Cogitations…The Old Codger aka GPP
First lets concentrate on the southern end of the Parish.
The Great Shalstone Train Robbery
I’m including this little piece under the title “Cogitations” because I think cogitations are private and personal to one’s own thoughts, whereas reminiscences require someone else to listen to them and these are private thoughts, which come to me out of the top of my head, while I’m thinking about years ago, because I sit for a long time by myself. The other evening, I suddenly woke up and realised there was a story that hadn’t passed through my brain for, probably, forty years; I had totally forgotten about it and it’s the Great Shalstone Train Robbery.
In those days, the Express trains to and from London and up north, always had a postal coach on them, which was a mobile sorting office and, just south of Bletchley, there was a gantry which hooked on to a mail sack which had been left to be collected or dropped off. During the dark days and nights of the early war, a mail sack was lurking, unattended, by the railway track at Bletchley. Some rascally people realised this and somehow managed to get the tenancy of Number 35 [in Shalstone] for a short while. Nobody was attending to the village very much; there was an agent who did the paperwork but no one kept an eye on things. My parents were in Tewkesbury and, one night, three men, with a little car, waited for the mail sack to be dropped, popped it into the car and came, hot foot, down the A422, stopping off at Bear Bridge. Two of them came across the public footpath, towards the village, to number 35. They didn’t actually have to go into the village because the path stopped just by their front door. When they were safely inside, they undid all the registered letters, put the rest back in the bag, and went back to Bear Bridge, where they were picked up again. When the Agent finally realised that, since the tenancy first started, nothing much had happened at number 35, they opened the door and found that the grate was full of opened registered letters – the contents long gone..
Bear Bridge
While I’m cogitating, lots of stories come into my head which haven’t ever been recorded and I would like to put them on paper so that they are not lost forever because, when you are 95, you have to have a very long memory and, luckily, my memory is fairly good! The very fact that they have come out means that there is some purpose of truth in the stories.
I talked just now about Bear Bridge. Rumour (or myth or legend) has it that a tramp had a pet bear and he travelled up and down the roads. The bear used to dance to provide him with some pocket money and, very often, he camped down by Bear Bridge because there was water, wood, shelter and somewhere for the bear to live, hence it became known as Bear Bridge.
Shalstone Mill and Fulwell Station
If you go on from Bear Bridge down to where it joins the Ouse, you will find the remains of what was “Huntsmill”. I have a document from 1347 which bequeaths the rights to have a mill there for the parish. The Great Ouse started at Syresham and went through Whitfield, Turweston, Westbury, Shalstone, down to Tingewick and, eventually, came out in The Wash. If you go a bit further along, you come across the railway crossing at Fulwell. I remember that refrigeration didn’t come into the countryside until the early 40s. In Buckingham there was an ice factory. My grandparents did a lot of entertaining and, therefore, there was a considerable amount of food which needed to be kept fresh. The ice factory produced ice which was put in the ice box in one of the semi underground rooms of the Old Laundry [part of Shalstone Manor]. The bottom layer of the ice box was a reservoir for the melted ice. The middle one was a container for the ice, which used to arrive with a hessian sack around it so that it didn’t slip about and, in the top, there were two cupboards which were kept cool by the melting ice and, in there, food for all the people in the house – which were many – was kept fresh.
Now to concentrate on the northen end of the Parish.
Wood Green: I don’t know very much about the farms beyond the crossroads, Den Farm and Wood Green Farm as they were sold before I came here, but I do remember a story about Wood Green Farm. There was a Scotsman, by the name of Gribbon, who had a flock of sheep and a sheep dog. He would go out to his field and the dog would round up the sheep and take them back to the farm. Gribbon put a little stick against each gate, which he left open, and when he had finished his jobs, he would say to his dog “Take them back and, when you come back, shut the gates.” The dog snicked the sticks which were holding the gates open. They slammed shut. Just before Christmas Barry Linford came to see me and I mentioned the sheep dog story – he too had heard it. It was good to have confirmation.
Welsh Lane: The Welsh Lane is so called because it is part of the drovers’ route from Wales to London. The Enclosure Act came into force in Shalstone in 1763. Before that there were no hedges and livestock grazed on the verges as they travelled Welsh Lane. At night they were penned in and the drovers lodged at Den Farm, Wood Green, where they were often robbed of the previous day’s sales. It was called Den Farm as in robbers’ den not foxes’ den.
The Sluices: There are two oak copses bordering either side of Welsh Lane. The northern one is known as Ten Lands and the southern as Cow Pond. The farm has no water, except down by the brook which runs through the village, so, if any cattle were to be fed and nurtured at the top end of the farm, they needed water. In Ten Lands there is an enormous dam and wall and the remains of a sluice which kept the water back. If water was needed for the cattle, they would open the sluice and it would run down the ditch, past the Red Barn into Thistley Field where the cattle could drink. In the early ‘40s we had some very hot weather which engendered a national Polio plague. One of the people in the village actually lost the use of his arm through catching Polio; he lived in Number 18. The drains in the village were then non-existent and any effluent went down in a pipe to the brook which went through the village. If you look across the wall of the western side of the checkered bridge, you will find there is a sluice, which was put in by the council, with a handle to raise it when necessary. On Mondays Jimmy Cannell, who was the road man, used to get the key from underneath the bridge, where it was kept, and raise the sluice allowing the water to swill through the brook. He was a great character; we used to have jumble sales in those days and Jimmy came to one on the Saturday morning, took off his coat, bought one that had been brought in and left his other one to be sold!
Phone Mast: Some years ago, although it only seems like yesterday, a man came to see me and asked whether I owned Evershaw Copse. I said that I did and asked him why. He said that he wanted to put up a telecom mast. I asked a bit more about it and he told me that they would give me an annual rental, which would be reviewed every five years. I didn’t think it would be a problem although one or two people complained when planning permission was eventually granted. There is a telecom network for which masts need to be able to talk to and see their neighbours, however far away they may be. They wanted to extend the height of this one so that it could talk to the mast over at Aynho. I said “Yes! On one condition!” He asked “what’s that” and I said “when you have got the crane there, can I have a ride on it, up to the top?” It was a wonderful view and well worth the effort!
George Morgan – Grounds Farm: Andrew Morgan’s grandfather was George Morgan. He came from Wales in 1933. There was a slump in agriculture around the world and many Welsh farmers came from Wales because they could get a better farm here and the landowners wanted to ensure that their land was tenanted even if it produced little rent. Several other Welsh farmers came – Davies Chetwode, Davies Leckhampsted and Davies Stowe, amongst others. George told me that the reason he took the farm was because, on the farm where he was born, there was an avenue of chestnut trees leading up to it, and Grounds Farm still has an avenue of chestnuts so he must be looking down with great happiness. Before the Napoleonic wars, it was said that a squirrel could go from Bristol to Norfolk without touching the ground because there were so many trees. When George came to Grounds Farm, the land was riddled with roots of trees and I remember him telling me that the field adjacent to Welsh Lane, by Evershaw Copse, he had to plough with a horse, a single furrow plough and an axe because the plough kept getting stuck and he had to chop the roots out of the way as, of course, in those days, there were no JCBs!
The Nook: People have often wondered why the little cottage, to the north of the Manor and to the east of the flats, is called The Nook. It isn’t a twee name; when my grandparents were here, they had a houseman whose job was to stoke the boilers, lay the fires and keep the fires going, and, what is now the bathroom, to Flat 4 of Manor Mews, was a place known as “Cook’s Nook”. When the flats were developed, back in 1953, Cook’s Nook lost its name, so it was transferred to two little buildings opposite. One was a laundry, hence the drying green to the north of it and the other one was a dairy. My grandfather kept half a dozen cows which were milked every day to make butter and provide milk and cream for the house and, after school, the children in the village would come with their jugs, from their parents, to take a pint of milk home.