Jackdaw Chatter - The Quarterly Magazine about Stow-cum-Quy
The last issue of Jackdaw Chatter.
Nice one Grace! Several friends agree with me that it was a good read. I particularly
liked Johnny Chapman's aunt, Ivy's account of her long life - a hard childhood
in Quy in the early 1900s; some happy times in service at Trinity College;
and then a long happy marriage to Herby. We thought that Stanley's story of
his childhood was very interesting but perhaps a little sad. Life was very
different and hard in those days.
Eva Bunn's description of her life as Eva Crisp in the family home at no 6
Quy (now 64 Station Road, where Barry and Betty Cox live) rang a few bells.
Eva wondered if the 'Spring', the meadow and plantation behind this pair of
cottages, had been built on. The answer Eva - and Jane - is ' No'. Since Wilfred
Flack retired, Swan farm and the Spring have come under Allicky farm and for
several years riders have used it as a paddock for their horses. Its entrance,
a grass track, if you're one of our new Quy friends, is half way down Station
Road on the right, opposite the old Quy Hall orchard which is just past the
thatched cottages. During the war a small shelter for Home Guard weapons and
explosives was built just inside the gate. Frank Theobald, the commander,
lived nearby at no 9. The store, a small nissen hut, was removed in 1945.
After Eva's mother died - we remember her as 'granny Crisp' – Maurice
and Alice Crisp (Colin and Joan's parents) lived in no 6 for many years. Sue
Chapman lived in no 7, next door. Sue was crippled, always walked with a crutch,
and was rarely seen out of her cottage. In those days it was not unusual for
gardeners to throw their green weeds and vegetable waste over the fence for
the cows to eat. Maurice, our old baker, recalls that when a later tenant,
living in
No 7 did just that, Wilf's milk tasted of onions for days.
In the early 1900s after the 6 cottages at the top of Station Road and the
2 pairs - now nos 89, 91 and 58, 60 - were built by Musgrave Francis, all
the estate cottages were numbered through the village, from no 1, the Bush,
to the cottages in Mill Drive, numbers 50 - 53. When my father was directed,
as a young wheelwright, to work in a factory making wheels for gun carriages
in Matlock, Derbyshire, he wrote home on postcards addressed to ' Mr. Tom
Watts, 23 Quy, Cambs'. The post was so good in those days that cards from
my aunt to my mother read - 'coming to see you on the 2 bus, this afternoon'.
My father's call-up was delayed by a year, during which time he had to wear
a bronze lapel badge engraved with 'on war work' to distinguish him from shirkers
who were being given white feathers by the women. Eventually he enlisted in
the Liestershires a year before the armistice luckily missing serving in the
trenches.
The farms and privately owned dwellings were named but not numbered until
1966 when the district council numbered every dwelling and possible site.
Each street or road (with the exception of Newmarket Road, I think?) was numbered
from 1 or 2, thus Park Farm became no 2 and the Bush no 101 Station Road.
In Main Street no 29, where Bill's parents lived, became no 2 Main Street.
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