Caterham Valley, Timber Hill, Bromley Hall Corn Merchants.

A Memory of Caterham.

I will be 72 years old this year of 2015. I remember working with my uncle Syd and Auntie Chris Ryder at Bromley Hall Corn Merchants at the Godstone Road end of Timber Hill on the site which later became Fine Fares supermarket. I was about 8 or 9 years old when I first used to go round to Syds home in Holly Tree Road on The Hill and he would take me down to the Corn Stores on the bus with him. At this time Mr. and Mrs. Prescott were the owners of both the shop and the flat above it. Syd and Chris had once lived in the flat but that was years before I was involved. So had my Grandad lived there but I think that was probably during the war years. The Prescotts had a son who was away a lot of the time possibly at university. They also owned two sausage dogs called Banger and Suzy. My Grandad who was Amos Edwin Ryder and Sydney Ryder both worked for the fire brigade during the war years as their jobs were necessary and they could not therefore join the forces. My older brother Albert Ryder remembers that when he was about 12 or 13 before the war he used to help in the shop and the main customer in those days was Caterham Barracks. They supplied food and straw and hay for all the horses there in those days. I remember playing on the straw and hay bales that were kept in the back below the shop. As I grew older I had the job of filling the hessian sacks that customers would bring in for either the hay or the straw. Bert can remember when the shop was owned by an old lady called Miss Hall. It belonged to a person with the name Bromley Hall originally as did Ivy Mill Nursery in Godstone. The Prescott family owned Ivy Mill Nursery too when I was there and on occasions as I grew older I was sent there on my bike to deliver messages.