Brogborough’s Bridget Bardot

Brogborough’s Bridget Bardot

My father, James Christopher Butler, from Waterford in Ireland, arrived in Brogborough in early 1946. Marston Valley Brick Company, like others at that time, were recruiting workers from Ireland because of a shortage of labour. After the Second World War, most of the male working population of Britain was still in uniform and scattered around the world.
Having a secure income, my father returned to Ireland and married, Winifred Kathrine Boyce, from Rosslare Harbour, County Wexford, on the 18 June 1946 in Kilrane Church. He returned to England, and once they were allocated a house, Winifred left her home in Rosslare to join him. My sister Ellen was born in Bedford Hospital on 15 September 1947, and I was born in 32 Highfield Crescent Brogborough about three on a freezing winters morning on 27 January 1949. My mum’s sister, my auntie Mary, was the first person to hold me and we had a special relationship for the rest of her life.
So that was my arrival in the UK, a first-generation Irish immigrant, but being an immigrant in Brogborough was not unusual. The village was populated with a mix of English, Scottish, Welsh and Commonwealth nationals. Then there were the others: Irish from North and South of the border, Italians, Poles, Yugoslavs, a mix of displaced Europeans from the chaos of World War Two, plus the odd German POW who never went home. The name of the village probably came from the Anglo Saxon, Brocc-Barrow meaning Badgers’ Hill, we were just a continuation of an old ongoing migrations into Britain.
In truth we never thought of Brogborough as a village, it was built in the early 1930s as a housing estate specifically for company workers. Locally, it was always known as the estate. It was built on a gently sloping, a south-facing hill overlooking countryside to the distant Anglo Saxon church at Husborne Crawley. But, don’t imagine some tranquil pastoral setting. Immediately to the east, only two minutes walk, was the Marston Valley Brick Company with twenty-four tall chimneys, twenty-five when the new Hoffmann kiln was built. These chimneys belched sulphurous fumes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week as the factory cooked off bricks from the local Oxford clay. There was an insatiable demand for bricks to rebuild a Britain that had been pounded by the Luftwaffe, and for the industrial centres of Germany and other parts of Europe that had been flattened by mass bombing and total warfare. Everyone worked in the brick-works, it was a reassuring constancy always there pulsating as a background to our lives. The heavy cable trucks ran day and night, clack clacking as they hauled clay from the pits behind the hill to feed chambers of the kilns. Little did anyone know the changes that were coming.
The estate consisted of about one hundred houses in three streets. Hill and Highfield Crescent ran east to west and were known as the ‘top street’ and the ‘bottom street’ respectively because of their position on the hillside. Ridgway Road ran north to south connecting the top and bottom streets. There were two shops and a red GPO telephone box facing the B557 Bletchley-Bedford Road that separated the estate from the CIU Working Mens’ Club.
Every fourth or fifth house had a communal half-submerged, brick-built bomb shelter with a flat concrete roof, in the garden. Depending on the owner, the shelters were either off-limits or playgrounds and camps for the local kids. Kenny Yates had one in his garden next to my auntie Mary in Ridgway road. I remember going there one day, Kenny and Johnny Mac were jousting knights prancing around with dustbin lids and broom handles. Peter Hinson was wandering around with a wartime baby’s gas mask respirator on his head, with a big perspex visor and a bellows hanging off it. He looked like something out of the H.G. Wells movie ‘The Shape of Things to Come’. It was so surreal, I almost turned my troop of 7th Cavalry around and took them back home.
An average day in Brogborough started at seven in the morning. Mr Bevington, the local farmer, delivered freshly bottled milk on a large flat-bed wooden trailer with big pneumatic tires. The trailer was pulled by a massive shire horse, he had two a black one and a brown one. They were huge powerful, but docile beasts. They plodded and stopped waiting patiently unattended as the farmer went about delivering milk to each doorstep in pint and quart silver-topped bottles. The more horticultural residents would be rewarded with large piles of steaming horse dung randomly distributed on the streets during the delivery. Following on from Mr Bevington came the newspaper delivery, this was usually done by Peggy from the shops. Peggy was a lovely lady who must have risen very early as she was always made up like Ava Gardner in the mornings. But, best was the summer when Mrs Peacock, from the ‘six houses’ just down the road, took over the paper deliveries. On her bicycle, with a skimpy blouse tied in a knot under her bust, in shorts and sandals revealing her navel and long tanned legs, she was an exotic creature more suited to the Mediterranean than a delivery round in Brogborough. A shameful Bridget Bardot, well appreciated by the male population of the estate.
Shortly after eight, the postman would arrive in his red Morris or Austin GPO van. Dressed in a navy blue military-style uniform trimmed with thin red braid on cuffs and collars, wearing a peaked cap with a brass badge and brass buttons, he would deliver the Royal Mail. Then finally along came the buses to take the children to the primary school in Ridgmont, the comprehensive in Aspley Guise, or for those who passed the 11 Plus the grammar school in Dunstable.
On Friday nights we congregated outside the shops waiting for the arrival of Mr Bitchener’s fish and chip van. A very sociable event where we stood chatting, eating our fish and chips in old newspaper. Sixpence for a bag of chips, one shilling and thruppence for a piece of battered cod and a scoop of batter-bits for free if you asked for them.
There wasn’t much crime in Brogborough, we didn’t have that much to steal in those days. You didn’t need to break into a house anyway, if you put your hand through the letterbox in most front doors, you’d find a string hanging down, pull on the string and up came the front door key. Never the less Mr Button from the station house in Ridgmont would patrol the streets once a day on his bicycle to ensure all things were in order. In those days the minimum height for a policeman was 5 foot 10 inches (1.78 mtr), Mr Button was above average height, so you didn’t give him any lip.
Another thing relating to the lack of criminality. One Sunday of every year was devoted to the summer outing. At seven in the morning a convoy of blue Horseshoe Company buses, all governed to a maximum speed of 40mph, would turn up and the complete populous of Brogborough would be transported off to the seaside. One time, like a scene from a film about wartime refugees, we all made our way to Ridgmont railway station and took the train. On these occasions, the whole estate was abandoned for the day and must have seemed like the site of a sinister mass alien abduction. We would go to Yarmouth, Clacton-on-Sea or Skegness. I remember one time on our way to Margate passing through parts of London still with blackened bombed-out shells of buildings left over from the war.
After a day of bracing sea air, paddling in the turbid North Sea or English Channel, and the thrill of the fairground we returned to a sulphurous Brogborough untouched by felons, quite amazing really.
There is a lot more I have to write about old Brogborough, but I will finish here by saying I remember there being a lot of tramps about when I was a kid. These men weren’t drunks or homeless in the general sense, they were wanderers, they didn’t bother anyone, and they were able to look after themselves. I guess they were ex-military men who just couldn’t fit back into society.