Category Archives: Historic Buildings

A history of Easter at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Easter has been celebrated in one form or another for over two thousand years, as a celebration of spring, as a religious festival and as a joyful holiday. Over that time, the emphasis has changed and it’s interesting to think about what Easter would have meant to the people associated with some of the museum’s buildings.

Replica Iron Age roundhouse at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Early Britons like those living in our Iron Age roundhouse would have been closely attuned to the seasons that determined how they lived. We believe that they celebrated the festival of Imbolc in February, to welcome the birth of the first lambs, and Beltane in May, when the cattle were moved to their summer grazing.

Later, people began to celebrate the spring equinox, marking the emergence from winter and the balancing of day and night. Eggs were associated with this festival as a sign of the emergence of new life and hares were seen as a symbol of fertility.  According to the 8^th century monk, Bede, celebrations at this time were associated with Eostre, the goddess of spring and renewal. When Christianity came to Britain, the celebration of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection was linked with this festival.

Throughout medieval England, Easter was primarily a religious festival and celebrations carried on for many days. However, it also involved eating, drinking and playing sports and games, partly because it came at the end of Lent when people were required to abstain from many of these worldly pleasures. The long-standing tradition of giving eggs as gifts was an important part of the celebrations. Peasants gave them to the lord of the manor and there is a record from 1290 of Edward I purchasing 450 eggs decorated with gold leaf to give to members of his household. In a more practical way, being able to eat eggs was significant for the poor who were not allowed to eat eggs during Lent but could not afford meat. In the museum, the Arborfield cruck barn dates from the late medieval period and this was the type of Easter that might have been experienced by the people who used it.

Astleham Manor Cottage at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Our Astleham Manor cottage and Northolt barn are both Tudor. This is the period in which Henry VIII broke with Rome and, after that, the number of holy days reduced, but Easter remained important. People still observed the religious services and other traditions. Perhaps the inhabitants of our cottage and the users of the barn enjoyed the popular performances by mummers, known as Paskers at Easter. The Paskers dressed up, often in the clothes of the opposite sex, and visited neighbours’ houses, singing, dancing and ‘partaking of good cheer’. The tradition of egg-giving still continued and there is a record of the Pope sending an egg in a silver case as an Easter gift to Henry VIII before the Reformation.

Leagrave cottage at Chiltern Open Air Museum

The inhabitants of the Leagrave cottages would have experienced quite a different Easter. With the rise to power of Cromwell and the Puritans, Easter celebrations were banned in 1647 and, although they were restored in 1660, they never reached their previous levels of religious importance. By the 1770s, when our cottages were first inhabited, Easter might have been less religious but it was still a cause for celebration. One thing that the inhabitants would have enjoyed is the hot cross bun. The earliest written record of their sale comes from Poor Robin’s Almanac in 1733 which mentions a London street cry:
‘Good Friday comes this month, the old Woman runs
With one or two a Penny hot cross Buns’.

Many people of this time believed that hot cross buns baked on Good Friday had magical qualities and would not go mouldy. They believed that the buns brought good luck, could be used to treat illness and could guard against shipwreck if taken to sea. Some people would keep Good Friday bread hanging from the ceiling throughout the year, breaking off a piece and soaking it whenever needed.

By Victorian times, the number of national holidays had reduced, but Good Friday was still a national day off, along with Christmas Day. Perhaps the children living in the Haddenham Croft Cottage or High Wycombe Toll House would have joined in an Easter Egg hunt. This idea was introduced to England by the Hanoverian and, in 1833, Queen Victoria, then a child, recorded in her diary how much she had enjoyed this activity. She and Prince Albert continued this tradition, hiding Easter eggs in little moss baskets for their children to find. The idea remained something of a novelty in England for some time but, by the early 1900s, Easter Egg Hunts were quite widespread and, in 1902, Hamley’s advertised an Easter Egg Hunt box for sale. Another Easter activity particularly associated with the Victorians is the sending of Easter cards. Once the halfpenny postage stamp was introduced for postcards in the 1870s, the Victorians sent cards for many occasions and Easter was no exception. Their designs were often quite strange but most included rabbits, chicks or eggs and all suggested a sense of spring and hope.

Amersham prefab at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Finally, moving on to the Amersham prefab, built in 1947, we can visualise one important aspect of Easter in the years following World War 2. Chocolate Easter eggs had been first sold in England in 1873 and, as mass-production developed, became widely available. However, during the war, rationing of milk, sweets and chocolate meant that they could not be produced. Some sources suggest that children were offered carrot sticks as a substitute!  It was not until 1953 that the rationing of chocolate ended. How excited the children in the prefab must have been to eat their first Easter eggs!

Clearly, despite changes over the years, Easter has continued as a significant day in our calendar.  A line in the poem, ‘Easter Day’, written by Nicholas Breton, a contemporary of Shakespeare sums it up beautifully: ‘a day of much delightfulness: the sun’s dancing day and the Earth’s holy day’.

Written by Paula Lacey, Museum Volunteer

Photographs by Daniel Atkinson

Glory Mill

At the far end of the museum site is a rescued and reconstructed building that was once part of Glory Mill, a paper making factory that was in Wooburn Green, High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. The building is currently used by COAM to store dismantled historic buildings waiting for re-construction and as a workshop space for our buildings team. COAM Volunteer, Roger Coode, has been researching the history of Glory Mill and has written this piece for our blog.

Re-constructed building from Glory Mill at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Glory Mill

The Domesday Survey of 1086 lists twenty mills on the River Wye (or Wick) which flows through Buckinghamshire. At that time they were all producing flour, but during the 13th and 14th centuries cloth fulling became common using locally grown hemp. It was not unusual for the mills to grind corn and at the same time, by attaching large wooden hammers to the mill’s drive shaft, full the cloth. By the early 17th century fulling mills had virtually disappeared, but it was realised that the machinery used to full cloth could be adapted to beating to pulp the rags used in paper making. Paper making was going on by the end of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1603. In 1636 there were 12 paper mills in Buckinghamshire and there were eight paper mills near High Wycombe in 1690. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries paper making was a major industry on the little River Wye and in 1816 there were 31 paper mills.

Glory Mill was named after John de la Gloire who held the mill in 1235. It seems to have been producing paper from rags in the early 17th century. The Mill had several owners and the size of the mill increased, becoming a large factory. In 1850 mechanisation came with the installation of a 36ft 6in long Fourdrinier paper making machine. This speeded up the manufacturing process and therefore increased the mill’s capacity to produce good white paper. However, in 1894 the owners had to petition for insolvency and the Mill was taken over by Wiggins, Teape & Co. Despite a disastrous fire in 1898 when a considerable part of the Mill was burned down, after rebuilding and installing new machinery it was producing high quality paper by summer 1901. The building that we have at COAM was called the “Rag Warehouse” where bales of rags were stored and went through the first of several sorting procedures. It was dismantled and transferred to the Museum in 1987.

The First World War brought the need for air-reconnaissance photographs which led to a major phase of paper making innovation at Glory Mill. Photographs became a vital tool in the waging of the war. Consequently, Glory Mill built a new paper machine exclusively for the production of photobase paper. The country’s need for such paper in the Second World War was also satisfied by Glory Mill and it continued to make photographic base paper until its closure. The mill finally closed in 1999.

Leagrave Cottages

Leagrave Cottages at Chiltern Open Air Museum

This building was at 57, Compton Avenue, Leagrave in Luton. It originally consisted of two thatched single room cottages under one roof, the central chimney serving the back-to-back fireplaces. A coin found in the building suggests that it was built in the 1770s. Around 1912 the cottages were modernised, an upper floor added, and cast-iron ranges fitted. Between 1928 and 1930 the building was converted into one large cottage. By 1979 it had fallen into disrepair and the last occupant was evicted in 1982 since the Borough of Luton considered it unsuitable for human habitation. It was dismantled in 1983 to 1984.The sparse furnishing of one cottage reflects the way the cottage would have looked in the late 18th century. The other cottage is dressed for the 1940s. In 1988 Jim Turner was interviewed and said that he was the last person to live in the cottage before it was demolished. He recalled that friends would not sleep in the bedrooms of the house because they said that there was a ghost of an old man wearing a cap the wrong way round who would walk from the kitchen up the stairs. Jim Turner, however, never saw it. Another former resident, William Dickman, who lived there as a boy of nine in the early 1900s recalls that there was a well in the garden where they got their water. We do not have a well, but there is an apple tree in the garden which nicely fits in with the fact that the area of the cottage was known as Apple Tree Yard. The story goes that Joseph Thomas who we know was living there in 1881 planted an apple pip that grew into a large apple tree.

One of the common activities of the women and children in the Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and north Essex was straw plaiting and in the first cottage can be seen some of their tools. On the wall in Leagrave is a replica post 1800 splint mill which was used to soften straw splints, the split straws used for finer plaits. Pre 1800 the mill was known as a plait mill and was used to flatten the scores of plait before they went to market. A score was a 20 yard length.

Below here follows an article by Vanessa Worship and the Woodlanders Lives and Landscapes project, part of Chalk Cherries and Chairs Landscape Partnership in the central Chilterns and which I am including with their kind permission. It concerns the life of Nellie Keen, a straw plaiter in the Chilterns.

Nellie Keen was aged 79 when she was interviewed by Stanley Ellis of Leeds University, for the Survey of English Dialects. The recording detailed below offers a fascinating insight into the life of a straw plaiter in Buckland parish in the late 1800s.

“The men had to go round the country to straw ricks and draw all the better straws out the ricks and make ‘em into great big bundles…they used to bring ‘em round to the people…

“Oh, lots of different kinds of plaiting. I always done what they call the pearl plait but there was brilliant plait…beautiful plait that was, and railroad…they used to dye the straws for that you see, a mixture, but I always done the pearl…

[Author’s note: The straw was first split into splints, using a straw splitter. Then the splints were softened using a splint mill – see below]

“And then when you’d done this plait, you used to clip it and mill it… [the mill] was a little thing that’s hooked up on the wall, you could unscrew it and screw it, and with a handle at the side like a little tiny mangle I should call it…

[When the length of plait was finished it was clipped to remove the joined ends, then milled to make it look more even and appealing to the buyers.]

“And then after that you had to do it up round your arm the old-fashioned folk used to do it, in lengths of ten yards you see and then put them together and two ten yards [was] a score of course, and then tie it up with string like this ’ere as you go along – oh dear now I’ve dropped it – and then tie it all up and take it to Tring market to sell it…

Wooden splint mill from the 1800s Photograph courtesy of Veronica Main

“…ooh everybody had to do it years ago to turn a shilling or two. The women and children, everybody…

“They used to have what they called a plaiting school in the children’s holidays…a woman used to have all the children sit round and they used to sit plaiting straws… [parents] paid about three ha’pence a week for the woman having you there…

“You had to bring it back home and your mother’d take it to market and sell it…only four or five pence a score, that wasn’t much was it? And then you’d got to walk to Tring to take it. There used to be an old market house at Tring years ago, they’ve pulled it down now, and they used to go under there and the plait buyers used to come round…

“Yes, all the village people used to plait years ago.

Written by Roger Coode, Museum Volunteer

Henton Mission Room – the iron building

What do Prince Albert’s ballroom at Balmoral, Mr E. Moon’s Shepherd’s Hut in Watford, and Henton Mission Room have in common? They are all examples of “iron buildings”. After seeing a prefabricated corrugated iron cottage at The Great Exhibition in 1851, Prince Albert ordered a large, prefabricated building to serve as a temporary ballroom and dining room at Balmoral. It was erected in three weeks and first used for the gillies’ ball on 1st October 1851. It remained in use until 1856 and in 1882 was resited to its present position near the stables and game larders. A catalogue of such buildings manufactured by Boulton and Paul includes a Shepherd’s Hut which was ordered by Mr E. Moon of Cassiobridge, Watford for his gamekeepers. The catalogue prints a letter from him written in 1882 which states: “Gentlemen, I wanted your Shepherd’s Hut on wheels for the keepers while tending the pheasants, and they say they are pleased with it”. In 1886 the Rector and Churchwardens of Chinnor had our Mission Room erected at Henton, demonstrating the need for new buildings to accommodate the large population growth and movement at the end of the 19th century.

An illustration of the Balmoral building can be seen here

Between 1801 and 1901 the population of this country grew from 11 million to 37 million. There was also a move away from the countryside by many working people as they sought better conditions in the growing towns and cities. By the end of the 19th century no more than 10% of the population was engaged in agriculture. This meant that more and more buildings were needed in the towns, not just in the form of houses but also as warehouses, churches, meeting halls, etc. Iron sheets had been used to cover roofs since the late 18th Century and by 1829 corrugated iron had been developed and the process of coating the iron with zinc (galvanizing) was patented in 1837. This process increased the life of corrugated iron sheets significantly and by the 1840s several manufacturers were producing it. Corrugating an iron sheet makes it more rigid and allows the use of lightweight framing and larger sheets since the corrugated sheets are able to span greater lengths unsupported.

By the end of the 1850s corrugated iron was being used for the walls and roofs of many buildings. By the late 19th century there were several manufacturers offering ‘kit’ corrugated iron buildings. Corrugated iron churches, chapels and schoolhouses could be bought from a catalogue and large numbers of portable buildings were sent to Australia and California for the gold rush prospectors and newly set up farmers. Corrugated iron buildings were generally all constructed in the same way. There was a prefabricated timber framework usually built on a brick foundation. The walls were clad on the outside with corrugated sheets and on the inside with good quality tongue and groove boarding. There was usually a sheet of felt between the wood and iron. When the Mission Room at our museum was being dismantled an original delivery label was found under the corrugated roofing sheets which proved that the prefabricated building was supplied by Boulton & Paul of Norwich.

The Illustrated London News of 1853 variously referred to Hemmings Patent Improved Portable Building Manufactory, the Clift House Factory and to the Avon Clift Iron Works with a Board of Directors both British and Australian which was active in Bristol until 1854/55. When Hemmings transferred operations to Bow, London he continued working there in the same line of business until at least 1870. Hemmings’ principal claim to fame, perhaps, comes with his pioneering development of the portable or temporary church both for home requirements and for export. His original motivation was to provide his son, who was an Australian emigrant, with some form of durable shelter. His inventive mind evolved a house which combined portability with the facility to be erected by inexperienced hands. Other people on seeing it wished for similar accommodation together with more rooms and a shop and Mr Hemmings saw the prospects for adaptations. A catalogue of 1854 shows single cottages and medium and large houses, including one for the Archbishop of Sydney. Sumptuous villas were constructed which included butlers’ pantries and libraries at prices which varied from 50 guineas for a simple cottage to 850 guineas for the more elaborate buildings. Other examples of buildings were: commercial buildings, small shops, even rows of shops for Melbourne, a hotel for 80 persons consisting of 2 storeys costing 2500 guineas, a three-storey iron bazaar shipped to Melbourne in 1855, churches and a pub, appropriately named the Iron Duke, erected in Narberth, Pembrokeshire. The scale of this enterprise can be judged from the number of ‘packages’ shipped to Australia. In 1853 he shipped 6369 such items valued at £111,000 (approx. £10,000,000 today) and the following year 30,000 packages were valued at £247,000 (approx. £22,000,000 today). It was said that few other manufacturers could match his design or functional quality.

An illustration entitled “A portable church made by Hemmings” taken from the Illustrated London News 1854 can be viewed here on page 3 BIAS Journal No 18 1985

The reed organ or harmonium in the Mission Room was built by F. Estey & Co of Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1863 Jacob Estey became the owner of a company which had existed in various forms since 1846 making melodeons. The recent arrival of the railway meant that instruments could be ordered by mail and sent all over the country. By 1900 the company had made about 300,000 instruments and for many years was the largest employer in Vermont with around 700 employees. By 1960 when production ceased, they had made about 500,000 reed or pipe organs including the “Acclimatized Folding Organ” made for Christian missionaries working in tropical climates.

You can read more about Estey organs here in an earlier blog: The Henton Chapel Organ

You may also be interested in watching this short interview with Ned Phoenix, Founder of the Estey Organ Museum: www.namm.org/library/oral-history/ned-phoenix

Written by Roger Coode, Museum Volunteer

The history of our toll house

The toll house at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Between 1724 and 1727 Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, published A tour through the whole island of Great Britain. He comments that the roads all over the country “had been ploughed so deep, and materials have been in some places so difficult to be had for repair of the roads, that all the surveyors rates have been able to do nothing”. The problem was that until the 16^th century wheeled vehicles were quite rare, but thereafter more and more goods and people were being transported around the country, rendering the roads, which were simply unsurfaced paths that had grown up over centuries, impossible to maintain. Very early in the 13^th and 14^th centuries a few roads such as busy streets in London charged a toll (for example in 1346 tolls were collected for what is now Aldersgate Street), but generally it was the people of each parish throughout the country who were responsible for repairing the roads, a completely untenable situation. Therefore in 1663 an Act of Parliament was passed which established Turnpike Trusts empowered to set up gates and to collect tolls which were spent on the upkeep of the roads.

In 1718 the Beaconsfield to Stokenchurch Trust was set up of which COAM’s Toll House was a part. This in turn was part of the main London to Oxford road. Apart from general traffic the main roads from London also carried the Stagecoaches, the long-distance transport of the time. Stagecoaches passing through our Toll were travelling to London from Birmingham, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Hereford, Warwick, Worcester and Wantage. In 1840 there were 22,000 miles of turnpike roads in England and Wales with 3,000 coaches running regular services employing 30,000 men, 150,000 horses and 20,000 toll keepers who collected £1,500,000 each year which is roughly £90,000,000 in today’s money. Four horses could pull a coach at 10 miles an hour for one hour (i.e. a stage), hence coaching inns were about 10 miles apart. Alan Bell’s Directory of Stage Services, 1836 shows that the first coach of the day through our Toll was The Union coach at 1.15 am and the last The Royal Mail at 2315 pm. These coaches often had splendid names such as The Retaliator, The Regulator, The Champion and The Good Intent. In total there were 28 coaches on the timetable, but in addition there would be local traffic, untimed services and general rural traffic.

The kitchen of the toll house at Chiltern Open Air Museum

Many Toll Houses were far less imposing than the High Wycombe Toll House. This is because COAM’s Toll House was built very close to Wycombe Abbey. The owner Robert Smith, the first Lord Carrington, employed James Wyatt to refashion Loakes Manor which he had bought in 1798 into the then popular neo-Gothic style. In order to blend in with the newly renovated and re-named Wycombe Abbey, the Toll House was built in a similar style. The Toll House remained active until 1867 by which time the coming of the railways resulted in coach traffic becoming less and less until in 1867 tolls ceased to be collected. The coming of the railways spelt disaster for most turnpike trusts. Although some trusts in districts not served by railways managed to increase revenue, most did not. For example, in 1830, the year when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, the Warrington and Lower Irlam Trust had receipts of £1,680 but, by 1834, this had fallen to £332. When our Toll House became obsolete it was first used as an ordinary house, then by the groundsmen of the Cricket Ground, then as a chair making workshop and between 1939 to 1945 as an A.R.P. Warden’s post. In 1972 a lorry collided with it, demolishing the front room. Thereafter it was removed to the Museum.

The damaged toll house before it was moved to Chiltern Open Air Museum

Gatekeepers were usually paid between five and seven shillings a week (more in London), but this low wage was usually offset by a rent-free house, often supplied with free candles and fuel.  However, gatekeeping was particularly vulnerable to fraud, such as overcharging travellers, failing to account for the tolls, and taking bribes not to weigh vehicles where a weighing machine was in use. Leasing gates for a fixed sum was popular, although even this was no guarantee against fraud.  Trusts were obliged by law to auction the lease of a gate, with the starting bid being equivalent to the sum it produced in the preceding year.  Therefore, if the gatekeeper who was eligible to bid for the lease on a gate withheld receipts to decrease the gate’s income, its rental value was lowered, while those attending the auction could fix the bidding between themselves in advance. Gatekeepers were of course unpopular and frequently suffered violence at the hands of travellers. They also had access to relatively large amounts of money, hence the bars on the windows of our toll house. They lived with their families in the toll house, and we know that in 1841 Thomas Brickwell lived in our toll house with his wife, Margaret and their three children, Mary Ann 11, James 9 and Martha 6.

In all our minds there are memories of films depicting cheerful, ruddy-faced passengers enjoying their coach ride. Thomas Cooper, a poet and leading Chartist whose life (1805-1892) spanned the change from coach to railway, presents us with a different view!

“Oh, for the dear old coach again!” I cry ―

But soon remind myself o’ the pelting rain,

And that umbrella which the old man would try

To hold up still for shelter, with insane

Resolve, although it drenched our necks; the pain

Of sitting, crampt, for lack of room; the wind

That kept us in one posture, like a chain ―

It was so keen!  And then I am inclined

To own ’twas well men did the steam-steed find, and bind!

Written by Roger Coode, Museum Volunteer

The history of Garston Forge

In years gone by, every town, village and hamlet would have had a blacksmith’s shop at its heart. Here at the Museum, we saved and re-erected a forge from Garston. In the middle of the 19th century, Garston was a hamlet to the northwest of Watford.

Garston Forge in its original location in 1982.

From the late 1850s until 1926, this forge in Garston was run by the Martin family. Early in 1859, blacksmith George Martin with his wife Susannah and their children moved from Chiswell Green to Garston. The St Albans area had been the home of generations of blacksmiths called Martin going back to the 17th century in the villages of Park Street, Nap Hill and Leavesden. The 1861 census shows George and Susannah in Garston with seven of their eight children, one of whom had died in infancy. They would later have four more children. The house where they lived had a grocer’s shop within it and at the rear, a large garden where the forge was built. The house had been called Church Cottage in what was then Church Lane, since it stood opposite All Saints Church.

A country blacksmith made and repaired hand tools and repaired farm implements as well as making horseshoes. A blacksmith in rural South Wales in 1892 is recorded to have done the following work: mended a ploughshare and coulter, made a new hatchet, mended an oven, banded two wheels, mended scythes and made gate springs.

The Martin Family

An important job was the making and fitting of metal tyres for the wooden wheels of carts and wagons. Outside our Forge can be seen a tyreing ring platform where, with the old tyre removed, the wheel would be clamped, the new tyre heated on a fire and then dropped onto the wheel. This was then cooled with water, thus shrinking the tyre and clamping the wooden wheel securely. The blacksmith was an indispensable member of the community. He provided all the metal tools and implements required by the local people.

In 1890, an examination and registration system was introduced for “shoeing smiths”, a measure made to protect horses. From 1975, only registered farriers may shoe horses. Farriers would often visit stables where horses needed to be shoed and in our blacksmith’s shop we have a travelling forge and half-size anvil which the blacksmith or farrier would take with him.

The tyre ring being moved from it’s original location.

The Forge closed in 1926 and by 1982 the forge and the house were scheduled to be sold and demolished. The Museum learned about this and obtained the right to preserve the Forge. In November 1982, volunteers from the Museum dismantled it and during the summer of 1984, it was reconstructed on its present site.

Written by Roger Coode, Museum Volunteer