The Lawrence Family at Hatching Green
No. 4 is in the right-hand block
LHS collection
The White House, formerly the Horse & Jockey, at the end of Harpenden Racecourse
LHS archive
1900-1930
By Eric Meadows
No. 4 Thatched Cottages (the middle cottage of three), Hatching Green, Harpenden, was the home of the Lawrence family from c.1900 to c.1930. There were 13 children, the last one born c.1920. Their mother lived to the age of 94 years, dying after breaking a femur; until then a very fit woman.
In about 1930 this Lawrence family moved to the ‘White House’, St Albans Road, Harpenden – the isolated house on a bend about 300 yards south of Cross Lane. That house then had no piped water or electricity, oil lamps being used after dark.
Information from a conversation with the youngest members of this family, who, together with a brother, had a bakery at Bricket Wood until about 1980. He was living in retirement in a village just outside Inverness when Eric Meadows met him in 1987.