Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Waitman, Major Christopher (O2003.11) |
| Interviewee | Christopher Waitman (Major) (CW) |
| Interviewer | Eve Sangster (ES) |
| Date | 15/04/2003 |
| Transcriber by | Jean Riddell (Purkis) |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording No: O2003.11
Interviewee: Christopher Waitman (Major) (CW)
Date: 15th April 2003
Interviewer: Eve Sangster (ES)
Venue: 4 Villiers Street, Hertford
Transcriber: Jean Riddell (Purkis)
Typed by: Freda Joshua
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
(This recording was difficult to hear because of a loud hissing noise)
ES: This is Eve Sangster on Tuesday April 15, 2003. I’m at 4 Villiers Street with Mr Waitman. I’ll find out his Christian name in a minute – Christopher, yes. How old are you?
CW: In a month I shall be 89
ES: So you were born in 1914?
CW: A long time ago.
ES: Did you have any brothers or sisters?
CW: Yes, I had two brothers. My mother and father were very clever about their children, they spaced it 5½ years between each one. I was born, then my middle brother, Stanley, was born 5½ years later, then my younger brother, who’s still alive, was born 5½ years after him [poor sound but could just make out older brother lives in Canada, the younger either Kent or Devon. Father was in the Royal Engineers and Christopher in the Royal Artillery] I was a gunner
ES: So your father lived to tell the tale?
CW: Yes, he was 80 when he died.
ES: Did he tell you about his experiences in the 1st World War?
CW: Not a great deal, no. I think a lot of soldiers in the 1st war didn’t really. They seemed to want to forget about it, another life. Unless you’re stimulated or you’re one of these attention seekers. A lot of people now are very good at advertising themselves, especially women, particularly [then comes a barely audible criticism of the Spice Girls, which it’s too difficult to follow]
ES: Where were you born?
CW: I was born in Paddington, 86 Walterton Road [W9]
ES: So you went to school locally?
CW: Yes, I did, Essendine Road School. And a little bit down from Paddington our sports ground and the recreation ground where we used to go to play games. When I was about 11, I went in for some sort of exam and I won a place in an industrial… – not concerned with being a clever boy but learning to use brains and hands, which we don’t seem to have very much of these days. How many young people these days are aching to be engineers? All they want to do is media studies. We get them over here, young students, and they all think they are going to do media studies and bogus jobs of that kind.
ES: When you say we get them over here, over where?
CW: Well, some of them in that house over there.
ES: Oh, a hostel for students?
CW: Yes it is a hostel but it’s private.
ES: So when you got your industrial scholarship, where did you go?
CW I think I left school just before my 15th birthday. I went to a good firm called Buss and Eliston as an apprentice to this firm. They were very high class woodworkers, they made the woodwork in churches and they did a lot of carving, and there was a lovely French man called Sir Thiery. But, unfortunately the clients were poor, that would have been in the thirties. So then I had to leave, so I took a job in Harrods and I got a job in display.
ES: Still on the artistic side.
CW: I stayed there for a while and then I went to work for John Lewis, not doing the same thing but in the furniture department and I stayed in the furniture business for some time until the war.
ES: You haven’t got a London accent, it’s much more a Harrod’s accent!
CW: That probably beefed it up.
ES: I just wondered!
CW: No, I think the truth of the matter was, like many boys do, my son for example when he was a little lad when he first started work, he was doing all kinds of rough labouring jobs and he would come into the house where we lived then talking really rather rough stuff, because men pick it up generally, do women do this?
ES: I’m not sure to such an extent, but, of course, men have to, we now call it being streetwise, adopting a protective coverage.
CW: That’s exactly what it is, otherwise you stand out and you become a figure of ridicule and that tends to diminish you, so what you do then, you pick up the local lingo and use that as a protective covering.
ES: You were in John Lewis and did that take you up to the war?
CW: It did. I joined the Territorials when I was in John Lewis because I was at the one in Sloane Square. Peter Jones and John Lewis had a very great admiration for service and army people and they encouraged me and others in various departments to join the TA. I didn’t need any encouragement because I wanted to do it anyway. At the time, I was playing rugby with a London Polytechnic and many of them had joined an outfit called the City of London Yeomanry
down there in the City. So I joined with them, the rugby club.
ES: John Lewis has always been a rather family (firm) and it still is very different.
CW: Old Speeden Lewis, who was the guiding light when I was there, he was an ornithological body, birds of one kind or another, and when I joined the army proper when the war came, I was sent to a Battery down at Fareham in Hampshire and we were then all despatched to West Africa.
I’d been in touch with the firm, I’d been talking to the man who’d been my main superior and this had got back to dear old Speeden because I got a letter from him saying would I please be so kind as to give him some information about the local owls. At the time there were people walking about in West Africa selling Shanti gold weights. I was collecting these things and one of them could have been in the shape of a West African owl, so I packed one in a little basket in a little box and sent one back to him.
ES: So were you called up?
CW: No, no, I was already in the army.
ES: I know you were in the Territorials, so did that mean you automatically ---
CW: I went to a firing camp in 1939 north of Liverpool. When I first joined them they were Royal Horse Artillery, so I did a year with the nags, horse-drawn guns of course, then the whole of the army was reorganised because aircraft were becoming very much more important in warfare and you needed guns to fire at them, heavy anti-aircraft, big guns, then you had the light ones, bofors guns, 20mm, fired very fast, put up a lot of flak. These were for low-flying aircraft and we were transferred into that.
ES: Had you met your wife by then?
CW: Oh yes, I met my wife when I was living at home. Still [I think he said he met her at a rugby match]
ES: So when did you get married?
CW: 6 or 7 months after the war actually started. I was in Tilbury at that time and I had a leave and we decided to get married. My wife was a Catholic and I had to go and see the Catholic priest, you can’t just marry a Catholic. I don’t know what it’s like now but then I had to almost swear on my God’s oath that I’d never stop my children being Catholic.
ES: Yes, I think that’s still ---
CW: I’d been to see the local priest on a couple of occasions and I’d agreed with one of my friends in the army to come with me. Unfortunately, we got to the Catholic church on the certain day and my friend never turned up. So there I was, about to be married and no best man. And there was a little audience of people with nothing better to do [and I asked one man?]. I never knew who he was! A lot of my wife’s friends came to the church. I only had this one major – he didn’t turn up so I was alone.
ES: Tilbury must have been a dangerous posting – was it?
CW: This is the time of the phoney war, there wasn’t much doing up until that time and I’d been at various places. Bentley Priory was my main posting up. This was the HQ of Fighter Command and it was ringed with bofors because they thought that the enemy would want to do low level attacks and destroy and they never did.
We were doing our drills and mostly bored most of the time and then we moved down to Tilbury – much more exciting there because the Germans started creeping up the Thames. They started doing sneaky little raids on airfields in Kent, very low flying and not in great quantities, just a number here and there. I can’t remember the names of the airfields lining the Thames, but they were all there and after that, for a little while, we fired up another round (?) didn’t hit anything, the idea was to frighten them away.
At that time, the whole battery went down to Sheerness, the Germans were coming out of the Thames Estuary and they were dropping a thing called a magnetic mine. Now these were mines that floated barely visible and if you touched them they blew up, mostly commercial stuff coming out of London. So we were put on 3 old paddle steamers. We had a bofors on the front and a bofors on the back and we used to go out at night and sit in the Estuary and wait for these people to come, quite exciting
ES: And did they come?
CW: Oh yes, they did. I don’t know if we ever brought any down. Sometimes with the bofors the round is too small to bring it down, it’s a wound the aircraft can absorb. We might only have done damage but it scared them off. [I think he’s saying that he wanted to be a bombardier]
CW: And the captain of the Battery came along one day to me and said, ‘Would you like to become an officer?’ and I said, ‘Oh yes please’ [inaudible as to why and they sent him somewhere to ---] turn me into a temporary gentleman
ES: Where did you train?
CW: (Inaudible place) that’s where all the guns ---
ES: And did you have a more exciting life?
CW: No!
ES: Where did you go?
CW: Well, my first posting after I was commissioned was down to Fareham in Hampshire, the Battery there I was sent down to, because they were going overseas, no-one quite knew where they were going. Originally, it’d been a Territorial Battery which had been turned into a regular Battery of the army and I was there with a number of other young subalterns. We didn’t quite know what was happening and suddenly we were going to Africa. That would be good – a lot of rushing about in deserts, but it wasn’t that, it was West Africa, hot and sticky place.
Anyway, off we went. We arrived in Freetown where the Battery was installed and I got sent down the coast to a place called Takoradi. There were 2 of us, I was 2nd in command to the Troop Commander. We took a whole troop of people down there because there was some installation we needed to defend. At that time, France was no longer our chum and they had a lot of places down there they were colonising the Ivory Coast in particular and Sierra Leone of course, was midway between the Ivory Coast and another just round that bend of Africa, French controlled, they had the French Army out there.
ES: Some of it was controlled by the Germans, wasn’t it? I’m thinking about the African Queen.
CW: No, they never did have much, the Germans. They were never a colonising country like us or the French. The French were really quite good, they had a lot of stuff in Africa if we go back over the history of things, the French did colonise a great deal more. I would say west and north-west Africa in those days were French controlled. Takoradi was a very important port at that time for shipping that was coming from the north or London, UK, going down to South Africa or India. They sometimes had to call at Sierra Leone, Freetown, or Takoradi which was a very big deep harbour, which we had built there. It was man-made, so that’s the reason we were stationed there.
ES: Where were you stationed when you were made a major?
CW: Ah well, that was some time in the future – I’m talking now about when I was still a 2nd Lieutenant and I was Lieutenant soon after that. Well nothing of any great consequence happened during those times. We were always on the alert and had quite a few amusing adventures.
I went with another chap who was a garrison engineer and we went in French territory, 50 miles into the country, because we were told that there was a cache of pipes that my engineering friend seemed to want to get hold of if he could, we never did though. Otherwise we were doing training and looking after the soldiers. Then eventually the war in the Far East broke out and then it was thought that our soldiers should go and fight in Burma. I’m skipping a year or two when I say that because nothing much happened at that time. We did extremely well and it was then that I became a Battery Captain.
We’d moved from the Gold Coast as it was then over here to Nigeria, had a lot of exhaustive training and I became a Captain and my Major was a naughty boy – he did something really stupid, so I took over the Battery for some time, and then we moved over to India and during this time we’d gathered a lot of Polish officers. Now, as a sort of footnote to all of this, when Poland was overrun by the Germans, a lot of the Polish army managed to escape through France to England and, in doing so, they were all concentrated up in Scotland in Ayrshire and then they parcelled out, half a dozen to this place and half a dozen to that, and in the West African Division we got quite a lot of Polish officers and one became a very good friend of mine, Benish. He took over the Battery and I was his Battery Captain. Off we went to Burma, well to India first of all then to Burma where we started to try to kill Japs. For some reason Benish was sent back to England and I became the Major.
ES: And did you kill Japanese?
CW: Don’t know. Never rushed out to look and see, you just fired at them and they fired at you. Bamboo jungles are strange places, rather mysterious and rather eerie because these great sticks of bamboo grow up like grass and you have to cut them through it and it isn’t an open warfare at all. It’s a rather nervous business, you have to cut little tracks and you go out on patrol all the time and you’re walking along a little track in the jungle, which may or may not be made by you or the people that lived there. They were very sensible, they just got out of the way of either us or the Japs. And suddenly around the corner, 50 yards ahead of me, was a Jap, who turned round, we all retreated very quickly to think and then we would open fire, hoping we would hit them where they were. It doesn’t sound very heroic, does it.
ES: It’s heroic enough, I think. Did you not see your wife in all these years?
CW: After about 3 years abroad, I did have a leave, yes. I came back on a ship called The Arbosso (?), one of the West African ships that were used by the Elder Dempster Line. The Elder Dempster people were the local shipping people in West Africa and one of those ships was the Arbasso, when I was still a captain for 3 or 4 weeks leave. And I was in charge of a battery of guns on the Arbasso and we fired at quite a lot of aircraft and also a lot of shipping too, as we approached England there was a lot of enemy shipping [difficult to hear but could be that if ships didn’t make the right signals they were fired on, I think he’s saying. He then goes on to compare American and British soldiers].
We were by far the better soldiers, not the better fighters, the better soldiers because our discipline was a lot more regular, attuned to it, by reason of being an old country, we accepted discipline as part of the life that we were used to and the Americans don’t quite have that feeling, being a younger country, but I’m speaking of 50 years ago. Wherever the British Army went, we made friends very quickly, at Tilbury, for example, I reached a little agreement with my Troop Commander that I wouldn’t do any late guard duties at night after the first one, and, in return, I would become the Troop Cook. I could cook a little bit, simple food, and Naafi would send me great quantities of everything, great lumps of meat, baskets of fruit and veg, and as I started cooking these great joints of meat there was lots of dripping and we had lots of kids hanging around the place, chatting up and I got the idea of sending bowls of dripping to their mothers. It was very difficult in those days, fats of all kinds [were scarce] and we got in kind – these little boys would turn up with packets of cakes their mums had made – for a time I pretended that I’d made them, but I couldn’t keep it much longer! Now, where were we? [Pause]
ES: We could go back to your military career but after the war, did you come back straight away? Some soldiers waited months, didn’t they?
CW: I’d had a rather nasty accident with a grenade, a phosphorous grenade, and I threw one and I got burned. When I came back [just after that], my missus said, ‘Your face looks like the map of Europe’. Luckily, I was carried away to a First Aid post nearby and they splashed stuff all over me and picked the bits out. So I had to leave the Battery and come home to England in 1944.
ES: And was that the end of your active military service?
CW: Pretty much, yes. But after that I was posted to Northumberland, a training regiment there, to take over a Battery of young soldiers who were going to be sent to Europe. By then, the war was coming to an end and these lads were going to act as military policemen. As soon as I got there, I reported sick to the Colonel and eventually I was sent down to Roehampton where I had a long skin graft – these fingers were all glued together.
ES: Oh yes, so it’s never been right, that hand?
CW: It was better than this at one time, it’s got worse as I’ve grown older. They managed it quite well, these 2 fingers were much straighter than they are now.
ES: So when you came out of the Army, what did you do? I want to know how you ended up in a shop in Fore Street! You were living at Roehampton with your wife?
CW: When the Army finally released me, I went to work in the Board of Trade. I was pretty well up in furniture at that time – making and designing, and I got a job with the Board of Trade because at that time Utility Furniture was being made. But I found it a boring job, bookwork and paperwork. My wife was still working at Harrods, she’d been at Harrods all the time. She and her friend had gone to join the army or the WAAFS, her friend had been accepted but my wife had been told that, because she was half French, they would have to look into her details. And there was me, a serving officer in the army and her brother was a regular air-force man from before the war, and yet they didn’t accept her. She was having a good time with Yanks in London. She used to go to several of their canteens and serve there.
ES: What was her name, her surname?
CW: She was French on her mother’s side, her name was Georgina. Nothing French about her except perhaps her figure, large on the upper part and then slim down. The English figure’s the other way.
ES: Yes, pear-shaped!
CW: She didn’t mind the idea of moving so I bought a little house with a business attached to it with the money I’d accrued, at Winchmore Hill which was doing furniture and I built it up, and that trade went on for some time. I was able to get some decent stuff from some of the best manufacturers. That came to an end of course and I knew that was happening and branched out. I’d had a lot of experience of upholstery.
ES: So what actually brought you to Hertford?
CW: I felt the need to expand a bit. I suddenly saw this advert – a Mrs Norris. Mrs Norris was Henry Norris’s wife. She’d started this little decorating business in this shop in Fore Street. She was employing most of her various nieces and one of her sons there too. She was making no money out of it because she was paying these people just because they were family. I got in touch with them and we took to each other – I rather liked her.
ES: I had contact with Joy Norris, the artist, who I think was her daughter and also the Norris who worked on the Corn Exchange.
CW: I forget the names but she had 2 sons, Morley and ? They worked for Norris, Builders, and 2 nieces, one who had a business out by Hertford North, where she did something to do with chickens, and the other niece, the flour miller opposite the hospital.
ES: Garratts?
CW: Yes, she was a Garratt. Both these girls were Garratts. Mrs Norris was employing them and paying silly amounts of money.
ES: And married into the Norris family.
CW: I’m not sure if it wasn’t Mrs Norris’s sister who married Garratt.
ES: What year did you come to Hertford?
CW: It must have been the late 50s I should think. I had this big shop in Winchmore Hill. One side we dealt with the furnishing, upholstery and so forth, and the other side we did [cane furniture] and lampshades.
ES: So how did the town strike you when you first came to Hertford?
CW: I’ve always liked it. I’ve always found it to be a pleasant, not to say quaint, little town. It’s lost a lot of its glamour in recent years, it’s lost a lot of its reason to be. I remember walking down Fore Street one morning, used to walk to work in those days because I lived down the road here at 53 Ware Road at that time. No, wait a minute, was still living at Winchmore Hill and commuting. My wife was running the shop at Winchmore Hill in the mornings and I was going back – I employed people – in the afternoons. Walking down the road earlier on and being surprised to see a lot of cattle and sheep being driven up the main road and turning up by that pub, the cattle market was behind it, The Ram.
ES: You’re the same age as Bruce Johnson, the butcher. He speaks of, in his early days of the shop, driving flocks up the Ware Road into Fore Street with sticks.
CW: I wondered what I’d strayed into, because although they didn’t walk about with long sticks and gaiters, I liked the idea of it. There were a lot of very interesting customers. It was a very high class business in those days, what we used to call rather snobbishly, the County Trade, what I would call the squire-archy.
I realised that with the turnover she (Mrs Norris) was doing, with my connections, I had seamstresses, upholsterers, carpet layers – I had a whole body of people I could call on. I didn’t actually employ them, they were sub-contractors to me and I picked up a lot of the work she’d paid out to do, by doing it myself, which is what I was there for.
And after a little time we did very nicely out of it. The long lease on Winchmore Hill was sadly coming to an end so we decided to pack up and buy a house in Hertford, and that’s when we came – late ‘50s.
ES: You say you were 51 Ware Road
CW: 53.
ES: And is it one of the tall old properties?
CW: Yes, you know the one
ES: Where is it in relation to the one with the long frontage and very high hedge [55]
CW: Next door, this side. There’s a pair of houses there
ES: They’re all handsome really.
CW: I’m still in contact with the people that last lived there.
ES: What, Brian Bromley?
CW: Yes, I went to lunch with him and Clio the other day. I go there every month
ES: It looks a lovely house and because of those high hedges it’s quite mysterious. Was it lovely?
CW: When I knew it I wouldn’t say it was lovely. It had a lot of possibility. I think originally it was a very nice private house and then it became a little dame school [late 19th Century to about 1930’s]
ES: Yes, I know somebody who went there.
CW: Primarily it was for little girls. They taught them how to walk nicely and how to sit without showing their knickers and all that and I think they learned a little bit of manners. Then, when that packed up, the house was left with the remnants of this. I found it an awkward house when the Bromleys had it – they weren’t the first to have it – Gwynfer Wills – she lived there with her husband for some time.
ES: Have you ever belonged to the local Dramatic Society?
CW: No, I can’t act!
ES: So you prospered, and can you remind me of the address [of the shop], Norris Décor.
CW: 11 Fore Street.
ES: What was it like being in such a very old building?
CW: Very interesting indeed – well, we just left that alone.
ES: Was anybody upstairs?
CW: Well, when I first came there, I took it over from Mrs Norris at a reasonable price, I paid her what she asked me to pay.
ES: So you actually owned it?
CW: Well no, she had a long lease on it. The cleaners on the corner [of Fore Street and Market Place and opposite Church Street], they owned the property and Mrs Norris had it on a long lease and she passed the lease over to me.
Prior to this there were this old couple called Swan, Mr and Mrs Swan, and they had that little shop as a sweet shop before Mrs Norris took it over. Mr Swan was a smart little fellow who used to go for walks now and then. Mrs Swan used to wander about in a rather vague manner and became very lost. They just lived in one room at the side and they had a kitchen [position inaudible] which I had the use of as well [then the noise of an emergency vehicle drowns out the rest of the description]. It was put up in the 16th century, perhaps a little earlier. I looked it up in the records on one occasion. At the time of the various plagues and pestilences in London they had to keep the civil service going, so places like Hertford and Guildford all round London, they sent out parcels of people to live there while the town [London?] was being plagued or being burned out by fire, and that house was where they used to come, used to pack’em all in.
God knows what they did for sanitation, the only lavatory was right up the top and that wasn’t all that old, late Victorian. The entry to the house was through a little backway in Maidenhead Street. The front of that house was not a shop, it was just a building, a frontage. If you went in there in 1720 you wouldn’t have found a row of shops. The only thing that interested me at the time was that marvellous pargeting, the Italianate style of pargeting.
ES: I was very surprised to hear how charming you thought Hertford was, because I was talking to someone who’d come in the middle of the 1960’s and he said when he told people that he was moving to Hertford they said, ‘What do you want to go there for?’ When do you think the balance was tipped over to what we now have?
CW: The balance was tipped over when the big shops came.
ES: The first large supermarket, say Fine Fare, 1960’s, 1970’s.
CW: Do you remember Victor Value down in Maidenhead Street opposite Woolworths, it then became Fine Fare and a little way along.
ES: We had Home and Colonial.
CW: Those, yes, and, of course, it was always a Co-op town, big Co-ops too, all down Maidenhead Street. When I first came here it seemed to me that there was a butcher on almost every corner, and how many are there now?
ES: Well, none. You’ve got to go for the meat counter, haven’t you. So when did your shop lose the patronage of the local squire-archy, or did it never?
CW: I don’t think it ever did. I went on working but as I grew older I became a little more short-tempered than I had been, which meant that I wasn’t as good at it as I used to be. And my wife said the same thing, because I know she used to get very up-tight about people who complained such a lot. When we first went there they didn’t but later on they did seem to be pernickety about things, always moaning about this and that, about things that couldn’t really be improved on.
I remember one day my missus was dealing with a customer, won’t tell you her name, you might well know her. She used to come in with a friend and there’s nothing worse than someone who [wants to complain?] coming in with a friend, so you end up time after time this person came in. We looked at books, we sent her patterns and I went and measured up and we did all kinds of stuff. To cut it short, nothing ever came of it because every time we thought we’d got it in the bag, the friend would say, ‘I don’t really like that’. I remember once my missus was dealing with one of these kind of irritating people and she did a thing I’d never seen her do before – she walked to the door, opened it and said to the customer, ‘OUT’ I said to her, ‘You mustn’t do things like that’. But she got fed up with it too. I must say I think the standard and style of customers changed at that time too. I hear now people complaining and I think the man who ran Gravesons at one period…
ES: Yes, David Tomlin.
CW: He first came as a young man because I had people come to me who’d worked there and my neighbour in Ware Road, the daughter worked there as a window dresser, anyway, David Tomlin said the standard of behaviour was so thoughtless, there was no pleasure in it anymore. They all wanted you to do something and holding you responsible, never them.
ES: I would think there’s a general decline in standards and manners.
[Then follows a criticism of hospital staffing/patients it’s inappropriate to include]
CW: It’s in line with the way we all dress nowadays. Dignity? Has slipped away.
ES: It’s all partly due to the lack of discipline [then a criticism of child management] Just going back to the shop, did you receive any support from the Chamber of Commerce?
CW: I belonged to the Chamber of Commerce. We met at the Priory Rooms and talked over this and that, how we could build up trade because even in those days we could see it was slipping. I mean this is in the days when there were shops in Fore Street.
ES: Yes, it looked a bit depressing as I walked along this afternoon. Did you ever belong to organisations like the Rotary?
CW: No. I don’t know why, it never occurred. I’m not by nature a belonger. I have a meeting with my division every year, of course, and I belong to the Civic Society as you well know. I think that was a good organisation, I think it has been beneficial. And next door, I put Glen up for an award and they did come round then, Sheila Pettman. I think he got a recommendation. I said to him, ‘You should join the Civic Society, people like you’, but he’s dilatory, can’t be bothered.
ES: That’s a general attitude but you would have thought, in his case, he would have done. OK, is there anything we could have spoken about?
CW: I’ll just say this, when my wife and I decided to move because the house was too big for us, our son had moved away, he lives in Sweden now, so we thought of moving to Norfolk where we’d been on holiday. Then I thought there wasn’t much point in this. I’d had customers who’d moved away to the seaside and then, a couple of years later, you’d see them walking round ‘Oh, hello. You on holiday?’, ‘No, we’ve moved back. They’re not very friendly down there’. You see, holiday is one thing but to live there all the time is different. So we decided we’d stay. She’d always liked this little road because as she walked down to the Catholic Church she’d come down [Villiers Street] and at the time this house came up and it was just what we wanted and I’ve been fascinated by it because this road has become very desirable. All of a sudden roads come into their own – people want them!
ES: We moved into West Street in ’68, nobody would give you a mortgage, then reluctantly the local authority…
CW: I’ve often said I wish I were 20 years younger and retired. I would love to research this road because I know a little bit about it. This land was owned by the Dukes of Leicester or Buckingham?
ES: I half think it might have been Buckingham.
CW: All the streets down here are family names.
ES: Yes, I think it’s the family name of the Dukes of Buckingham. Do you know the date of this house?
CW: Well, the old people who lived next door, they had their deeds still and the house was built in 1856, and my house was built before theirs and it’s not connected to their house. But when you look down the street it’s not just one row of houses built all the same. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know who the builders were, for example.
End of recording