Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Blair, Thomas (O2016.4) |
| Interviewee | Professor Thomas (Thom) Blair (TB) |
| Interviewer | Janet Holmes (JH) and Frances Green (FG) |
| Date | 12/05/2016 |
| Transcriber by | Jake O’Gorman |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: 02016.4
Interviewee: Professor Thomas (Thom) Blair (TB)
Date: 12th May 2016
Venue: Braziers Field
Interviewers: Janet Holmes (JH) and Frances Green (FG)
Transcriber: Jake O’Gorman
Typed by: Jake O’Gorman
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
JH: This is a recording of Professor Thomas Blair at Braziers Field, Hertford on 12th May 2016. The recording has been done by Frances Green and Janet Holmes of the Hertford Oral History Group.
TB: Hi, Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and I am very happy to welcome you to our humble abode.
FG: It’s lovely.
TB: Thank you for your complements on my garden and on my wife Myrtle’s paintings and books.
FG: Which are lovely.
TB: We were engaged in a preliminary ‘bati papa’ as they say in Brazil and we want to get down now to some topic which I have notionally titled ‘The Blair Family of Hertford’.
Why, I can be asked? Well, it’s Hertford because we’ve lived in at least three places in Hertford. One is 42 West Street, over the road that leads out to Welwyn and Hatfield. The other is Bengeo, where we lived 18a New Road, very wonderful neighbours there. Pub down the road.
[Laughing]
TB: Holy Trinity Church, I think it is, at the top, so you’re able to between the two of them to find solace. [laughing]. Thirdly, we came to Braziers field. And we like it for good reason. One is, it did not deny us our liberty so to speak, and it didn’t hurt our pocket book too much. We own our bungalows here, all of us. It is retired housing, of course, but it’s run by a social housing group called Hanover Association. So, we own our own places, we’re happy in a complex of 28 people and we have a community centre in which, as I will explain later, we ourselves have had an art exhibition. So West Street is only one part of the whole of our existence in Hertford for more than 43 years.
JH: So, what bought you to Hertford in the first place?
TB: Well dare I say, that was a very perceptive question. [laughing] Well. It’s a process. Where does it start? Well, it starts with my profession, which is Sociology and Town Planning. And I came here, first of all, to go to Africa with my family. All of us from New York, where we were resident before. If I haven’t mentioned it already and you don’t know by my accent, we are both, myself and three of our children American. One, the youngest, Ellen was born here. So, I’ll repeat. I came out of America, New York City, John FK about 1961 on my way to Nigeria to pursue my interest in sociology and the planning of urban habitat.
I had one or two fellowships, so that helped bring the whole family with me. I entered Britain, in order to do some studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I went to Nigeria, came back to do some writing, and said ‘blow it’, I’ll stay. Nice place, peaceful and quiet. Why not stay? It was a little backward at that time, I remember my daughter saying, ‘why are those people in black face?’ when we came out of the airport. Well, it was smog, people selling coal. You know, carrying it on their backs like miners. First time we had ever seen that.
FG: Oh yes, I remember those as a child. They were frightening.
TB: My how times have changed. So, I stayed, you see. Now London was the place that we thought was the ‘In’ place. All the intellectuals were there, at least to our understanding. All the artists and writers were there, some of whom we began to know. Then the question, of what do we do with the children? We’re OK, the adults, but what do we do with the children?
So, we had to make a choice.
At that time, I had a few bucks in my slides, so to speak. So, we sent them to a private school in Hampstead. It cost a bomb. A nice place, but once you’ve been in there for a while you begin to look at your pocket book and say, ‘I can’t afford this anymore’. So, then it became a question of choosing a state school. And to be honest, we didn’t like any of the state schools we saw around us. They were too Victorian in that they had nothing in the sense of nothing as far as modern facilities were concerned. Cold toilets and cold showers. It’s supposed to be good for you, but no, you see.
Plus, London felt a bit, strange to say, fast for us. You know, it’s big. In order to get from Hampstead to Whitechapel, you’ve got to get there through the transportation and so on, and you have to pass through neighbourhoods that you don’t know. So, it was a question of, let’s get the hell out of here. To the green pastures. I think that was the choice. Which meant, out over the greenbelt in effect, because we didn’t think much of the suburbs, then.
So, my wife saw an advert in The Times, I think it was, saying someone in Broxbourne was offering a flat. Well, literally a house, they would continue living in the basement, and the rest of the house, two flights were to be given to us at a reasonable price. So, we picked up sticks and said, ‘let’s go’. So, we went to Broxbourne. Now I’m mentioning this in sequence to get to Hertford, because you’ll appreciate somewhere in all of this there is a story. What is that story? Well, it turned out that Broxbourne was a really interesting hive of activity. We were on Station Road. Opposite the church.
FG: OK, Yes.
TB: Around the corner is, what?
FG: Uuh, the river? Just trying to think.
TB: The train station is down there, I can’t even remember the road either. But down the road, just adjacent to us there were living Diplomats, media people, journalists…
FG: Oh my goodness, wow. Gosh, I didn’t know that.
TB: And so, our daughters, then were plunged into this kind of wizard time, for the 60’s anyway. Playing with their children, running around and so on. In the back yard we had all sorts of celebrations. Halloween, Christmas and all that sort of stuff. So, for us, the 60’s in Broxbourne was quite an exciting time. I was commuting into London. I was always surprised, no one talked to each other. Mainly men, they would get in with their newspaper and put it up like this …
JH: It’s the British way, isn’t it? And now everyone is on their phone. [Laughing]
TB: So, I daren’t raise a conversation. ‘So, what did you have for breakfast today?’ They wouldn’t have liked it.
JH: [ Laughing] Could you imagine? They wouldn’t have liked it.
TB: OK. My wife, she was beginning to make her way about this whole question of art and art education. So, she enjoyed much of our existence then. Well, we were renting there, and life goes on. We felt we wanted something to own ourselves, the people below were beginning to get on our nerves, their family thing was changing as their younger children got older and began to move away and so things were changing.
Basically, we wanted to find something of our own. So, one of the ‘in’ crowd was a surveyor, and he said, ‘no sweat’, I’ve looked around for you and I’ve found you this place in West Street, in Hertford. It’s good to know surveyors. So, we said ‘how much is it?’. I think it was the princely sum of £13,000 for that house 42 West Street.
FG: Wow! And had you known Hertford already? Or was this a new place on the map?
TB: No, nothing, nothing. Completely new. And completely different. Because as I said, Broxbourne was like, how can I say? That little complex we had there was part of a not too spectacular town, there isn’t much to Broxbourne. Whereas Hertford, to our delight, was part of a town. And that is what it says in the tourist information, ‘County Town’.
Well, as always, people of a certain class, let’s call it, looked to head to the same thing you are. We had a wonderful time having tea (She did – referencing wife) with the county ladies. Above Café Rouge, where the restaurant lies was a tea room at the top there, and all the county ladies, you know, Able Smith you know etc. would take their tea. They would go shopping in wherever, have lunch, take a tea…
JH: So, Myrtle joined them?
TB: Yes, it was a nice introduction. Now, when it comes to things like, life in Hertford, well, one has to focus on particular things. So, let’s start with the house, the garden and the river.
The house, as Eve Sangster wrote in her book, two thousand years of West Street*, said that the house was the sort of thing that was given over to people from the companies that bought barley up the river, and so on. That sort of level of people. My mother once said that what she heard from going around, my mother was Lucy Gage Blair Elson, it was pretty much a neighbourhood of working people with pockets of gentility.
*Transcribers Note: Eve Sangster ‘West Street, Hertford, the First Two Thousand Years’ (2003)
FG: Yes, I like that.
TB: And what she could never figure out, well she was not working then, by then she was 80 or so, was, what were these pockets of gentility, and where are they? They certainly weren’t in the pub. And this part I have to be careful. Across the road is a pub, I won’t name it, and they are bikers. That wasn’t a pocket of gentility.
Well me and my neighbour across the road, he was a teacher the other one was a social worker. This one down here was a wife of one of these people in the oil business, so she had a lot to do with different things, mainly going down to London. Mr Crow was our neighbour, he used to regale us with stories about the doodlebug bomb that fell.
JH: Yes, 1944 on Mill Bridge.
TB: Ah yes, so it was a mixed bag of nice people. Robert Kiln, lived at the corner, West Street was the ‘in’ place to be.
FG: It still is, pretty much. Almost.
TB: Oh yes.
FG: Was Gascoyne way built when you arrived?
TB: It had just been built, so we were cut off from being able to walk.
JH: I wanted to ask, were you one of the first African Americans to live in Hertford, do you think, at that point?
TB: That’s what we’re going to find out [laughing]. That’s precisely what we’re talking about when we talk about indexing and research and so on. As soon as I get the message, I’ll watch you get this stuff up on the internet, by the email and all the rest, we’ll discover.
I’ll google the question, which I can do ‘was there ever an African American family in Hertford?’. That doesn’t mean there weren’t black people here, because as you know slavery was a part of the whole thing. The Hertford Library had an exhibition about 10 years ago on black people, African, not Caribbean, personalities, who were in, I can’t remember if you would say ‘Hertfordshire’ the county, which would include Watford and all the rest.
But closer to Hertford would be some remains or something at the Church, the All Saints Church. Being a domestic slave, the domestic of a house, a noble household. Or whatever they had. So, we’re beginning to touch on the uniqueness of the Blair family in Hertford, although that feels like giving myself too much self-worth. Well, we’ve had a unique experience, that’s sure. Hertford has had a unique experience, let’s put it that way.
FG: It’s mutual, exactly.
TB: Yes. So, education. The children, can’t forget the children. The education in Herford, not bad at all. One daughter went to Morgan’s walk. Straight through, then went to St Fred’s. The three older ones went to Presdales, in Ware. Well you have to get as close to the top as you can. It was a school held in a position of esteem. So that’s where we went.
FG: Yes, definitely. Interesting.
TB: So that’s where we went. And I think that’s what has helped us make our way. You use the phrase, ‘not my cup of tea’, going to pubs and boozing was not my cup of tea, so I don’t know those people at all. I used to see them come down the road to the pub down there and I decided that they weren’t the kind of people I wanted to be associated with. So, I think Hertford allowed us to make choices, and again I think that is something I like about being in Hertford.
Education. The three older ones, of the four, went to Presdales. The oldest went straight from that to do a little secretarial work in London and then went off to university in the United States.
The next one down left Presdales and went to Ware Regional College, not the one in Ware the one in Broxbourne, to do Art and Textiles training. She then went on to Central School of Art and Design in London to take a degree in textiles.
The third one **** Gage, she went to Presdales and did her sixth form there. And thereafter went to the United States and took her various degrees. One in social administration, she took a Law Degree, met someone who she later married and had a child, a son. So, in America now are, Lucille the oldest, who went to college in the United States, and also… ********
Break in recording
TB: And so, there are two in America [daughters] each found partners, each of them have a child. It’s interesting, Ellen, who is the youngest who went to Morgan’s walk, and St Fred’s, had learned quite a lot in the musical sphere and began to play the violin. On West Street, if I recall right, there was a music centre. I can’t really remember the name of whoever it was, but she began her tinkling and so on there. And then we got, I can’t remember all the names of the teachers but its not important, local violin teachers, of which there were quite a few and we had to choose.
We used to go out to another location when she wanted to get her Violin repaired, if she wanted new strings there was another shop where the old post office was. That was part of both education and being part of the activity in the town.
Now, to come to grandchildren, briefly. Duncombe school fits in this because one of my daughters has a son who stayed with us in Bengeo, at the age of 3, 4 and 5 I think it was. And so we signed him up in Duncombe school which was very nice. He has since gone on, with his mother, back to America, I’m speaking about one of the two who is in America. And is now in his senior year in college at, and this is partly an interesting thing too, a place called Bowdoin College, Maine, which started out as a Christian place that made education available to ex slave people. In the 1860s, around the time of the civil war. That’s him. Gage’s son Max, is now a prominent young violinist. He plays with the Baltimore Youth symphony orchestra.
FG: Fantastic. Right, wow, Gosh.
TB: And so now we come to Catherine’s children. Sam, the oldest, had jumped completely into the technical aspects of information and all that stuff. He does, what shall we call it. He’s in the gambling, leisure, entertainment thing on the internet. You can deal with sports, who’s going to win between Chelsea and Man United, etc. What are the odds.
FG: A growing business.
TB: Incredible. And he like’s that. I said to him, why don’t you become an actuary in the city of London. It’s the same thing, but it seems exciting what he’s doing. So that’s Sam.
Lottie, Catherine’s daughter, went to a fairly good private school in London. I can’t remember the name of it. And went along to do 6th form somewhere else in London. She went on to take an art degree in Guildford. Now remember, her grandmother i.e. Myrtle, was an artist. So, we’re beginning to get little threads taking place.
Indigo, who is the third of Catherine’s children, now runs a little business on the internet. Little doodads, like these things [points to something].
FG: On yes, little jewellery bits, braids and things.
TB: She gets customers from all across the world. And she does this herself. It’s her mother, Catherine who went to Central School of Art and Design. So we have Myrtle, Catherine and Indigo.
JH: But you also have a sociologist...
TB: Oh yes, that’s right. So, we get different things. Ok community, we were interested in local politics. There is no two ways about that. In the 70s, there were choices that needed to be made about who was going to run the district council, the town council and so on. I’ll mention Peter Ruffles, as it’s about this time that we met him. He was a nice fellow even though he was a Conservative, don’t tell him that.
FG: [Laughing] I think that’s still the case. He’s still a Conservative.
TB: I’m joking, I’m joking. [laughing]. So, our choice was more towards the Labour side, so Myrtle used to, with the children in tow, do leafleting. She’d get down to the polling station and do whatever you do, sitting at the table and checking who is coming through and so on. So that was one thing. And then there was the resident’s association.
FG: Yes, I wanted to ask you about that. The West Street Residents Association.
TB: We never chose to hold office there, we just wanted to be ordinary members, but we were part of the activity taking place there. One of which was called the ‘three rivers report’. Somewhere there should be a copy of that. We were interested in the environment, in the flood plains, keeping the water clean and so on.
FG: The three rivers, of the 4 that go into Hertford.
TB: So, Myrtle and one or two trusted neighbours, Eve Sangster, as well. Went out and went all around, coming back with muddy shoes, and so on, so they produced this report. So that was one thing, the West Street Residents association was quite keen. Now, the Hertford Civic society of which we were members. Headed by Alan Melville was an interesting experience. Because given my interest in town and country planning, that was a wonderful place to be in the 1970s. Because there was much interest, I think, in making sure that we dealt with Hertford in some kind of sane way. Because we had the experience of Gascoyne way, you know what I mean? That cut off so much.
We were beginning to get something which I’ll come to when we discuss change, new housing units. Gated communities. The big toffs may have had gated communities but all of the rest of us lived ********. We begin to get these pockets of gated communities. Warren Terrace is a good example. The corner of Bengeo and New Road. To get into them you have to go through a gate. So, Hertford Civic society was very important. I ran the architectural awards each year giving awards for the best this and that. Design, renovation, whatever. If you remember where the Hertford Camera shop used to be?
Transcribers Note : He means part of Warren Park Road rather than Warren Terrace
FG: Down on Bull Plane.
TB: Alright, well across the street there is a building, I assume it’s still there. I assume also that it has a plaque on the wall. I headed up the committee that awarded them the award.
FG: Oh right, so that’s the one just up from the museum. I know the one.
TB: Yeah. So that’s the architectural awards. Anything else, I won’t speak about [laughing].
Changes. Well, the growth of new populations, I think. When we came here, you could traipse through Hertford and see your neighbours shopping. When Waitrose came you could meet them, because that’s where we shopped by the way. That’s where the county people shopped. And it probably still is true.
FG: Yes, I should think you meet a lot of people you know in Waitrose. I shall look out for you now [laughing].
TB: Ok. So new populations, and new things coming in. But the downside, more hairdressers, with respect of course, more boutiques, more of this, more of that. Coffee shops. A Turkish ‘whatever’. Thank goodness for the Turks. The new post office and so on. But we don’t have one home furnishing store.
JH: No shoe shops.
FG: After Gravesons went.
TB: That’s right. Absolutely. And of course, the charity shops are good to get little doodads I keep using that term. But for men, we want a proper men’s outfitter. New patterns of pop culture, we didn’t have that before. That only began late 50’s and early 60s. By the 70s children had a few more bucks in their slides. Pounds, shillings and so on. They weren’t farthings, they were beyond farthings, they had shillings, they had pounds. The barber jobs? Gone. Ok, ‘you think I’m working for charity’, the kid says to me [laughing].
Change, you were talking before about the new proposals on pavement and so on. Everyone began to start looking down into their mobile phones. You couldn’t see who, ‘was that Sally’s child, or not?’. Because, as one sociologist said, in close knit communities the night has a thousand eyes. Sally’s kid can’t get up to anything no good because somebody will see it. Well, all of that is gone.
FG: We have a thousand electronic eyes, don’t we? We all have cameras don’t we?
TB: Wow, you just said it. CCTV has developed. That is new as well. I might say, it may not fit completely. The whole question of surveillance and police presence. Dare I say, in the old days you look around and somewhere there is a policeman, and so on. And we probably had a local police, whatever. They weren’t tootling around in cars and didn’t have fancy buildings and so on. But with them moving out from the street and the coming in of surveillance, an important change takes place in the behaviour of people.
Community involvement. Well, this is Braziers field. 28 bungalows. All nice people. Retired. We have a little community centre down there. We also have a residents’ council. I’m on the residents’ council.
FG: Of course.
TB: [laughing] yeah. I’m nonplussed. I’m on the council. I refuse to be chairman because I don’t want to be. I want other people to be chairman, I just sit and make sure the budget gets taken care of. That we don’t pay over the odds for a gardener, or people to wash the window etc. I’m part of the monitoring of the budget. So, I think that’s an important role to play, to enable all of us to sleep well at night. To know that somebody isn’t taking our money unjustly.
FG: Exactly.
TB: I mean, I don’t want to put too much on this during my tenure. Mind this there is a chairman, there is a secretary and so on, very nice people. Let’s say, during ‘our tenure’ over the last 3 or 4 years. We’ve got Hanover, the association to drop their tariff from something like £200 to £162 per month. That’s what we have to pay for the various services. Because they came up with things such as inflation this, and inflation that. Well, inflation nonsense. Do better, for less.
JH: And they agreed with pressure from the residents’ association?
TB: And I also was able to begin to change the culture of dependency that many older people feel, and that others place on top of them. I’ll give you one example. Hanover…. [begins to laugh] …I’m not really against Hanover. I’ll put it this way. We found that the use of the word tenant came up frequently in discussions. Well who is a tenant? Well they have tenants who are retired people, that’s good. But when you address us, you must address us as owners of our houses. It’s a difference isn’t it.
FG: Absolutely it conveys a less permanent status, doesn’t it?
JH: So why not call you residents?
TB: Well ok, that’s true, as in Residents Council. But in almost all of the objective devices they use, we’re sort of dependent upon somebody. So, what some of us wanted to do was to shift some of the services out of the control of the association into our own control. For example, we could choose who would be our gardener, we could choose who would be the window cleaner. We set the price and pay ourselves.
Now, we come to the last point. Hertford Sketchers. My wife, artist, has done paintings. Basically West Street mainly, but other things, landscapes, portraits and so on. Relating to Hertford. I have an interest in photography and I have taken over the years, many photographs of places and people etc. For example, Hartham park etc. Nice pictures, I think. Well, I won a competition with the BBC…
FG: I saw that, I saw the BBC.
TB: Yes, well I was ‘mentioned in dispatches’. Yes, the seed mill was one. (Looks through papers) So, we got some things together of ours, which you’ll see up on the wall there. We held an exhibition of that, in the community centre for all of the residents. And other people came in. Some people came from Courtyard Arts. I think there may have been someone from the Hertford Museum. We had neighbours from all around who were invited. Maybe 100 people or so, not at one time. It was over two days.
Now, somewhere leading to that, and I now discover four years ago. I became interested in Herts Memories. I looked at the articles online and it says, ‘submitted by Professor Blair in 2011’, which is many years ago now. That was the family. Myself, Myrtle as an artist, ok? Children and so on. So, with that as an idea we began to put on the website, Myrtles paintings, my photographs, you see? This is how it emerged. And it is from that that we created the exhibition. And here is the picture of the seed mill [finds picture]. This is the one that was in the BBC competition, and that’s the one that appears on Herts Memories, and that’s the one that appears in the exhibition. In her case, the Hertford Art Society must have many catalogues that record her paintings. And individual owners have her paintings.
And with that I feel I can draw a conclusion. Saying that the Blair family from, in many cases, diverse historical origins have found themselves here, not as supplicants, certainly not as slaves, but as participants in the growth and development of Hertford. You know, as a one place. Hertfordshire as well, as we lived in Broxbourne. And I did a lot of town planning work. I’ve done things in Harlow, Stirling, Milton Keynes, I was a consultant in Milton Keynes development. So, I’ve paid my dues, you see. Plus, as a professor at the Polytechnic of Central London, which is now the University of Westminster, I have taught all of the best planners and architects living, some are dead now. You name anyone, he or she was probably on my course.
FG: I’ll leave Janet now to name all of them. I’m joking. Wow, well that is a legacy isn’t it.
TB: And we’re so happy, you see.
JH: And so, you’re happy you stayed in England. You’re happy that when you came back from Nigeria you made that decision to stay here, rather than going back to America?
TB: Yes, yes.
FG: Just picking up on that, your mother came to live with you. How did she feel about Hertford? Did she settle in and like it as much as you did?
TB: Yes. One or two stories about her. She was a member of the All Saints Church and several neighbours were also members of the church, and so she would go to church with them, fellow supplicants. So, the church was a place of solace for her. Let’s see, she came when she was about 80 and died when she was 89 so about 8 years or so.. She used to sit out in a park, in the grounds of castle hall. If you come from the car park, over the river, and you come around, somewhere along there are a few benches. She used to sit and rest her bones out there. And would, because she was a very personable person, would have good conversations with people that came past. And they used to ask, ‘Oh yes, my dear, and where are you from?’. Sometimes I think she was brave enough to say before then, where are you from? We’ve got to get this going on a two-way angle.
FG: Yes exactly, not everyone comes from Hertford.
TB: Ok, and she would reply. I’m Lucy Flood. Why? Well she was born in Monserrat in the West Indies and when she was born, there was a storm, a flood. Both of her parents were killed in the flood. She was saved, like Moses in the bull rushes. She was saved. People gave her the nickname ‘Lucy Flood’. Her maiden name was obviously Gage. She would tell them, ‘I’m Lucy Flood’. Meaning for her, ‘I’ve been through the worst and life can’t bring anything more that will hurt me’.
She had observations to make about places and people. For example, education. What she couldn’t figure out was why young people got paid to go to higher education. She came to America and lived most of her life in America, so she was aware of the American education system. She sent me through the school system and so on. She couldn’t understand why you had grants for going to further education. Her point was, it reduces self-confidence, self-worth, self-capabilities. You know, is that what you’re worth. A tuppence hap’ney. She was surprised they didn’t show…in her case, she was an anglophile I guess.. they didn’t show any grit or enterprise. That was the lazy person’s way to live off somebody else - in this case the government which also is your parent’s taxes.
So that was one thing that caused her some difficulty to understand. Also, with our children too, as our nose was in a trough. [laughing].
JH: Well it’s quite different from America, the American system you pay your way through.
TB: Yeah well, some say the American system of education is better too. Mind you, I don’t want to go too much into the politics of it, but the point is that if you want something, you’ve got to get out there and get it for yourself. Nobody is going to give it to you. That is America.
If you’re really good at something, someone will offer you a fellowship, or scholarship and it will be across the board. If you’re good at philosophy OK, but also if you’re good at basket weaving, I mean, I’m making that up…
FG: No, but it’s true isn’t it.
TB: Yes, or design, playing the violin, or football. There re scholarships, fellowships, you have to be the best. Anyway, so my mother felt that was a bit strange. I’ve already mentioned the class system. She really couldn’t understand, well, let me put it this way. She found it interesting that people of different ranks lived on the same street.
FG: Yes, the poverty and the gentility.
TB: Yes, that’s right. This is not something you get in New York City. Actually, I’m talking about some very interesting stuff, aren’t I? My goodness.
FG: [Laughing] Yes you are! It is fascinating. I think it’s the observations of people coming into Hertford.
TB: Differences in rank, differences in status and also differences in esteem. See, and how that worked out. If you take the West Street Residents’ Association, you had some people who were members and others who weren’t. The only two types who were in it were people who wanted something. The upper middle-class people wanted to keep our property safe and sound. The chaps on the lower end wanted better housing. And those two interests came together. They were not necessarily compatible. In some cases, the same guy who was there owned something that someone else was living in.
FG: Yes of course.
TB: In that context, Robert Kiln was a delight. An absolute delight. He had made money. I can’t remember, whatever he worked in. And he was willing to put that out for music scholarships and so on. You see, and he was equally good with any of the ranks, statuses around. I had to teach him how to make a good martini, however.
JH: You can’t get those in Hertford.
TB: That was my contribution.
FG: A very vital one to the wellbeing…
TB: [Laughing] And so there we are. I hope I have not only entertained you but given you something that is of value. Not only now, but in this whole question of history. We have a photographer came to do photographs [points to photograph], which we did for the great grandson. And I said, ‘well I don’t know these things, come to do the photographs’, and she says, ‘you don’t realise, this is history’.
FG: Yes, exactly! Do you get the Mercury newspaper?
TB: Yes, I do.
FG: Well Marilyn Taylor who is a member of our group and lives up in Bengeo. She’s always putting ‘Hertford in the Old Days’ photographs up and it’s fascinating.
TB: You see, of years back. In 100 years from now this will be the point of reference for this period of time.
JH: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, it’s really interesting.
FG: And Braziers field, what’s the history, was there ever an encampment of firelighters? Charcoal burners.
TB: No there was a family, the Brazier family, he was an MP, a wealthy man who ran a coal and gravel company and this was one of his sites.
FG: Ah well we’ll romanticise it then. Thank you so much, thank you.
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