After years in the stationery, food and retail trades in Chertsey, outer London, my grandfather, Ernest Taylor, decided to
abandon all that he knew to become a farmer - for which he had zero knowledge
or experience. He was going to be a pioneer, and in 1912 he took a 100 year
lease on 14 acres of land on the outskirts of Letchworth Garden City, a New Town that mainly only existed on the plans and 50 miles from the family home.
He invited two others to join him. One was
Thomas Flaws, the son of the editor of the Bedfordshire Times newspaper, who
also had 'limited' farming experience, to say the least. The other was Gertrude
Matilda Beaumont, the daughter of the owner of the grocery store where he
worked. Though Ernest asked her to marry him so that they could set up this
venture together, she declined. She would live unmarried with them both first,
to see if she liked the lifestyle.
This is Gertrude and Ernest on
their Ner-a-car motorcycle.
Was this 'small-holding' going to be viable? Was it a wise decision, in
1912, for an unmarried young lady to move in with two men in an isolated house
on the edge of civilization? The scandal! What did her parents say? What did
the neighbours in London say? What was Erent and Gert's reputation in Letchworth? …And
what a big change to leave a comfortable home with a maid to find that, at her
new home, there was no flushing toilet, no bath, no hot water, no income, no
mechanisation - just 14 acres of untamed land.
Gertrude eventually did marry Ernest. Ernest died when he was 95, and Gert
at 99, in 1982. During the whole of their married life they never had a day
when they were not sharing their house with someone else. Thomas Flaws lived
there until he died - but in the meantime, on her death-bed, Gert’s mother had
said to her, “Look after your sister, May”.
When May arrived on the doorstep of ‘Camp Holdings’, as the property was
called, Ernest thought she was coming for a holiday, but she never left, never
had a proper job and outlived them all.
The small holding never generated much income. Ernest visited the local auction each week and bought things as cheaply as he
could – bits and pieces from which he could make his own cultivating equipment
and old picture frames to rip apart for the glass to construct
cloches ...plus curtains and furniture. At the end of the day, the auctioneer
would say, “Will you give me a shilling for the bath full of rubbish, Taylor?”
and Ernest usually did – more often than not it contained a bag of nails or
something that would ‘come in handy one day’. The sheds increased in number. I
remember the oil shed; the incubator shed; the goat shed; the egg shed; the
wood shed; a workshop shed; the machinery shed; a shed for the horse; my
father’s shed; and number 42 shed – yes, there had been more over the years
that had fallen down.
Ernest and Gert grew rows of Mrs Simpkins pinks (carnations) that were
picked and sent by train to the Covent Garden flower market, strawberries,
vegetables and a large apple orchard with loganberry and blackberry bushes
between trees, and they bred chickens. When I was a child they must still have had a good number of hens because there were often 20 - 30 dozen eggs on stacked trays, though one client was noted for cycling miles to the property to buy just
a single egg.
Up until the 1950s my grandfather delivered eggs, fruit and vegetables to some families in the
immediate neighbourhood by horse and cart, when he would hoist me on to the seat next to him. Most customers had
kept food scraps for him to feed to the chickens, some of which were enclosed
in a special run, while others roamed the orchard, along with geese - the subject of a picture book story I'm writing for children.
For the majority of families just after WW2, eating chicken was a Christmas
or Easter treat, and for the week leading up to the celebrations, the birds
would be killed, cleaned, plucked by hand until the shed was waist high with
feathers and trussed – tied up with string to enhance their appearance and help
them cook evenly. All transactions were by cash, and a box was kept on the window ledge – the money from sales
being put into the box, and whenever anyone wanted to buy anything, they just took whatever they needed.
But Gert liked her independence and some money of her own, had a greenhouse
built, developed close to half an acre of immaculate flower beds around the
house and sold bunches of blooms to passers-by en route to the cemetery which
bordered the land.
Gert and Ernest leased the right-hand
half of the house
She also bred Angora and other rabbits for their fur, and prepared some of
the pelts and sold them to the glove factory. If born in the present era, I’m
sure she would have been an internet marketer or some kind of entrepreneur.
In the days before TV and especially in the winter, May and Gert spent their evenings either doing embroidery or studying bulb and plant catalogues - most
of Gert’s income was given away or used to buy plants. As soon as spring
arrived, she spent her time gardening, but it was nice to relax, too - lazing in deck chairs on the lawn or snug in the summer-house she constructed – but then one day a Romany gypsy parked her
caravan on the road outside the house. It wasn’t long before a deal was done.
And just like the Jeep adverts of today, all her friends and family said “She’s
bought a what?”, but nodded in approval.
Gert soon added all the essentials – books and magazines in the cupboards, a
wicker chair and plenty of plump pillows – and we all pushed and pulled the caravan to the edge of the orchard, overlooking
the flower garden and house. The house had become redundant.
The caravan soon became my favourite place to read, too.
Peter Taylor
www.writing-for-children.com
