Group photograph. Credit: LHS 12380 See below for group photo enlarged and with participants numbered Scroll across and up and down to view all the photo. Names and information supplied by Colin Gaskin are listed below. If you can name any others and/or add information please send to enquiries@harpenden-history.org.uk and we will add it to this page Group photo; participants numbered Colin’s information (numbers in bold): Other information added ...
Transcription of a newspaper article in our archives – which paper and date not known. HARPENDEN TALK ON A.R.P. ARP badge. Credit: Wikipedia Harpenden people learned something of the limitations of aid (sic) raid precautions, as well as of the possibilities, at a meeting in the Public Hall on Thursday night. “It is impractical to take precaution against a direct hit from a 500lb. bomb. You would have to go down 60 or 70 feet into the earth for pr...
Busby’s Chemists shop, c.1900, between West’s Bakery and The Registrar. Marten Part bank was on the corner of Leyton Green. Credit: LHS archives James Busby was born at Kirtlington in Oxfordshire on 21 March 1840. He came to Harpenden in 1865 as manager of the chemist’s side of Lewin’s grocers shop in Leyton Road, having served his apprenticeship as a chemist in Birmingham and Woburn, Bedfordshire. After two years in Harpenden he moved to Welling...
The school with cricket pitch. Credit: 1938 Prospectus, LHS archives Having read many of the comments I decided that someone may be able to pin point my time at Hardenwick so that I can fill in that space in my Family History. I think I started at the school when I was about 6 years old, as I know I attended in 1947 because my parents sent me a newspaper cutting showing the large snowdrifts around Spalding in Lincolnshire. I had to leave in about...
This article first appeared in Newsletter 123, August 2014. While researching the Mercier family of Harpenden I came across an account written by one Francis Smith who attended the school run by members of that family at Church Green in the late 1830s. The research is ongoing – the editor would be grateful for any information about the Mercier family. Francis Smith was born in 1834 at Pré Mill House and wrote an account of his family history in 1...
This article first appeared in Newsletter 124, December 2014. Shortly after the publication of Francis Smith’s memoirs in the last Newsletter (issue 123) a search of the British Newspaper Archive found the advertisement reproduced below in the Morning Post, which had recently been added to the archive. This is the same property that was put up for auction in 1836 (reproduced in Newsletter 116, page 21 – see below) but with additional details that...
Henry Salisbury and his family moved into a cottage near Yew Tree farm West side Crossing the lower end of the Common one came to the cottages near Yew Tree Farm [now known as 15 Leyton Road, Prezzos]. In the nearby cottages lived David Dimock. ‘Dave’ as he was known, was a journeyman butcher. He was much in demand when local people had a pig to kill. Many people kept a pig in their back yard to help supplement their supply of food. Dave, a burly...
... Peter Valentine The Verulam Auto Club used to run some excellent rallies, their best known being the 'Scotchlite Rally' which was a qualifying event in the London Counties Rally Championship....
A word picture of the centre of Harpenden, drawn form the details of the 1871 census, the Parish magazine and old newspaper cuttings. Also used were: “Thirty Three Years at Harpenden” by Miss Vaughan, and Edwin Grey’s “Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village” and his “Rothamsted Reminiscences”. Church Green – a little later – in 1887 Of those people living in the village centre in 1871 – the ordinary man or woman in the street – there is little r...
The Brigade outside the Fire Station, early 1900s, with an old manually operated fire pump and standpipes, branches, hose-reels and ropes. Left to right: Arthur King, Charles Latter, Robert Archer, William Read, William Bigg, Herbert Fells, Frank Bonfield, Arthur Harris, William Rogers, David Ward, James Dellar, William Slough, Fred Hodges and Frank Bentley. Credit: LHS archives – HC 182, caption from Harpenden Free Press, 20 Jan 1961 Harpenden’s...
Mary Skinner revised and updated the work she published as a booklet in 1998. A downloadable pdf is attached at the end of this document for readers who wish to print out a copy. As further information is received, we propose to add it, in italics, to the appropriate entry. See also photographs and a transcription of the memorial plaques. Detail of the Celtic Cross, designed by Ernest Hasseldine, and dedicated in 1920. Credit: LHS archives Quite ...
Coleswood House 1887. The boy is John Elmes In 2007 a Ralph Elmes living in Bere Alston, Devon, sent a large file of family photographs to Les Casey, the curator of Harpenden History Society’s collection, because they were relevant to some of his family who had lived in Coleswood, a Victorian house on the edge of Harpenden’s East Common. Les Casey was able to compile a family tree from them and other information. It shows that the Elmes family re...
... I have now found a couple of pictures of The Harpenden Corps of Drums when it had just left the scouting movement and started wearing scout like uniform with a peaked military style hat. The pictures date from the early 1980’s. Some before the Corps had valve instruments. ...
The aftermath of the bomb. Credit: LHS archives – LHS 13209 The bomb hit us on the night of Oct 20 1940. I owe my life to mother’s decision to sleep under the stairs, following a previous landmine explosion which had taken out our windows. I suppose the explosion must have awakened me. I just recall a roaring and rumbling as the house collapsed, then complete silence. My mother told me later, she called, “David, if you are alright shine your torc...
Lady Marjorie Bawden in 1992. Credit: Rosemary Ross The beginnings – Rothamsted Ramblers, 1900-1914 The Club was founded in 1927, but Ladies hockey had been played as early as 1900 when Sylvia Creke, granddaughter of Sir John Lawes of Rothamsted Manor, started the Rothamsted Ramblers. Miss Rhoda Wilson [sister of Theodora] – a founder member – says that they wore navy-blue skirts, white blouses and scarlet ties and a silver brooch with the letter...
Many of Harpenden’s book browsers must have been puzzled and disappointed at the sudden demise of the Town’s bookstall. A few facts would be well worth recording. Packing up for another Saturday, November 1994. Credit: LHS archives – LHS 4850 Nearly fifty years ago the Harpenden Branch of the charitable organisation, Toc H, set up a bookstall in order to raise funds for various good causes. At first it was located in the forecourt of “The George”...
Studio portrait of Iris Bone, aged about 4, sent to her mother. Credit: Iris Page Iris Page (nee Bone) was evacuated to Harpenden from Enfield and so must have arrived with the buses which brought 1,200 evacuees on Sunday, 3 September 1939. She contacted us after reading John Olley’s account of evacuees and adding a comment. It seems she was among the last to be placed, and was taken to 63 West Common, home of Mr & Mrs Milner by Mrs Lewis, who ...
... Rosemary Ross An earlier photo of Kirkwick has been found in our photo archives. This appears to show the house as it was when built in 1899 for Lt.Col Braithwaite until he left Harpenden in 1920. It has replaced a later photo which had been at the top of the page, and which has been positioned in the 1920s, when it would appear that the house was enlarged. The tennis court features in two photos from that period, when it was still a family home....
The Gardener’s cottage, sketch by Hilda Lydekker, c.1920s A comment posted on the page about the widening of Sun Lane in the late 1920s and the consequent loss of cottages on the south side, asked for information about the cottage hidden behind the walls of the Lydekker estate on the northern side of Sun Lane. In the Society’s collection of paintings, we have a watercolour sketch of the Gardener’s cottage by Hilda Lydekker, daughter of Richard Ly...
This article first appeared in Newsletter 120. An old-fashioned sporting fixture This time-honoured fixture in the sporting world was duly held on Thursday, the 8th inst., and there were some good fields of horses for the various events on the card. The weather was not inviting for outdoor enjoyment, as rain descended in a series of smart showers throughout the afternoon: but this did not appear to materially affect the attendance; indeed, what ...
We believe that the autobiographical extracts were published in the introduction to a second edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s first collection of short stories – Encounters – published in 1949. We have photocopies from Encounters, which were displayed in an exhibition in 1980 about School Days. Additional information is from LHS Newsletter 98, December 1995, and from ‘Bowen’s Court’, Elizabeth Bowen’s account of her ancestral home, published in 1942,...
Gorselands, 1935 Among the slides given to the Society from Jim Jarvis’s estate in 2013, are some photos from his childhood at Gorselands, Queen’s Road, which he had evidently copied to transparencies. These were digitised by Peter Boden. Marked “JMJ in full dress uniform, aged about 6”. copied by JMJ from a 1920s photo in 1998 JMJ on bicycle – 1999 copy made by JMJ from 1920s photo E C Jarvis in his car on Harpenden Common in December 1927 – is ...
Alison Edmonds prepared these notes for the European Heritage Weekend – In the Steps of Frank O Salisbury – on 15 September 2013. THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER WINDOW The St Christopher window This fine stained glass window was presented to the National Children’s Home and Orphanage* in 1928 by Lord Wakefield as a memorial to Dr Stephenson, one of the founders of the National Children’s Home. The donor was also asking us to remember the many men and wome...
The Society was given a large collection of 35mm slides of scenes in Harpenden from Jim Jarvis’s extensive photographic output, which also includes many glass negatives of model railway locomotives, and of houses on the West Common estate built by Jarvis Brothers in the 1930s. The donation came through Mr Humm in the spring of 2013. Sets of slides relating to Harpenden Lawn Tennis Club have been passed to the club, and of scenes around Wheathamps...