about Sopwell Mill Farm and Cottonmill Lane. She also gave me a carrier bag full of papers that belonged to her late father, Edward Butcher. He had the unusual occupation of being a well sinker, not many of those around today, I would guess. He was a member of the Ver Valley Society and he left a bundle of papers from meetings and also some written notes on why the river flooded in the late 1970s. It was fascinating stuff. Betty sadly passed away a couple of years ago.

And then we lost Margaret Brown. She lived in Boleyn Drive and had many memories of when the Mentmore estate was built. Mrs Brown loved to talk and, as I loved to listen, it was a good interview. We are still hoping for her son to grant us permission to add her memories on the Sopwell Memories website.

Losing Russ Bowman this year was a real shock as he was not old, my age in fact. Russ gave a good interview and contributed loads to the Project, including images, as well as being a popular face on the St Albans Past and Present Facebook site. His family took comfort that his memories are preserved in the book and on the website. I was pleased to be able to hand a copy of his interview recording to his daughter.

Kathy Sinfield became a friend. She too had loads to tell me about living in Doggetts Way in the 1930s. I visited her several times. She and my Mum used to go to St Stephens’s lunch club together in Vic Foster’s bus until she became too frail. She passed away in July and I attended her funeral which was a week after the funeral for my husband Len. Not a nice time.

And just a few days ago, dear Bill Mackenzie (pictured) passed away very suddenly aged 78, so another one taken far too soon. His death prompted me to write this blog. He was another talker and had endless stories to tell me. Bill was the one who first told me about the murder in the allotments in 1948 and had me scurrying to the library to look up the reports in the Herts Advertiser. He was one of my first interviewees when I started collecting memories back in 2010. My interview technique then was very amateurish. I have given his family copies of the interviews. I hope they take this into account when listening to his memories.

I am not aware of any more deaths. I hope there aren't. I take comfort in knowing that they have left a lasting footprint and that they will never be forgotten.

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Sandy Norman