We first moved to Stanwell in 1965,my father having obtained a two bedroom property through the good graces of B.A.S.H.S (says it all, really), the Airways Housing offices. As we alighted from the 203A bus at the top of Clare Road, our nostrils were assailed by the delicately fragrant combination of 1. Aviation Fuel and 2.Smithfield Animal Products Ltd (aka "The Bone Factory").This latter could best be described as an amalgam of Marmite and dogshit.
A brisk 10 minute walk (believe me, we couldn’t get indoors fast enough) saw us arrive,gasping and retching, at our new home.At first sight, the immediate environs presented us with all the basic necessities for a small family, a pub with the name partially spelled out in off-white letters (The "(H)appy (Lan)ding") and a grafitto in blue spraypaint of one of the better known local "faces" ("Jimmy Hogg shagged a Wog and a Dog"). There was a small supermarket…Shaws by name, Fader’s Toyshop, a post office, TWO butchers, ditto greengrocers, and a chippy,run by the redoubtable Mrs Church and her strapping son.Just opposite the pub was Dr. Collins’ surgery, and 100 yards farther up Hadrian Way, the Dental surgery.Everything one required, in fact, after an evening in the "Appy Ding", a cheery hostelry where one would like as not receive a cheery greeting peculiar to the locale;"Wotchu lookin a’? Wonna smack in the maahf, caaahnt?". Two primary schools, Town Farm Juniors and St Annes infants and Junior school, and a fair sized park (the "Rec") catered to the needs of the younger residents.
A word about the aforementioned Smithfield Animal Products Ltd. This fine, well established company had its premises on a large plot of rough ground situated between Long Lane and Clare Road,the tall brown brick chimney being something of a local landmark. It was a common sight to see a convoy of dark green wagons bearing their cargo of putrefying animal carcases into the factory grounds, eagerly pursued by a gigantic swarm of bluebottles buzzing merrily behind them. These loads of offal would be boiled, steamed,and rendered to their component parts of a.bone, for fertiliser, b. fat, for the tallow industry, and c. the most appalingly stomach turning stench known to man. The "Boney", as it was affectionately known, had been operating since time out of mind, until that glorious Sunday afternoon in the mid Seventies when one of the huge pressure cookers exploded, blowing the entire roof off the factory and unfortunately taking the lives of three workers in the process. My mother and I had been watching the "Eric Sykes Show" and eating our tea when suddenly, our living room window appeared to bulge inwards (how the panes remained intact I will never know), followed by a bang worthy of Hiroshima.Rushing into the front garden, we were greeted by the sight of tiles, roof joists and masonry falling delicately earthward, apparently in slow motion. One rumour put about later was that the I.R.A. could smell the place as far away as the Falls Road, and had decided to eradicate the problem once and for all with a huge fertiliser bomb. Of course the Priest at St David’s, the local Catholic enclave,tried to claim it was an Act of God. Who knows though, how far up the stink travelled? He may have had a point.
After the rubble was cleared, Smithfield Ltd decided to move their base of operations elsewhere, to the joy of the local residents and, after lying fallow for several years,rebuilding finally commenced some time in the early 90s. The site is now occupied by the Northumberland Close Trading Estate.
It’s a myth that the name “Stanwell” has anything to do with St Anne.
Stanwell simply means “stone well”. Stan (pronounced “stahn”) was the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) for “stone’”, just as hlaf (“hlahf”) was loaf, and ac (“ahk”) was oak. Etc., etc. There was a general change whereby OE “ah” became “oh”. So Stanwell would now be “Stonewell”, if it wasn’t that there’s no reason for place names to undergo these changes because place names don’t have to mean anything.
Of course this doesn’t explain where Saint Anne comes into it, as she undoubtedly does. Alongside St Anne’s well and St Anne’s School, there used to be a St Anne’s House. Can anybody shed any light?
I DO remember Mrs Jones! She was a large dragon faced lady with ginger hair and glasses and a voice like a foghorn. I was terrified of her for years, until one day I cut my hand open, which requred stitches. She was so nice to me that day my fear of her vanished completely.
As for St Mary’s church, yes it is very old, I believe a plaque somewhere on the building stated it to have been built some time in the 1200′s! It was famous for having a crooked spire for many years until the parish finally got the funds to restore it.
There was a turnstile gate at the ‘back’ of the church grounds, leading to a cow pasture which ran all the way to Clare Rd, now the site of the Falcon Drive estate. Going the other way from the church to Town Lane, there is to this day a tiny fenced off square adjacent to the pavement which contains a sort of sewer grating. This is supposedly the actual St Anne’s Well, by which the village got its name.
By the way, did you know that the church is HAUNTED????? (wooooooo!)
One afternoon a friend and I were mucking about near the entrance, when the Vicar came out of the church door. He smiled and wished us good afternoon, then locked the door and walked off to the Vicarage which was the first house on the right outside the gate..
About 10 minutes or so later we heard the organ playing. Now we had seen the vicar leave, so we wondered if he had inadvertently locked a parishioner in, and this was a ‘distress call’ to be let out. I crept up to the door and peered through the letter slot. There were the pews, there was the lectern, and there was the font. Over to the left was the organ, which was still playing……BY ITSELF!!!!!!! Yet another occasion when we ran all the way home.
Also, I vividly remember the night in 1979 when Stanwell was visited by……ALIENS!!!!!
It was a foggy night, and I had been spending the week with my parents while on term break from university. By about 9 pm the fog had lifted from the streets but still hung over the rooftops, and it was pretty chilly. I was in the living room with mum watching tv, when the whole house began to shake, accompanied by a deep droning sound. It sounded as if some huge machine were running in the front garden, so we went outside to investigate.To our surprise most of the neighbours were out, and everyone was looking up at a point over our roof. Directly above our house, and just barely visible in the mist was an absolutely GIGANTIC object, hovering motionless. There were no visible lights or windows from where we were standing, and it was difficult to tell how far up it was, due to the fog and the darkness. I went back in the house and upstairs to my parents bedroom to get a better look. To my great surprise, there was a green beam shining from ‘our’ spaceship to another one a couple of miles distant, in my estimation somewhere near St David’s Welsh Girls school in Ashford. That ship in turn was projecting yet another green beam to a third ‘ship’ , somewhere in the area of Staines. I got my binoculars and tried to make out a shape or distinguishing feature, but could see nothing but darkness. Of course nowadays lasers are a common sight, and the first time I saw one at a disco it immediately reminded me of the green beams coming from these craft. However such things were uncommon back then, so thoughts of ‘death rays’ etc were going through my mind. Was this War of the Worlds come to life?
Meanwhile, my mother was still out in the street, but was now shouting at the ‘aliens’ to land and take her for a spin in their saucer!!! She was always into the books of Erich Von Daniken and so forth, and saw this as an ideal opportunity to visit another world!
I leaned against the windowsill for a good 45 minutes watching these objects, during which time they performed a kind of aerial dance, moving a short distance left or right, but maintaining their height at all times. The one over our house never moved however, only the other 2 . Eventually all 3 of them rose eerily into the fog, and were not seen again to my knowledge.
Of course living right next to the busiest airport in the world, we are used to seeing strange things in the sky. This story made it onto the front page of the Evening Mail (local rag in those days), along with a comment from the Civil Aviation Authority that they had ‘no record of aerial traffic at low altitude’ at the time and places in question. In fact the matter was treated as something of a joke.
When I told this story to my friends, they accused me of taking drugs! This is the first time I have told this tale since then. I wonder if any other ex-Stanwell residents remember the night of our ‘Close Encounter’?
I can understand why a lot of people hated Royer, but he was a victim of his niche in the St Anne’s ecology. His job was to intimidate the kids it was thought could only be dealt with by intimidation. If you were one of those, or had the bad luck to be trapped in a class with those, I imagine he was hell incarnate. But if you weren’t, you saw another side to him: a decent, sensitive, intelligent bloke who, whether under instruction or because he felt it was expected of him, spent most of his time hamming up the sergeant-major act. I’m not saying I approve, just that that was how it was. In our final year, instead of putting on a school play the top classes were divided into groups who each had to write and perform their own little cabaret turns. These can’t have been much fun to sit through if you were an adult in full possession of your faculties. And yet prominent in the front row of the audience was Royer, laughing fit to bust at our feeble jokes, roaring encouragement and generally keeping things going.
Back then discipline was primitive. I was once caught cutting the corner of that interminable walk from the Long Lane entrance round the edge of the playing field, and got caned for it. Several stinging cuts to the open palm from kindly Mr Silk.
Earlier you mentioned Shaw’s the supermarket. I remember how it came about. On the arm of the L-shaped shopping parade opposite the Happy Landing there were originally two grocer’s shops. One, at the very end of the block just before it turns through a right angle, was called Maxwell’s. Because of this location they had more space than any of the other shops, and decided to capitalise on this by making a daringly futuristic move into self-service. Then it became Shaw’s, who later expanded into the premises across the road.
In my circle it was considered extremely daring to penetrate the bone factory grounds. In the nature of their business it was strewn with decomposing animal parts. That attracted a large population of rats, which in turn attracted cats. The only time I remember going there was as an adolescent, with a mate, both of us armed with air rifles. We were on a rat / cat hunt.
Ahhhh the fortnight stay at St Mary’s Bay!!! Yes, the highlight of our last year. Remember the cocoa at bedtime, and the scratchy old recording of the doings of Dr Syn, alias THE SCARECROW! There was a feature film made of this gentleman’s life as a smuggler, starring Patrick McGoohan as I recall.
I also remember Mr Silk’s pottery class, in fact my mum still has the ashtray I made her all those years ago.
As for Mr Royer, yes I was told about his military background. Pity he was teaching 7 year olds rather than German pows. He was an extremely nasty man who would have been ‘filled in’ by many a modern day parent if he had tried those tactics nowadays.
Don’t recall Mrs Jones, she must have been well before my time. Do you remember the local nurse, Mrs Hatton, who lived just off Canopus Way? She was another nice memory from childhood, always with a kind word for any child with a cut or graze.
I remember the museum trips of course, as well as the zoo and also the theatre in the west end on one occasion. Windsor Castle was another memorable day out for us.
We also went swimming at Staines baths every thursday. I remember one day we never got as far as the pool, as some kid from another school had been unwell and left a number two in the shallow end.
I had a good time at St Anne’s too. I was playing up the horrible side and leaving out the enjoyable side, not least being captain of the rounders team that regularly thrashed Town Farm.
There were probably more male teachers in primary schools than there are now, many of them ex-servicemen who did a crash training course after the war. They may not have known much about educational theory, but they had a broad outlook on life and hobbies and enthusiasms that they shared with their charges. Mr Silk, Mr Royer and Mr Harvey were all there in my time, along with two or three other men, including Mr Spracklen, an official FA referee who offered interested boys a serious football training. Mr Silk, who had extraordinary looking ears, was a keen potter who taught us how to throw pots on a wheel, fire them in a kiln and glaze them. In my experience Royer’s bark was much worse than his bite. He was an ex sergeant major. Did he still go in for lining the kids up as on a parade ground before letting them back into school after break? I have a vivid image of him striding briskly up and down and blowing his whistle as he checked the military neatness of his formation.
Among the women who were still there when I left in 1962 were a neurotic central European refugee called Mrs Harvey (no relation), and Mrs Jennings, who seemed to teach nothing but needlework. I remember Miss Mears as already an elderly lady back in 1956, but that may have been just how she looked to a 6 yr old. In those days it was technically two schools, infant and junior, and she was head of the infant school. In your time was there still a dinner lady called Mrs Jones? She’d come in dressed and made up to the nines, as though presiding over the dining room at the Ritz.
Perhaps the best thing was the school trips: lining up outside the Short Lane entrance clutching sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper tied up with string, necks craning for first sight of the Golden Miller coach that was to take us to the zoo, the science museum or, on one glorious occasion, to a holiday camp down in Kent for two weeks by the seaside.
I loved it at St Annes.It was a strange place in some ways, having both a Headmaster and a Headmistress. The Headmistress was a genteel elderly lady named Miss Mears, who drove an immaculate black Austin 7 and looked like a character from an Agatha Christie novel.She was in charge of the children from ages 6 to 9 as I recall..For the final two years a firmer hand was deemed necessary. Mr Silk , the headmaster, was a tall, semi-bald, kindly gentleman who played the piano and led us in prayers at assembly. He also took the recorder class, during which he would try to teach us thickos the basics of written music while we sat there bored out of our skulls. I never did learn to play that damn recorder…Some of the other teachers were:
Mrs Roach, a short stout Irish lady.She was very nice, but what with her accent and her false teeth I never understood a word she said.
Mrs MacDougall, a younger Scottish woman with an abrupt manner but a heart of gold.
The fearsome MR. ROYER…… he was a complete bastard in every way, and surprisingly considering where he was working, rather a snob too. He would throw open the classroom windows to, as he put it, ‘let the Viola stink out!’. He also once reduced me to tears by tearing my exercise book into confetti in front of the entire class.
Mr Harvey, a very nice man who taught in one of the newer temporary buildings just near the old black nissen huts where Royer and Roach had their classes.
And finally my favourite, Mrs Burch. She was a wonderful woman who encouraged us to think for ourselves. I enjoyed every one of her classes, and was very pleased to have her as my form teacher in my final year there (1970).
Nigel, you were right about the old and new estates.If you walked through the Rec from Cordelia Gardens and took the right hand gate towards Hillingdon Ave ( there was always at least one junked car or van dumped there for as long as I can remember) the contrast was immediate. The pebbledashed houses, the rickety old wooden gates and the packs of feral dogs roaming around marked the old from the new. I also remember the old prefabs in Holywell Way. One of the boys in my class lived there, and he was always in trouble over his dinner money. His mum would make florins in her kitchen and give them to the poor little bugger for his school dinners.You could easily tell one of her forged coins as it would be black and so soft you could bend it with your fingers.
It’s hard to believe nowadays, but back then there was real poverty even in a busy place like Stanwell, with kids dressed in hand me downs and the old rag and bone man coming round on his horse and cart. Of course living on the BASHS estate, if your dad didn’t own a car that marked you down as a bit of a gippo.
Of course when the Conservatives introduced the Right to Buy scheme everyone bought their houses at a substantial discount, and the clever ones sold them as soon as the market took off, making a very nice profit and moving out of the area. Now of course everyone has gone to town on the old properties, adding extensions, iron railings and mullion windows, so that the streets no longer look like rows of neat little rabbit hutches as they did back in the 60′s.Everything looks the same by virtue of being totally different, it’s a right mess. To be honest there’s probably a large element of ‘rose tinted spectacles’ going on here, but I really miss the old days. Growing up there was fun.
I lived on the BASH estate from 1956 to 1969. So I was in on it from the beginning. What I’d be interested to know from people who came after me is whether the distinction between the New (BASH) Estate and the Old remained as absolute as it was in those early days.
Maybe I need to explain what I’m talking about. The Old Estate dates from the 1930s and was put up to rehouse people from the East End of London. The BASH estate was planned to join up with it. So when you walk up Canopus Way and it suddently becomes Cranford Avenue, you’re going from New to Old. If you go up Hadrian Way east of Clare Rd to its junction with Clyde Rd and then up towards Long Lane, Explorer Ave suddenly segues into Ravensbourne Ave, and you’re on the Old Estate.
Back then it was like stepping from one world into another. In the 50s the Old Estate was only 20 years old, but already distinctly banged up and slummy (see my description 10.12.09 above). In contrast, the BASH development, although only one small notch above council housing, was at least brand-new, neat and orderly. There was one design of garden gate for the whole estate. There was a choice of front-door colours, but the choice was made by BASH and it had to be the same colour for a whole block of houses.
These physical differences went hand in hand with social differences. Ten years after the war accommodation was still in short supply, and all sorts of people who would nowadays expect something better had to make do with a BASH house. So there was an interesting social mix. Alongside the truck drivers and the baggage loaders there were air traffic controllers and senior airport management. A couple of doors down from us there was an expert on the work Jean-Paul Sartre, who at the drop of a hat would explain to you about existentialism. His next door neighbour saved up his pennies for regular trips to Covent Garden for the opera. The church organist, a serious academically trained musician, lived in Ensign Way. In other words, there were quite a lot of BASH people who were culturally middle class. I don’t think they had many counterparts on the Old Estate.
The contrast was at its starkest at St Anne’s School. (I mean the old St Anne’s, between Long and Short Lanes.) It dated from before the war, built to cater for the Old Estate as well as people in and around Long Lane itself and the northerly bits of Ashford just south of the London Rd. In 1956 I was already of school age, and Town Farm’s infant dept evidently wasn’t yet operative, so I went to St Anne’s, along with other BASH kids of my age. They formed a small minority, conspicuous for being, on the whole, healthier and brighter than the average. Their mothers sent them to school in clean shirts, in itself enough for them to be derided by Old Estate kids as “snobs” and liable to be beaten up after school. Of about 80 children in the top year when I left, just 6 (and not one from the Old Estate) passed the 11 plus, and half the rest were near totally illiterate. Many didn’t wash or change their clothes for months on end. There were necks black with age-old grime. There were kids who routinely shat themselves and would have sat in it all day long if the teachers hadn’t instituted gruesome and humiliating strip searches in quest of whoever was responsible for the dreadful stink. The school was rife with perpetual low-level disease. There were outbreaks of impetigo and head lice. There were kids who spent the entire winter with nostrils joined to upper lip by two thick runnels of yellow-green snot that trembled slightly every five seconds when they sniffed. And there was the vomiting. Hardly a day seemed to pass without someone throwing up, in the assembly hall, the playground, the classroom, the corridors… One of my abiding memories is of the dust-coated caretaker, with mop and bucket of industrial-strength disinfectant, clearing up a pool of sick.
Fifty years on, I imagine these contrasts have diminished. The BASH estate has got old and a touch shabby (although the spindly wire-caged saplings down Clare Rd are now rather nice trees), and on top of that there’s the riot of not always very taseful ad hoc extensions, personalised window frames, etc. that I assume came in when at some point the houses were sold off to their occupiers. At the same time the Ravensbourne Avenue crowd will have come up in the world. So what I’d like to know is: does the Old/New distinction still have any currency at all?
Thanks so much. Nigel and Larjanus – for the fascinating history lesson and the nostalgic recall of long, hot summers in Stanwell.
The incident with the cow’s head sounds very Lord Of The Flies….
Oh, and when I go and visit my Dad next week, I think I’m going to take time to look at St. Mary’s church….
Sorry Nigel, I posted that before reading your own fascinating post about Stanwell Place. Wow, you have really researched the town and surrounding area. I can’t compete with that but I can maybe remember some more little incidents from the past.
For instance, we would often mooch around the land where the Boney stood, and over the years we saw a few things in those woods.
One time it was a tin box buried in the ground near the broken concrete wall surrounding the place. When we opened it, we found a collection of geological samples, including some iron pyrites (fool’s gold) and some gemstones, all labeled in individual compartmentsThere was also a compass and a whistle (???). Why would anyone bury a thing like that?
Another time we found a rotten cow’s head hanging from a tree by a rope.It was swarming with flies, but some other kids were prodding it with sticks and pushing each other into it. I passed on that one.
Also, do any of you remember that wonderful summer in the late 60′s, when the Rec suddenly aquired three huge mounds of soil and we all dug them out and made camps in them? There was some nice long grass growing on it, and that made a great camouflaged roof. We dug some real deep tunnels into that muck, and it’s lucky nobody got buried by a wall collapse. It must have been 68 or 69,I was still in short trousers. It was glorious that year, sunny every day for weeks. They don’t make them like that any more.
When I was a kid living in Stanwell, that bit of land that Stanwell Place was on was known as ‘Iraqi Woods’ and was supposedly given to Faisal when was in power. I don’t know if that’s true, but there you go. My mates and I would take our air rifles into the woods on weekends, and explored it pretty well. If you kept going towards the centre, there was a track leading to a Redlands gravel pit. We got into the machinery one weekend and tried to start it up, little buggers that we were. I think we nicked a packet of biscuits out of a lorry too. Also. there was a stream with a ruined stone bridge in a sort of clearing. It was a real surprise to find all this, it was quite tranquil.So we chucked a few stones at the fish and went home. We never went near the houses though We also once found an inflatable woman in the woods, along with 4 plastic bags full of pornography.The books had speech bubbles drawn in biro on the pictures, and the most perverted phrases written inside them. The rubber lady was slashed to ribbons and lay in tatters draped over a bush.
We ran al the way home.
There’s a photo of Stanwell Place in a little book called “Stanwell, My Village”, by Beryl Wilkins (1993). I could scan it and send it to you if I knew where.
Don’t know what you mean when you ask why the village is there. It’s there because a long time ago people settled there. Parts of the church are 900 years old. Stanwell has an entry in Domesday Book, which takes you back to 1086. The nucleus of the village is a typical Anglo-Saxon settlement, and the name is Anglo-Saxon. So that dates it to the second half of the first century AD. No doubt before that there were ancient Britons there or thereabouts.
Thanks so much for that information, Nigel – I will pass it on to my cousin – and yes, the gates have always been barred, thus adding to the general mystery of the place. I wonder if any photos exist of the house – it must have been fairly sumptuous.
Do you know anything about Stanwell village? Was it just a tiny hamlet and why is it there? (I’m thinking that the church is old – older than anything in Ashford, really).
The fairy tale palace was Stanwell Place, ancient home of lords of the manor and other notables, the last such being Sir John Watson Gibson, a civil engineer involved in designing the artificial harbours towed across the Channel for the Normandy landings in 1944 and known as mulberries. (Hence those weird looking houses in Mulberry Avenue, which used some of the same materials and construction techniques.) Gibson died in 1947 and the house was bought by the government as a British country retreat for King Faisal II of Iraq, the Harrow-educated head of a state then under UK control. Whether he ever used it I don’t know, but he was assassinated in the 50s and the estate sold to Hall’s of gravel pit fame, who knocked down the house and presumably dug huge holes all over the grounds. A typically naff Stanwellish thing to happen. What goes on there now I haven’t a clue. Last time I passed by the gates were locked and barred, just as they’ve been at all times, as far as I know, since the mid 50s.
I’ve been meaning to discover what happened to the old Bone Factory for ages – so thanks for this. (and the reminiscences about the 203 bus – a rare sight!) I had no idea that the factory blew up, or that people lost their lives. A fascinating piece of local history.
I grew up off Clyde Road and can remember it dominating Stanwell with it’s foul smell and spooky presence. It’s amazing really, that people tolerated it for so long!
I’ve often wondered what was in the site known as KIng Fizel’s Palace (through the village on way to M25) – was it really a fairy-tale palace or something more sinister…
Dear Larjanus,
If you’d like to trade nostalgia about Stanwell, we don’t have to do it here. My email address is *removed
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If it was the 203A and you were heading for Cordelia Rd, why get off at the Blue Star garage (where I used to go for my mum’s fags – 20 Embassy, 4s 7d)?
I do remember Oaks Rd Stores. Opposite, in my day, there was a pond where you could collect tadpoles.
Yes, life there did have its tough side. Going to school I walked down Cordelia Rd but instead of sweeping round to the right I cut through to Cordelia Gdns, did a diagonal across the rec, and suddenly I was on the “Old Estate”, the LCC overspill housing. Osborne Ave., Ravensbourne Ave, etc. Dung-brown pebbledash houses with paint peeling off doors and window frames. On every other doorstep there’d be one of those crown-capped, beer-bottle shaped bottles of sterilised milk that meant someone there had TB. Propped up on bricks in the weed-infested patch of waste ground that passed for a front garden would be a rusting pre-war car. On every street corner a pack of semi-feral black dogs lay in wait for a child making its way to St Anne’s. It took nerves of steel just to get there.
No, it was definitely the 203A, which stopped at the old Blue Star garage (now Shell I believe). The thing was, our new home was in Cordelia Rd, and if we had stayed on the bus for another two stops we wouldn’t have had to suffer the March of Death to our front door. As an old Stanwell resident, you must also remember Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, who ran the Oaks Rd Stores, now sadly closed. I’m not saying that life in Stanwell was all bad, after all if you could survive there you could probably live on the Moon.It certainly toughened me up for the future!
My parents still live in the old place, and they tell me that the town has gone from bad to worse, if such a thing is possible.
Are you sure you’re not mixing up the 203 (which went through Stanwell village and on to Staines) with the 203A (down Clare Road and on to Ashford)?
I lived on the BASH estate (Clare Road) from 1956, when it was only half built and the houses brand new. There were still a lot of cabbage fields and open spaces round about.
The interesting thing about Stanwell in my time was the contrast between the housing estates (especially the old LCC one adjoining Long Lane) and the village, which was ancient, still genuinely rustic, with some big old houses and families who’d lived there for generations. Two different worlds.