I was born in Datchworth in 1933 in one of the cottages near The Plough. At that time there was no electricity or gas and water was from a pump on The Green.
I remember a Girl Guide, Doreen Miller, planting the copper beech tree in the coronation year of 1937, just in front of our house. In the photograph you can also see Mr & Mrs Sehpherd’s motorbike and side car outside the shop. Mrs Shepherd taught at Datchworth School for many years. I did move away to Devon for a few years, but returned to the village where I now live.
Add your comment about this page
I lived briefly in the village during the Blitz in london when my mother couldn’t take another day of bombs, German planes fighting overhead and general mayhem.
Her parents and various brothers and a sister (Buckridge ) owned the cottage opposite and the attached shop, from the 1930s which at that time sold sweets, and I remember my first choc ice….and last, until the war ended. I went temporarily to the school in a sort of prefabricated wooden building next to the actual school …..I suppose it must have been provided for the ‘ official’ evacuees.
Later used the Green Line bus which conveniently started its Journey in Wood Green in north london , close to where my parents lived, and stopped right outside ‘sulby’. Other relatives visited Grandma , as it was ‘the country’ and provided a place free of bombs. I suppose I must have learned to read at the school . I enjoyed my brief time there although I think it only had one classroom divided by age by a curtain. I do remember it seemed a long way up Bury
And we visited in earlier years. (At the furthest reaches of memory
How lovely to see this photo. This is I believe my great great auntie. I have alway known that she planted a tree & I alway mention it when passing by… How it’s grown