Leaving Home|The Home Patch
QUESTION AND ANSWER
So what was this home that you were leaving, your local geography, and your points of reference?
WELL, FOR SEVEN YEARS, beginning in summer 1951, we’d lived on a small, apparently unnumbered, country road a mile from Eccleshall, a village where two moderately significant A roads and one lesser B road met. We were miles from anywhere else of any size at all. It was eight miles south to Stafford, the county town. We had to go six miles to Stone in the opposite direction and on another eight from there to Stoke-on-Trent or Newcastle-under-Lyme, the heart of the Potteries. Other places as big as any of those were further away again. All routes to and from home wove their rural way through a largely pastoral landscape of hundreds of small fields, with the occasional farmhouse or cottage here and there, and scattered hamlets or very small villages.
And what exactly did you live in, a cottage, a house?
The key to that question is a few miles away at Swynnerton, not the village itself but the huge and much later manifestation, the Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) covering hundreds of acres to the northeast of Coldmeece and Millmeece. The ROFs were developed fast from 1938 onwards, some making explosives, others making guns, tanks and ammunition. Swynnerton was one of a third group of eighteen where the ammunition was filled with explosives. Its production began in mid-1940, reaching a peak of 18,000 workers two years later.
Many of those people lived in the Potteries towns, coming in and out of Swynnerton by train every day. Fairly soon, the huge numbers of passengers involved disrupted the smooth flow of the main line traffic. To cope with this, the North Staffordshire Railway built a new two-track one-mile branch from its Stone-Norton Bridge line to a new Coldmeece station with four platforms. Train times corresponded to the three shifts of the round-the-clock working day. The Coldmeece branch line carried over three million passengers in its time but the services never appeared on any public timetables. In fact, the ROF itself was never shown on Ordnance Survey maps until 1962. During the peak period of its activity, it was a secret rail service to and from a secret destination.
However, the relatively local employees weren’t sufficient to cope with the demand for operatives, so considerable numbers were recruited from further afield. They had hostel accommodation built for them on sites nearby. The dwellings were mainly of simple, single storey H-block design with central kitchen and recreation facilities provided on each site. The sites were named after historical naval figures: Duncan Hall, now demolished; Raleigh Hall, today a commercial trading estate; Drake Hall, now an open prison; Beatty and Howard Halls, now a BT training college. Nelson Hall had already become a teacher training college in the Fifties. There was also Frobisher Hall whose function I can’t recall.
And it was your father’s job that brought the family here?
Yes. In summer 1951 the Old Man was appointed as a management tutor at the Post Office Telephones Central Training School at Duncan Hall, at the edge of Yarnfield village. The single village pub was called the Labour In Vain, whose inn sign depicted a couple of white men scrubbing a black boy in a tub, trying to make him white. Howard Hall was the student accommodation for it and Beatty provided staff housing. We lived a few miles away to the south at Raleigh Hall. On each site, the H-blocks had been converted into 2- and 3-bedroomed houses. They were made of a kind of chalky plasterboard, their exteriors covered entirely with felt and painted matt khaki, later repainted in glossy dark green. The central bar of the H was the only part made of brick. Hot water for general and central heating use came from a boiler house serving the entire site through gigantic lagged pipes, snaking all over the place slung from short iron gantries. Rugged local men with incredible muscles, tattoos and Biblical first names like Reuben or Jedediah spent day and night shifts in the boiler house, shovelling coal and checking valve pressures to keep us warm inside our cardboard dwellings.
How did you respond to this unusual setting?
The Old Man had seen it already, but the first glimpse of it that my mother and I had was on the very day we moved into it. Moving to this from the residential outskirts of a gentle market town of considerable antiquity and character, from our neat little brick-built bungalow with its front and back gardens, lawns and fruit trees, I couldn’t quite believe what we were coming to. I suspect my mother was probably more than slightly taken aback when she first saw it. No matter how it may have been described to you previously, nothing could prepare you for the reality. Khaki and dark green paint everywhere, it all bore no resemblance whatsoever to anywhere any of us had ever lived before – or had ever imagined we might live. It wasn’t a village, a town or a suburb of either. There wasn’t a normal road or a street with houses on either side. We were simply plonked down on a site of crude, ugly H-blocks, in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, for the first time in our family life, we were to enjoy the luxury of both central heating and an enormous fridge in the kitchen - and I believe the rent was extremely low. So it should have been.
Despite the unusual nature of it all, we settled down in time, as you do, and the initial oddness of our surroundings gradually became ordinary. The unused parts of the site, such as the former kitchens and other facilities that had been in daily use during the war, provided unlimited possibilities for young teenagers, once the small gang of us had found ways of getting in. As time passed and you got to know people, you took more part in what went on. I joined the site Youth Club, run by a man called Stan who later became a vicar. My mother was secretary of the Sports and Social Club for years and, for a small bet, was the first woman there to use the Gents; the Old Man became chairman of the Horticultural Society; and they were members of the thriving Film Society at Howard Hall. The Old Man got lifts to Duncan Hall with colleagues every day until he eventually bought his first car, a black Vauxhall ABG 355, round about 1954. I travelled to school in Stone by Bassett’s Coaches of Trentham, whose owner Reg Bassett also ran a big successful dance band.
When we moved to Raleigh Hall, my mother was determined that, whatever anyone else might say, she would pronounce ‘Raleigh’ with a long a as ‘Raa-aa-aaleigh’. She had even considered ‘Rawleigh’ for a while. She had great difficulty getting anyone locally to understand her when she had to give her address, but stuck to it obstinately. Everyone else pronounced the a short and said what sounded like ‘Rally’ and the place was known in the area as ‘Rally Orl’. Perhaps that pronunciation was her attempt to give her extremely unsightly surroundings a bit of class. (Interestingly, she always pronounced ‘off’ as ‘orff’ until the day she died).
What did you make of Eccleshall, your nearest settlement?
It provided several of the essentials, quite a few shops, a pub or two and an off-licence which interested the Old Man, and I used to cycle down there to get my haircut.
Between Raleigh Hall and Eccleshall was a mile of distance and a small wiggly river called the Sow. The Domesday Survey recorded about 100 inhabitants and there’s a 10th century stone cross still standing outside today’s Parish Church of Holy Trinity. The old name ‘Ecleshelle’ combines the Romano-British word eccles (church) and the Saxon helle or halh (land by the river). Apparently the estate had been given to the Bishop of Lichfield some considerable time before the Conquest. By the end of the 13th century about 500 people lived there. By then, the village had acquired a charter to hold a weekly market and an annual fair. The castle, a significant fortress built by Bishop William Langton in 1305, was besieged and eventually sacked by Parliamentary forces during the Civil War. It was rebuilt as a large country house during the 1690s.
Like many English villages, Eccleshall was probably a lot livelier during the preceding couple of centuries or so than it ever was in the 1950s. It owed much of its 18th century growth and prosperity to its strategic position on the main London to Chester coaching route, and it was an important stopping place on several different routes. Local leather work and shoemaking had also provided wealth on the domestic level for some three centuries but they had almost died out by the end of the 19th century as mechanised shoe factories were established in Stone and Stafford. Its communications value had declined by 1812 with the development of the Irish Mail to Holyhead. Unfortunately for the village, both the canals and the railways bypassed it, although I remember a pub called The Railway Arms on the Stafford side, presumably built in anticipation of a line that never came near it.
I went there mainly to get small bits of shopping for my mother, and for the 1st Eccleshall Boy Scouts, run by Jack Griffin and Ted Cook. I must have walked or cycled to and from Eccleshall hundreds of times in those seven years, passing very little of note on the way. There was one thing, though: outside a particular cottage near the edge of the village, there were always the bodies of small rodents hanging on the barbed wire fence beside the pavement. As kids, we developed myths about who might live there – people we’d never seen - and what the little corpses were for. We eventually decided their purpose was to warn off other small rodents but privately favoured our own more lurid and arcane explanations allegedly derived from centuries of weird country lore.
LAST WORD According to today's website eccleshallguide.com:
'the small country town . . . is predominantly a pleasant
residential town for people working in Stafford, the
Potteries and further afield'.
You say you went to school in the town of Stone. How did that compare?
If you click the S & S button below, you’ll find the companion piece to this conversation entitled Stone and Stafford, which should answer your question.