Wartime Evacuation

A Memory of Manuden.

The small private school I was attending in Westcliff on Sea was evacuated to Manuden in July 1940. We were established in Cleeve Hall,which became my home and centre of learning until around August 1941, when the school closed due to lack of teaching and custodial staff. During that time my parents (who lived in Richmond, Surrey) and grandparents made arrangements to spend weekends staying in the Home Farm at Hazel End, which was the residence of Alf and Hilda Gillman, who managed the estate farm for the Gosling family. They were a lovely couple who had no children of their own and made a great fuss of me when I spent Sundays with my family at the Home Farm. We maintained contact with the Gillmans for many years right up to the time both had passed away. It was my first experience of rural life and probably influenced the later decision of my wife and I to purchase a 25 acre property, a couple of years before retiring from a 30 year industrial career in Canada. It is hard to realise that Stanstead Airport did not exist at that time, in fact the USAAF base was not there either. I suspect that the bus service to Bishops Stortford was better then than it is now! It was in Stortford that I saw my first full length movie - it was either 'This England' starring John Clements or a picture called 'Convoy', a wartime story about the North Atlantic convoys. In Manuden there was a blacksmith shop, a place we dropped by on our compusory walks. Nearby, there was a dairy farm and we visited the milking shed to watch the hand milking of the cows.