Growing Up On Newberries Avenue!
A Memory of Radlett.
I've just found this place and boy what a lot of memories it brings. We lived in Newberries Avenue, moving out from Finchley when the Handley Page factory in Cricklewood shut (around that time). Dad, initially a draftsman, was Project Manager and then eventually Asstn. Chief Designer and how well I remember the Victors. I learnt to drive on the airfield. I was 12 when we moved so the property was new. My sister went to Radlett Prep. (she was 4.5 years younger than me) and I started in the 3rd term of the 1st year at Watford Grammar. This was hard because by the 3rd term, everybody had made friends. In truth the Radlett lot weren't very friendly towards me, an incomer, and the Watford lot were into cinema/films whereas newly into the 'country' which it still was then, and being a tom-boy, I wasn't! I was great friends with the Ralphs who lived in a big house on the left of this photo, on Shenley Hill and also with another who lived in Williams Way. I belonged to Radlett Tennis Club so may well have known some of the people who have contributed here. I knew the Woods family - Jeremy being a leading light, as I remember, at the RTC. My husband worked at the then Westminster Bank for a while, although we didn't meet until we both worked at the later NatWest in St.Albans. We both went to Watford Grammar although he was a Watford boy. We were married in Christ Church with our reception at The Red Lion. I have recently been trying to remember the name of the 'other' big house down The Ave. and now think it was Aldenham Lodge. I'd walk a neighbour's dog (lived on Shenley Hill too) down The Ave. and into The Warren and onto the golf course regularly.
After we married in 1964, we moved to a village some distance north of St.Albans and then back into Redbourn and from there out to Canada for 15 years. My husband's job in banking took us out to Toronto and area before we came back to the UK in 1989. Since then we lived near Saffron Walden and visited my old haunts in Radlett - amused to find what 'Radlett's House of Comfort' is now! A subsequent stroke which hit my husband unexpectedly, has brought us down to the SW (originally to be nearer remaining family) although my sister has since sadly died (last year). Mum died in 1980 and dad, having remarried and moved to Germany some 8 years later. They had previously left the family home in Radlett, for Somerset.
Loving the old photos of Radlett - I almost imagined being in some!!
Jan Albon (nee Hayes)
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There were a lot of displaced persons (mother & I being one) in need of housing before, during and after the war and a mega shortage of accommodation therefore borough councils made compulsory takeovers on all manner of dwellings; the agreement to hand back the dwelling after war’s over. People were expected to take in a lodger or two and, if a large abode, whole families were pushed into sharing cheek by jowl with as many as could be accommodated. Uncle Bert took us to meet two of his chums in such abodes. The first stuck in my mind simply because it was ‘meet the Warrens of “The Warren”. It was a row of tall redbrick buildings – semi-detached or maybe terraced - possibly three stories high and a basement too…remember, I am only a little girl not yet five, so the impression I have is of very tall buildings. There is no garden as such which is where I first met Mrs Warren who is standing before her rear garden surveying the scene, a round circular brick wall of about three foot in height and the width touching both sides of the fenced off plot took up the entire garden; a mound of earth heaped inside with lots of burrows and built by the Romans for the rabbits they’d brought with them to feed the legions passing through as they marched along our straight bit of Watling Street heading North. The surprise is that centuries later this construction (although now contained and restrained by its restricted surrounding) had survived with minimum damage…the wall only required repairing in two places. Bert asked why they didn’t dig it out - to him gardens are for produce; the rabbits themselves had long departed. Mrs Warren relates that they aren’t allowed to touch the roman burrow, a condition of their stay, it deemed a site of National Historical interest. I have never forgotten it. Next time I see the Warren family they are living in Rendlesham Avenue. Today, 2016 there is no sign nor mention anywhere that I can find of this wonderful Roman artifact left over from ancient history. Rabbits made a wonderful wholesome stew for the local population, a cheap meal for the working class – and totally lost when the scientist introduced myxomatosis into the rabbit population in the 1950s – although rabbits can survive an outbreak today – when first introduce they were a piteous sight, blind and scarred it was our duty to put them out of their misery by any means to hand…it was awful. The true country folk were horrified. It would be many years before rabbit was reintroduced to our menu.