Little Horwood Wartime Bellringers

LITTLE HORWOOD WARTIME BELLRINGING TEAM
A QUARTER PEAL
Was rung on Saturday 3rd February 1996
At St Nicholas, Little Horwood
As an 80th birthday compliment to
ALBERT SMITH
Tower captain and ringer at this church for
Over 60 years

I found this item in my father’s papers. In his memoirs on page 85 of “An Horrod Lad” he names the regular team that rang for a number of years during and after the war. There were others of course because sometimes it was like a village cricket team where someone drops out and you have to find a replacement at the last minute.

The team looked forward to weddings and special occasions because they always had a generous tip of beer money.

The team was:
Reg Savage the Tower Captain, Jack Ash, Albert Smith, Norman Faulkner & Jim Grainge

So who were these people, where did they live, how did they earn a living, what were their daily lives like, how did they fit in bell ringing?
I think it important to say at the outset that although we know them in living memory their lives were totally different to ours living in 2020 where we have sent a vehicle out of the solar system, Jet engines had not been invented. One could go backwards, saying 1989 Internet, 1969 Man on the moon, but the fact is in the 1940’s they were nearer the 1912 Winslow Telephone Directory which had only one entry for Little Horwood, that of Frederick Denny at Horwood House than the present day.

REG SAVAGE lived at number 15 Church Row Little Horwood, the house was a two up two down with a small barn and outside loo, the sewerage was not laid on at Little Horwood until 1951, so regular digging a hole in the long garden to bury the contents of the bucket was a regular feature. Reg had married a Gawcott girl “Kit” and they had two daughters, Beryl the eldest and Evelyn known as Ebb or Ebby. I well remember them as girls playing in the road by the Shoulder of Mutton bouncing a tennis ball against the house wall. It was common to play in the road then as there was little traffic and John Hyland in an article in the Little Horwood News describes being knocked over by George Gee’s construction traffic as it was heading to build the airfield at RAF Little Horwood and being gently cared for by Kit afterwards. Kit was a very special
person who always went to Church at the Shoulder of Mutton Gate while everyone else went to Church at the Main Gates. After she died the gate was named Kit’s Gate. Kit gave me my first job as a tiny tot to fetch her Jug of Milk from Reggie Goodes Farm at Cherry Tree, and when I was older taught me “The Valetta” and The St Bernard’s Waltz” at the Memorial Hall.

Reg worked on the Bucks County Council for his regular income, but devoted a lot of time to the village activities, he always found room to bury the outside loo buckets of the School in a group of Laurel bushes close by, and was often to be seen laying the hedge which went all around the school except for the footpath side and the churchyard side where there were metal railings.

In the 1960’s Reg was a keen Church Choir Member when Robert Britten (Benjamin’s brother) formed a Church Choir

For a number of years after he retired Reg gave Bell Ringing classes to any likely youngsters in the village. My sister Margaret Checkley (nee Smith), she recalls them putting on the Muffles for funerals, and for weddings ringing the Bells up beforehand ready to Ring them down with a bright peal immediately after the
ceremony. There was a numbers board up on the wall in the belfry to ring the changes when the leader called them for different variations. The one thing that “Scared her to death” at Little Horwood was the “Long pull” if you were to accidently get tangled up with the rope and went up to the high ceiling with it. Some of the pictured left to right I believe are possibly: Michael Howe, X, Gillian Beckett, David Randall, X, Julia Randall, Bernard Hosking, Margaret Smith, Mrs Penny Oakrhind, Andrew Beckett, Mrs Mary Smith, Reg Savage, Julia Howe
& Mrs Katie Westcott.

The second team member mentioned was JACK ASH who lived at number 13 Church Row. He was one of eleven children born to a Widow, when I first new them in the 1940’s only Jack, Harry and Joby lived at home with their mother, however it was a challenge for 4 mature adults to live in such a confined space of a terraced two up two down. They, like us next door had a tin bath, but they filled theirs up and bathed outside in the yard all year round. Jack remarked that it was a bit fresh in the winter! Jack worked a good deal on building sites. Harry and Joby were confirmed bachelors and the village thought Jack was too, however he visited his sister Ivy Samford in London and one day he brought to the village his wife to be Cicely to inspect the new house he had built her on the Green. (It was rumoured that the car that he travelled in from work had to have a few bricks in the boot as ballast each day).

Jack was a stalwart supporter of everything in the village and often finding fault with things so at one Recreation Ground Trustees meeting Bernard Westcott from Manor Farm said ” for God’s sake let us appoint Jack Ash to be a Trustee and stop these attacks on us”, and so he was duly appointed. Jack looked
after the wellbeing of the Rec, always the first to clear up after events and if the Cricket Club had left a bit of a mess he would always deal with it. He was also a nagging force which led to the War Memorial Garden, most of the village argued that we already had a War Memorial in the Village Hall and it’s dedication
stone, but Jack would have none of it and his persistence eventually lead to the Garden being dedicated.

Jack was of a very muscular build and so Bell ringing and Campanology came very easy to him and was always the first available.

There is a bit of a trend in addresses now because the third Campanologist mentioned above, ALBERT SMITH, my father lived at 11, Church Row, Little Horwood. Each of these lived next door to each other so not only did they speak to each other every day but they were literally only a stone’s throw from the Church itself to arrange any practises. We also had a tin bath and the hot water was warmed up in the bricked “Copper” in the corner of the kitchen, Mum would light the coal fire under the copper and transfer the hot water to the bath by bucket. However the difference was Mum put our bath in front of a blazing kitchen fire, rather than outside, first for my sister, then me, then for her and finally Dad all in the same water and only once a week. Our outside loo
was in the coal shed with cut up newspaper hanging on a nail and a Gasmask on the shelf. Unlike the others we had a pigsty at the top of the garden where we kept a pig, and a chicken run so we had a salted ham hanging on our kitchen wall. So we had ham and eggs and the occasional roast chicken if Mum
said one was not laying and a few vegetables fertilised by the emptying of the toilet bucket in the garden. Dad had a shotgun so he was always bringing home a rabbit or a hare and an occasional pigeon or pheasant. Albert had arrived in Little Horwood when he was 9 years old from Dr Barnardo’s and all on his own
walked from Swanbourne station with his suitcase and all his worldly belongings, to Joe Haley at Mount Pleasant on the Winslow Road. Before School at Little Horwood every morning he had to go to the Whitehouse and milk the cows. Later in life he worked on building sites before being attracted to the
opportunities at Warren Farm provide by George Gee’s modernised revolution just before the war broke out at the Warren Farm modern dairy.

At 11 Church Street where he lived with his wife Mary and my sister Margaret and me, he biked up to Warren Farm at 5.45am to milk the cows at 6.00am. At 8.30 he would bike back again for a full fried breakfast before going back to “muck out “and deal with the bull or new calves. At 12.30 he came home for
dinner, had a quick snooze afterwards and went back to get the cows in again for a 4.00pm milking and this was 7 days a week. When he was Church Warden he said to the Reverend Thomas Flynn who was vicar of Little Horwood from 1946 to 1954 “ I don’t know if I can get washed and changed in time for the 6.30pm evensong”, Tommy said, “I don’t care if you come in your smock and wellingtons Albert as long as you come”

He had two weeks annual holiday from farm work, one week was in the Spring where the whole family worked on a couple of Allotment Plots halfway up the Manor Hill to plant up all our vegetables and potatoes for the year and one week in early June before haymaking when we went to the seaside to a caravan. There was a sense of “Duty and Service” about all the Church Row Campanologists and Dad in particular was a Parish Councillor and Chairman for 25 years, a Church Warden, a member of the Home Guard, a Special Constable, a Hall Trustee, a Recreation Ground Trustee, a Little Horwood Trust Trustee, a School
Governor at Little Horwood and later Swanbourne. He was out almost every night of the week at some meeting or another. After Reg Savage retired Dad took over as “Tower Captain” and had numerous contacts to fill in spare bell ringing spots, and as the team aged and disintegrated he would try to invite guest ringers and always get up a team for weddings and special occasions.

The fourth member of the team mentioned was NORMAN FAULKNER. He was the son of Jack Faulkner and his wife who lived at the top of the Village Green in an old house, formerly thatched but then roofed by red tin sheets and a long garden stretching back to the village hall. For many years they delivered the village newspapers by bike with a huge basket front for the papers, and even after Jack died his wife carried on for years. Norman was a great mate of Dad’s because he had a motorbike and could ferry him as a single man to dances. He tells the story of Norman taking him to a dance at Old Bradwell and then having his motorbike stolen. They hitched a lift to Norman’s boss at a motor dealers on the A5 and borrowed a car to get home at 4.00am ready for milking at 6.00am. I think Norman may have come to a premature end because I didn’t personally know him.

The Fifth man in the team mentioned was JIM GRAINGE, a distant relation to Charlie Grainge, John Grainge’s father. Jim was a lovely modest fellow who was at times a “little simple” country lad. He lived with his invalid father Fred at 6 Church Street for many years. My father tells a story when he and Jim cycled to Winslow to catch the coach for the British Legion outing to Portsmouth and when they had already seen “HMS Victory” and “HMS Hood” they took a boat to the Isle of Wight for the rest of the day. It was the only time that either went “Abroad”. Later when his father died Jim moved house to the old wooden Post
Office next to the Memorial Hall. Again we thought him a lifelong bachelor but he surprised everyone when he went later to live with his girlfriend. The house was barely on the market when it was said that a smarmy character named Bob Johnson from the bungalow on the Winslow Road took a shoe box with three or four thousand banknotes in it to persuade Jim to prematurely sell his house for less than market value, taking advantage of his simplicity.

Terry Smith