The back room at The Anchor was filled with a jolly crowd taking advantage of a free drink and, where not a member, being upgraded to full membership for the rest of the year for their entrance fee! They had come to listen to ‘Voices of Old Hartfield’ recorded over many years to provide a unique verbal history of life in the parish.
During the autumn we had a talk from Gilly Halcrow entitled ‘Whatever happened to Christopher Robin’ and we learnt how he was badly teased at school because of the record of his singing that his father had produced. One of the recordings collected together included some of Christopher Robin songs and we were able to start our evening with a quick ‘listen’ to one song so that we could all hear why poor Christopher Robin was so teased – resulting in his estrangement from his father for many years!
We then moved on to our first main recording in which we listened to Ruth Taylor who worked for Lord & Lady Castle Stewart at Old Lodge whilst her husband was butler for 35 years. It was a pleasure to have Ruth’s daughter in our audience who said later that it was lovely to hear her mother’s voice again. Ruth had memories going right back to the age of 3.1/2. She talked about hop picking and seeing a Zeppelin shot down in flames and how she used her sowing skills to ‘remodel’ soldiers and airman’s uniform in WW2 when they didn’t fit! Altogether a remarkable woman who worked hard throughout her life and used skills she learnt from her mother as well as from school to support her family into old age.
A short piece from the recording of Lord and Lady Castle Stewart themselves provided a count of the numbers employed on the estate at the one occasion that they all met together for the annual Christmas Celebration. The result was 50!
After a break we listened to Joan Giradot who had been chair of the Parish Council for 12 years and been responsible for several important innovations in the village . She actually retired on the same day as the Memorial Garden was officially opened and also told us how she had run into the traffic calming bollards on the first day and because it was not lit sent a bill to the Council claiming it was their fault – and they paid up! A formidable woman.
To finish we played a song from the First World War as a tribute to the many Hartfield residents who had died and are commemorated on the Hartfield War Memorial and were the subject of our November talk by James Castle.
Our next meeting on the 25th February at the Village Hall follows this theme with a talk by Ian Everest entitled ‘Sussex during World War 1′
