PIG, PUBS, and PEOPLE : CHAPTER 2
TRADES & TRADES PEOPLE
As with many small village communities, the range of trades practised in East Haddon has fallen dramatically over the past 100 tears. Many of these are so specialist as to be rarely found today, and not in great demand, but others are sorely missed. This is particularly so with the Post Office shop, which closed just a few years ago.
Village Shops
To Fred Moore, who was born in the village in 1924, the demise of the Post Office shop (Picture)is “a great loss to the village”. “I miss the village shop more than anything. I used to go up there every day for my paper, and that’s when I talked to people and kept in touch.” According to another pensioner, Marjorie Ennever, the closure was “unnecessary”. “It will be very difficult for me and for others if the weather is bad and we can’t get out of the village.” For Debbie Williams, now the shop has gone “the social fabric of the village has been altered forever”. It was “the heart of the village, a place where people stopped for a chat and caught up on all of the news. Now it has closed there is no reason for most people to walk up the road...”.
East Haddon used to have two shops, and the village Co-op (Picture) (Picture 2) was once as much the centre for social contact as the Post Office was later to become. It was situated on Main Street on land given by the Sawbridges for the village to manage (it is now a private house called Folly Cottage) and was more of a general store than the Post Office. The latter went in for speciality foods, partly because it was patronised by Lady Spencer from Althorp House, whereas the Co-op “sold everything from food to household goods, like saucepans, mats and haberdashery”, according to Paul Capell. Anyone who joined the Co-op received a dividend, and thereby shared in the profits. According to Joan Holt, “The divi mounted up and once a quarter there was a ‘cheque’ day on a Tuesday and then on the Wednesday they did the stocktaking. This happened four times a year. If you saved enough you could redeem these ‘cheques’ for £1 a time”.
Mrs Cooper, who managed the Co-op, became the village postwoman in later years. Peter Wilkinson remembers her delivering the post in all weathers: during one big freeze she had to abandon her autocycle and walk all the way to Althorp station and back to carry out her duty. The Post Office also had the village telephone exchange in the shop, and the proprietor, Mrs Ackroyd, who had run the shop even before she was married and whose father had been postmaster for 36 years, used to have to get out of bed in the middle of the night sometimes to “plug in” a call. When she was a teenager, Margaret Wrathall used to make calls to her friends and say to Mrs Ackroyd: “Charge them to ‘the house’.” According to Marjorie Wightman, Mrs Ackroyd could take a dislike to someone and wasn’t afraid of letting them know it! Ernest Poole recalls that Mrs Ackroyd used to boast of being able to supply their customers with absolutely anything. Later, the Post Office shop was bought by the Arnolds, then the Barkers, followed by their daughter and son-in-law the Buntings, the Balls from 1990 and finally the Wainwrights, who closed the shop down permanently in 1999.
I remember the Co-op when Mrs Cooper worked there. It was a square room with a wooden floor and a long wooden bench on the left as you walked in. The counter was opposite the door with a bacon slicer on it. All the little sweets and chewing gum were displayed in boxes on a shelf slightly lower than the counter but in front of it and it was hard to resist helping yourself when Mrs Cooper was “out back”. The Co-op sold Lyons Maid ice cream and the Post Office sold Walls.
The Post Office was quite different. It was darker in there but I remember nice Mr Gilby who came out from the town every day to help Mrs Ackroyd and he wore a black jacket and a big white apron. He always had a few words for the little ones...
Debbie Williams (née Talbot)
The Co-op was later taken over by Long Buckby Co-operative society and eventually closed in 1960.
The Bakery (Picture)
People in East Haddon also have fond memories of the long-gone village bakery, and not only for the bread. Run by the Craddock family, it was also a place to which the villagers brought their Sunday joints and Christmas turkeys to be cooked. Marjorie Wightman remembers that the bakery would charge sixpence for cooking the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and that when the Sanctus bell was rung during communion at the Church, it became known as “the pudding bell” – the signal for the Yorkshire pudding to be put into the oven! Marjorie also recalls that villagers taking their jugs of pudding mixture to the bakery had to make sure that the tea towels covering them were “absolutely pristine” for fear of neighbour’s raised eyebrows! According to Maurice Fletcher, one Christmas Frank Cadd took his big turkey to be cooked at the bakery, and when he went back to collect it found that it had apparently shrunk to half the size. It turned out that Vic Alibone had gone home with the big turkey, having left there his own much smaller one!
But it is the smell of freshly baked bread that is missed the most. One of David Muddiman’s earliest recollections is the bakehouse with its warm bread. According to Marion Allen, it was “the best bread ever. I remember walking down the road chewing the corners off the crust.” Jan Pike confesses, “we used to eat half the bread before we got it home!” Diana Halliwell recalls her first visit to the bakery to buy bread: “it came straight out of the oven and it was so hot I was juggling it from hand to hand as I came back! I thought it was wonderful.”
The Craddock family, who owned the bakery until it closed in 1975, bought the business from the previous owners, the Parkers, in 1925. Baking was in the family: Ken and Neville’s grandfather had been a baker, and their father had joined them in the business until he had realised there was not enough work for him, and he left to become an odd-job man. Within a few years, the opportunity arose to buy the East Haddon bakery, and father and then two sons produced bread there for 50 years. As Ken recalls, it wasn’t an ideal set-up in the first place: “We didn’t have mains water in the house when we first moved here, and all our water, even for the bakery, had to be collected from the pump across the road.” They kept working through thick and thin, even managing to bake and deliver bread during the bad winter of 1947: “I will always remember delivering bread in the snow and walking over the hedges on the Teeton/Spratton junction to get to Teeton, with a sack of bread on my back.” Lynne Threadgold often used to see Ken delivering bread, “his big basket under his arm”. She says there always used to be a queue outside the bakery. According to Neville, it was the bread strike of 1974 that spelt the end of the business: “We had to work so hard and gained so many new customers that we couldn’t cope and had to make a decision to give it up. We finished on 1 January 1975.” According to historical records there had been a bakery in existence in East Haddon since at least as early as 1771.
We used to make the dough overnight and then we’d get up about 4.30am. The dough was rising in the trough during the night for eight hours. The first thing in the morning we’d weigh off the dough at about 2lb 4oz. The 4oz was because the loaves had to weigh about 2lbs when they were baked. This was all done by hand until we got a machine. Then we’d roll it out and shape it. I suppose we’d do about 200 loaves a day. We’d do two batches, we’d roll out one while the other was baking. We could get about 140 loaves in the oven at one time but they were various sizes. We used to use long ‘peels’ to put the loaves in the oven and get them out again. When she was a teenager, Lady Diana used to come from Althorp.
The bread was delivered all round the villages. We had vans to do this. People came from miles around to buy the bread. They used to eat it in the Red Lion and like it so much that they would ask where it came from and so they would sometimes fill their boot up with bread to take home. We tried to keep some back for the people who got off the bus from work every night.
Neville Craddock (Picture)
Neville Craddock
Butchers
East Haddon’s butcher, which was situated in St Andrew’s Road, closed in 1966. (Picture) The shop had been owned and managed by Sid Dixie, who had worked for the original owner, Joe Painter, until he died. Mr Dixie had been a familiar sight in the village, riding around on his bicycle in white coat and blue striped apron to deliver meat. According to Ernest Poole, “Sid would chop all the meat up and Mrs Dixie would wrap it and put it on the tray on the front of Sid’s bike.” He would deliver as far as the Red Lion, where he would stop for a drink, and then his wife would shut up shop and complete the round. Paul Capell helped Mr Dixie in the shop, and drove Mrs Dixie to deliver meat in the surrounding villages. “I used to take Mr Dixie to Northampton sometimes, where they slaughtered the animals on Campbell Square.... Before that they used to poleaxe the animals.”
Joe painter bought animals as he needed them and slaughtered them behind the shop. “At one time he used to come and kill our pigs,” Paul Capell remembers. “He didn’t shoot them, he used to ‘stick ‘em’. It’s not cutting their throats, it’s hitting a nerve and killing them that way.” Many people in the village used to buy their Sunday joint from Mr Dixie, and before him Mr Painter. “The meat was very good from Mr Painter, very fresh because it was slaughtered in the premises,” Dick Craddock recalls.
Other Trades and Professions
It is not only the shops and food suppliers that have now gone; other crafts and trades have also disappeared, through a drop in demand or increased competition from big business. Sid Allen used to have a carrier’s business, which was taken over later by David Garrett, Paul Capell’s uncle; and Jean Holt’s elder sister, Mary, was a dressmaker in the village, as were Florrie Johnstone and Mary Snelson. Florrie Johnstone lived in half of Mrs Talbot’s cottage; Mary Snelson lived in Priestwell Cottage. There was also a saddler’s shop in the village, now Saddler’s Cottage on the corner of Vicarage Lane, where a Mr Robinson used to work two days a week – he also had a shop in Long Buckby. He made other leather goods, including Paul Capell’s school satchel. George Page’s uncle, Mr Blackett, was the village’s wheelwright, and George worked for him when he was 14 years old. “We did general carpentry work, farm work, repairs to carts etc... I can remember seeing a photograph of a fete or some such down at the Hall, and this showed old Mr Blackett with a little four-wheeled trap pulled by a goat, in which he took children for a ride.” There was a malt house in the village in a thatched barn at the back of what is known today as Malt House. Here the wetted, sprouted barley was placed on fire bricks, over a fire, and gradually dried out ready for beer-making.
Many people have fond memories of the cobblers (Picture) and blacksmiths who used to ply their trade in the village. Phyllis Hobson remembers that there two cobblers – the Caves and the Snelsons. Daphne Walding (née Snow) used to enjoy watching Mr Cave repairing shoes with a mouth full of tacks which he spat out one by one. Barbara Pearson (née Cooper) was often sent as a child to have the shoes she was wearing heeled; when each one was being worked on she had to hop around on one foot until it was ready!
David Muddiman “loved the blacksmith’s and I would stand and watch Mr (Maurice) Ward for ages”. According to Ernest Poole, “I could never understand how such a small man could hold a huge shire horse’s foot and the horse never moved.” As Dick Craddock recalls, before Maurice Ward had become the blacksmith it had been a Mr Soden, and children in the village believed his wife was a witch “because she used to dress like one”. Marjorie Wightman says that you couldn’t walk past the blacksmith’s forge without there being a crowd of small boys outside watching the sparks fly. In addition to the big shire horses, the hunters were also shod there, but the blacksmiths did not only shoe horses: they made a variety of metal items. Eileen Freeman had a goatshead poker made at the shop, and Paul Capell remembers making polished steel chairs (Picture) that were sold in Liberty’s; three of them were used in the film The Devils, which starred Oliver Reed. Both Dick and Neville Craddock had their garden gates made by the blacksmiths.
The blacksmith’s shop was opposite the school, and we would often see him coming out on to the road to fetch water from the pump there. Mug after mug of water he used to collect. We could always tell when he was shoeing horses, because that distinctive smell used to penetrate into the school.
Dick Craddock
More recently, Marjorie Ennever was part of a bead-threading group, assembling jewellery for John Powell at Holdenby. “That was great fun and I am sorry when it came to an end. Two of our customers were Dickins and Jones and Liberty’s.”
The Police
There is no policeman permanently based in the village now, but Jean Holt remembers a Mr Sadifer being the bobby when she was a child, and after him a Mr Francis. According to Jean, the policeman used to live in the house now known as Rosehaven. After a few years, Mr Francis became the first tenant of a new Police House on the Holdenby Road. “He used to say to my father, “If I was here 100 years there’d be nothing happened.” Mr Burton, who is still in the village, was the last resident policeman.
The Doctor’s Surgery
There used to be an occasional doctor’s surgery in the village at Winn Cadman’s house. According to Jean Muddiman, she “always had a roaring fire and you’d sit there in the warm and chat and time passed ever so quickly. I remember her black and white collie. It was quite a social event.” Marjorie Ennever remembers the surgery “with affection”. “My husband used to go there for regular check-ups and I used to go with him because I used to enjoy the company so much and got to learn a lot about the village.” Eileen Freeman also remembers the Cadman’s “enormous dog” and the smell of Winn’s dinner cooking, wafting through the room. The surgery had formerly been held in Gardener’s Cottage. David Muddiman remembers a child seeing “a big Welsh dresser which always had bottles of medicine on it”. Maurice Fletcher recalls that the surgery door was “left open and people were able to go and help themselves to their prescription medicines and drugs which were left for them on a shelf”.
The Undertaker
One profession unfortunately still required by everyone eventually is that of the undertaker, and East Haddon used to have its own in the form of Henry, known as “Putty”, Brown. Paul Capell recalls that he used to have a sign outside his premises: “Undertaker, Carpenter and Decorator”. “Henry used to have to organise the bearers. That is why there is a bier house in the cemetery because of the distance [from the Church]. My Aunt Mary used to do the laying out for him.” Mr Brown used to play the organ in church, as did his wife, who gave piano lessons. The gravedigger was a certain Percy Beaumont from Long Buckby: Paul Capell recollects “After one funeral the mourners returned to view the wreaths and flowers, but Percy had not filled the grave in and was sitting with his legs in the grave eating his lunch.”
Nurseries
A number of nurseries in the village supplied fruit, vegetables, plants and flowers for the villagers and for customers from further afield. The Hall kitchen gardens were a popular source of such produce. Fred Moore worked there when he left school at the age of 14:
I worked for the head gardener, a man named Mr Burke. I worked there with Winnie Cadman’s brother, who was a bit older than me. We heated greenhouses with coke boilers... Some of the produce went down to the Hall and some went into Northampton and the people in the village would also buy lettuces, tomatoes etc. There were fruit trees trained up the walls and we used to net every one when they were ripe so that the fruit dropped into the nets.
Part of the kitchen garden walls can still be seen today. David Muddiman’s father was the head gardener in later years, and David spent much of his childhood in the gardens. At this time, the gardens provided the Hall School with fresh produce, and the Muddimans fed the leftovers to their pigs. Debbie Williams remembers buying tomatoes and strawberries from Mr Muddiman senior.
Two other nurseries in the village were Cobby’s, (Picture) later taken over by Frank Pidcock, and Charlie Brown’s. Charlie worked at Holdenby House before coming to work for Mr Butler at Cobby’s. According to the Blacklees, Mr Butler loved growing orchids. Charlie Brown also grew orchids and Ernest Poole saw one for the first time at his nursery. Ernest said it was Charlie who first interested him in cacti and succulents, and Daphne Walding remembers getting chrysanthemums from his greenhouse. “Charlie was a chapel man, and he did the flowers for my wedding”, she recalls. Debbie Williams remembers buying tomatoes and lettuces from Charlie Brown: “He’d pick the tomatoes while you chatted to him or sometimes he’d let us pick our own.” She has fond memories of Cobby’s “especially at Christmas when there was a lovely fire burning in the grate in the potting shed. There was a lovely smell of pine needles and piles of holly used for making the Christmas wreaths.” Fred Moore worked for Cobby’s from 1949: “They made about 3,000 wreaths each year for their five shops in Northampton.” He continued working there when Mr Pidcock took over the business. Daphne Walding used to bunch up the holly at Christmas for Mr Pidcock. “We used to do a great big box for about £2.00,” she says.
Haddonstone
Haddonstone, the internationally known manufacturer of garden stonework, was established in East Haddon in the early 1970s by Bob Barrow. He had formerly worked in the leather industry, in his family’s firm of Barrow, Hepburn and Gale, but left to form Haddonstone, recognising that with increased leisure time, gardening was likely to become more popular in the future. He approached Nene College of Art to find designers, and eventually employed a number of students. He was unable to pay them very much, so each student was also given lunch. Some of the students were very enthusiastic, and they set up a complete range of designs. Until Haddonstone exhibited for the first time at the Chelsea Flower Show with a range of six or seven products, they had not sold a single item, but the business took off from there. Jane Barrow describes Haddonstone’s amazing growth:
I was secretary for the company for about two years and if I took any time off during the day I was typing often until 11.00 at night. Ginny was a very small baby so we had a Filipino girl to help as I couldn’t answer the phones with a tiny baby in the background. The factory was our garage and we put the urns out where the swimming pool is now. In those days the forge was still a blacksmith’s, but later we bought it and moved the offices over there. First we had an office in our spare bedroom and then we made an office over the garage. Eventually we opened a factory in Brixworth. We all worked very hard but we loved it. We didn’t have transportation so we used my horsebox to transport urns around. We began with £500 and we didn’t borrow a penny. Now we have a factory in America. We have excellent staff including a lot of local people. Barbara, our sculptress, has been with us almost from the beginning and she still does most of the designs...
When Bob became ill he carried on working for the company. He was always involved, even when he was very ill. It was a lifeline to him really and kept him going through his dreadful illness. Bob died in 1996.
Haddonstone now describes itself, justifiably, as “The world’s leading manufacturer of ornamental and architectural cast stone work”.