Elham, Kent, England

[mossie]

I was born and brought up in the village of Elham, pronounced Eelam, in darkest East Kent.




In those days (1932), it was an almost self contained rural community of about 150 houses. It had a church,




A chapel, an Infants School for ages 5 to 7, and the main school for ages 7 to 14.
There was an Ex-Servicemans Hut, which the members of the local British Legion attended. Here they had a bar and a snooker table, and from where they organised social events, there were also two tennis courts. Membership of the Legion was open to anyone who had served in the Forces. This of course encompassed most men over about 30 because of the 1914-18 Great War. There were of course three pubs divided almost on class lines, from the top, the Rose and Crown, the Kings Arms and the New Inn. However the pub which took the prize for the oddest name lay a mile or so outside the village, the Palm Tree


There was a general stores, which sold toys also at Christmas time, a butcher, a grocer, two greengrocers. A news agent who also sold bicycles and sweets and paraffin oil which was extensively used for heating and lighting then. He would go out to his shed at the back to fill your oil can and come back and serve loose sweets from a big jar. ;D. There was a baker and a hardware store, selling anything from pots and pans to rabbit snares. More importantly for me was the village tailor, where my father worked. We lived in a two bedroom bungalow, which has had an extra room put in the roof in later years, and the garage built into the front garden.


He had been apprenticed there when he was 14 in 1911 and apart from serving in the wars, always worked there. Here is the shop as pictured on an old glass plate coated with bitumen which would date from about 1870


My father remembered "old Hobday Gibson" as he called him, but the tailor he worked for was Albert Castle, whose niece he had married. My father served in the RAF in WW11 and when Uncle Albert died in 1944, my father bought the shop from his widow and we moved down there.



There was a field called the Gore, because of its triangular shape, which was the cricket pitch in summer and the football pitch in winter. it belonged to a local farmer who grazed sheep on it to help out with the mowing, so one had to watch where one went diving after the ball ;D

The first time I can remember holding a proper cricket bat at the age of about 7, the man bowling to me was Les Ames, a local boy who was also the England wicketkeeper, both before and after, WW11.

An idyllic life, sort of interrupted by WW11 where we had a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain, watching aircraft crashing and being bombed. But to a boy that was all part of normal existence. Exciting by day and frightening by night.

[bixaorellana]

This is wonderful, Mossie ~~ like a telescope view back into your boyhood. You really tell a story better than anyone I know.

The pictures are super. I had no idea it was so hilly there. Are most of the houses built up on a rise like your first home?

There will be more of this, I hope!

[htmb]

Oh, Mossie, I LOVE this! What a wonderful thread. More?

[fumobici]

Wonderful little photo report. What a thoroughly charming town!

[Deleted]

This is a great report and the village is very photogenic -- not a McDonald's in sight!

I think the palm tree at the Palm Tree has passed the point of no return.

[bjd]

Please continue, Mossie.

[Deleted]

Charming and lovely indeed. Just as I so often picture Kent, rolling hills, bucolic....

Why might I ask do you refer to it as "darkest" Kent? I'm not familiar with this term although, I've heard it used before.

Please Sir, can we have some more??

[mossie]

As I have been requested to carry on boasting about the little village I was born in, I have raked up some more photos.



Darkest East Kent is just me, in fact when I left school it was a depressed area. The only industry left was farming and my first job was as a farm labourer, paid the boys rate of 1 shilling per hour, 5p in modern money. There was the remains of a brick works in the valley but production had ceased some time before, it had mainly supplied the railway for bridges etc. I forgot to mention that a branch railway ran from near Folkestone to Canterbury, via the village. This was taken over by the army in 1940 to carry ex naval guns, mounted on railway trucks. There were two 12inch and one 18inch, guns.

They were to engage the German invasion fleet of barges if they attempted to cross the channel, a tempting target. Consider a mass of barges, towed in pairs at about walking pace. Crammed with men and horses, if those guns , and others near Dover, had fired into them the carnage could have been considerable. I still think it is a pity they didn't try. We boys had been told "When the Germans come , you boys are to put sugar in their petrol tanks". These guns were fired on a few occasions to check their range and accuracy, when this happened we used to go up the top of the hill and line ourselves up with the barrel to hear the shells go whooshing over our heads.

The recoil from the guns so damaged the tracks that when the railway was handed back at the end of the war it was not possible to run passenger carriages on it, and it was soon abandoned and the track taken up.

Anyway, pictures.
Here is the Manor House, which was across the road from our bungalow, owned for a while by Professor Parkinson of Parkinsons Law fame. The first law of bureaucracy, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."


The village was granted its Market Charter in the 13th century, which was held in the Square



The High Street was very wide in the centre of the village and was the later site of a horse fair and market.



In later years it was the site of the Boxing Day Meet of the East Kent Hunt, which had kennels for its hounds and horses just along the road from our bungalow. This picture was taken by a pressman from our bedroom window when we lived in the shop.



When the village was bombed in 1940 the first bomb fell on the Kennel bank and the second in the kennels, killing several dogs and setting the others crazy to rush round the village. Other bombs fell in the back gardens each side of my grandmothers house, and the last fell in the main road outside the doctors house. This bomb blocked the road, broke the water main and brought down the telephone and electricity wires, so the village was cut off for a while. In this picture taken from Google Earth, that stick is at the bottom.



The other stick was apparently aimed at Park Gate House, a prominent house just outside the village, where Antony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, spent weekends. he ceased that practice after that.
Also marked is "doodlebug" . This was where a V1, one of Hitlers revenge weapons, fell at 7am on 23rd March 1945. My mother had just come in to our bedroom to wake us. There was a tremendous flash, followed by a very loud explosion, the curtains stood out straight, the house seemed to lift for a moment. Then there was total silence for what seemed like seconds, followed by the tinkling of glass as windows fell into the street. Our bedroom faced directly at this but luckily no one was killed or seriously injured, but 150 houses and the railway station were damaged.

There is this memorial to the Battle of Britain pilots on the cliff just outside Folkestone, about 6 miles from us.



I'll take a break here and rake out a little more later, if anyone can bear it/

[bixaorellana]

Somehow that monument is more poignant and evocative than any number of more martial ones used to commemorate battles.

Gad, the story about the doodlebug -- the way you tell it, I could see it!

That's a beautiful picture of the town nestled around the church in its little valley.

[tod2]

Oh Mossie, I am loving this! I like the before and after photos as it shows little has changed.
Now I know why I love England so much!
Recently I have been finding out stuff I never knew about my mother's young life in the army.
She got to be a Corporal before my father came back from Lagos and whisked her off to Kenya where I was born in '44.

Please do continue with the excellent photos and narrative!

[Deleted]

Truly lovely photos, but I can't help but think about how lucky Great Britain was in terms of bombing. France was bombed by 3 countries and 2 of them were allies.

[onlymark]

Yes, k2, being lucky about being bombed is a great comfort.

[mich64]

This has been very enlightening Mossie. The detail of your family history has been very interesting indeed.

It is special that you are sharing your experiences with us as we approach November 11th.

We have two Legion Branches in our City and a social club for the 406 Wing. As a child we spent many Saturday or Sunday afternoons at the Legion downtown or up on the Base at the Mess. They were great sources of support when my father was stationed abroad.

I particularly enjoyed the panoramic pictures of the village and the photo taken from the window in your family home. I am assuming that you no longer live there? Do you have family still living there?

[Deleted]

Real interesting, mossie. I come from Kent as well, the South East does have some nice picturesque villages. Are you still there, or did you move on?

[nycgirl]

What a picturesque place to grow up. I love the shots of the houses nestled in the lush green hills.

It's cool you found an old photo of your father's workplace. I was really pleased to come across a 1930s photo of the street I live on now, but yours outdates mine by a long shot.

I agree with Bixa, the monument is very touching. It lacks the pomposity that many monuments have. The pilot depicted seems warm and unassuming.

[mossie]

Mich, no I don't live in that area now, once I left home that was it. I eventually settled in Ipswich, Suffolk because that is where work took me, and I just washed up on the shore here when I retired.
And Deyana, that is too pretty a name to have originated in Kent . I still have a soft spot for that area, but it is not a practical proposition to move back. I have no connections there, and could not face the upheaval of moving now, I'm just waiting for them to come and fit my wooden overcoat.

Now, back to the point. I'll start be repeating the pic filched from Google Earth.

Looking at it later I realized that I had misplaced the doodlebug, it should have been further away from the village towards the middle of the field. It may be the whitish patch near the edge of the shot. I had forgotten that the railway ran along the field, there is a darker line near the hedgeline which marks where the trackbed was removed so the farmer could incorporate the railway land back into his field. The hedgeline marks the line of the stream so one can see that the village lay on the favoured west slope of the fairly steep valley.

Anyway, this is a long trail to the story of the two bridges.
About a mile north of Elham the main Canterbury road crossed the railway and the stream, by a Z bend bridge, known as Worlds Wonder because of Worlds Wonder farm beside it. In about August 1940 a German bomber dropped a stick of bombs across this, no doubt part of their invasion plan to cut a vital communication. Unhappily for them, the bombs did not explode, they had fallen into the stream and close to it. The army recovered some but the rest vanished because as fast as they dug, the bombs sunk further into the wet stream bed, and so they were abandoned and may still be there. . Rumour of all sorts was rife at that time, and the village rumour mill had it that the bombs had not exploded because their fuses had been filled with sand by the Czechs who had made them.

The second bridge was at the south side, just off the edge of the photo. This is where the lane from Hawkinge crossed over the railway and stream. One day in 1942 I was with a few of my friends on the hill just above the doodlebug field, when a German fighter swooped along the valley and fired his cannon at an engine and trailer, partially hidden under the bridge. One shell set light to the tarpaulin which covered the ammunition for the railway guns, which was stacked on the station platform, without doing further damage . Another hit a telegraph pole beside the line, taking a big bite out of it, some struck the rear of the tender and one took a bite out of the granite coping stone on the bridge parapet.
The aircraft fired his guns right in front of us, so we knew where the shell cases had dropped and rushed down to pick them up. This was standard practice, when I spoke to the woman who eventually lived in our house in the '90's, she said she had been puzzled by the mixture of spent cases she had found buried in the garden. I guess that is where my mother had disposed of my junk . However amongst the cases one of the lads picked up 7 live 20mm cannon rounds, that is shell and case complete, still linked together. I guess that was the end of a belt which had somehow got dropped, but a great prize ;D ;D

Incidentally a week or so later, we were having breakfast in the front room of the bungalow. This had a large window which looked directly out to the hill. Suddenly there was a burst of load explosions, followed by an aircraft zooming over the roof. When we had stopped trying to hide, we found that the bungalow had been struck by three 20mm shells. One just beside the window, one just below it and one on the chimney. We had been very lucky because if one had come through the window we were all sat round the table, it wouldn't have done us any favours . As it seemed safe my mother allowed me and my next brother to go round the garden to pick up whatever we could find. My three year old brother was kept in until we had scoured the garden and then he and my mother joined us.

He wandered down to the bottom and was rushing back within a few minutes to mother shouting "I've found a bigger bit of shrapnel than any of the boys". He was clutching a complete live round This was duly presented to the unhappy village policeman

[htmb]

Oh my goodness, Mossie. Were you terrified at all back then, or did it sink in more later as you got older and realized the danger you had been in with your family?

[lugg]

Really enjoyed reading your narrative, sharing your memories and looking at the photos.

Although I have only travelled through, Kent reminds me of Herefordshire in many ways , I guess it is the hop kilns and also seems that like Herefordshire, many villages remain essentially unchanged.

[Deleted]

And Deyana, that is too pretty a name to have originated in Kent . I still have a soft spot for that area, but it is not a practical proposition to move back. I have no connections there, and could not face the upheaval of moving now, I'm just waiting for them to come and fit my wooden overcoat.

Mossie, Deyana is just a forum name I use on the few forums that I am on, my real name is kind of boring

I know how you feel though, I have a soft spot for it too, I know the roads and landmarks so well, even the cracks in the pavements. But I have no desire to live there ever again. Truth be known the area of Kent that I come from is known as 'the black hole' by locals. Nothing too pretty about it really, but it was home for a long time for me, so I do have some fond memories of it.

[mossie]

Htmb, I wouldn't be honest if I said I wasn't scared some times, but I didn't really understand how much danger we were in until later. As I said, most of it was very exciting but the night times weren't so clever.
Here I am, playing on the lawn of our bungalow.


The rough old barn and yard behind me was used by the RAF to drag in the remains of German aircraft shot down in the area. Then they were examined to see what new gimmicks they carried, and learn what intelligence they could from them.

I well remember my mother taking us out into the back garden one night in 1942, when there was a lot of aircraft and ack ack (in modern parlance AAA). This was to see the big glow in the sky which was the medieval centre of Canterbury burning from Hitlers Baedeker raid. This is how it looked a few days later, the grammar school I went to lays just to the right of this. Half the buildings were destryed and the rest damaged. As a result the girls section was evacuated down to Dorset and the rest patched up, and some wooden huts erected, for the boys.


We had a barrage balloon in the playground, and concrete tunnels underneath it, where we had to shelter from air raids.
I am still not happy if there is thunder and lightening at night, scaredy cat.

[htmb]

I'm sighing deeply and thinking "the things we people do to each other." Just horrific.

Mossy, after serving in WWII, my father never wanted to go anywhere. He just always wanted to stay close to home. He only went to one film showing in a movie theatre that had war as the subject, and he left after breaking out in a cold sweat. I think war changes people forever, doesn't it?

[Deleted]

Some people seem to thrive on it, though. My father served in both WW2 and the Korean war. He was on one of the ships bombed at Pearl Harbor. He really loved talking about those times, even when they had to amputate a chopped sailor with a fire ax to get him out of the sinking ship.

[mossie]

My father would not say very much about his experiences.
However as you can see from my posts, war made a lasting impression on my young mind from which I cannot escape. I just like to share them with the younger generation, who have luckily not had to experience these things, and I hope they never do.
Yes, I realise there are people in Afghanistan now, and in other godforsaken places, into which we should never have poked our noses, who are now enduring harrowing experiences.
It is easy to be philosophical at 80, but not at 20.

[Deleted]

Since both of my parents (or should I say all three due to biological father and adoptive father) went through WW2 one way or another, just like many people of our generation, I was raised on war stories. One thing that strikes me so much now is that by the time I was old enough to pay attention to the stories (let's say age 6), the war only about 15 years in the past, but the anecdotes had the same effect on me as my grandparents talking about WW1. However, we did go to France a number of times (and yes, when I was 6), and it really struck me on the boat train from Le Havre to Paris (since of course we could not afford to fly) the number of ruins that I saw and even when we drove to my grandparents' village, there were signs of the war. Their own village was unscathed, but the next village over had several bombed out houses -- and they remained that way for at least the next 10 years.

(very sorry to slightly hijack your wonderful thread, Mossie)

[Judy Elam]

Do you know anything about a Welsh migration to Elham? My family was supposed to be there by 1273, but they were originally from Wales.

[patricklondon]

Jan 13, 2017 2:46:34 GMT Judy Elam said:

Do you know anything about a Welsh migration to Elham? My family was supposed to be there by 1273, but they were originally from Wales.

Records that far back are too sparse and unreliable for any firm conclusions to be drawn. With luck and perseverance, you can get back to the middle 16th century in English and Welsh parish records, and even that would depend on making suppositions about the conventions for parents naming children, and about whether or not people moved parishes. Any earlier than that, and it's very hard to prove any particular connections.

[Elham resident]

Some fabulous insights into our village, thank you so much for posting them.

It would be great if you could share the information with the Historical Society -

www.ehs.elham.co.uk/

www.facebook.com/pages/category/Community/Elham-Historical-Society-153938238015809/

[kerouac2]

Frankly, all one has to do is link this thread to one of those other sites and the deed is done.

But I'm sure that Mossie might have a lot more to contribute.

[bixaorellana]

Elham resident! This is not my report, but it's always exciting to find out who is reading the reports on this forum. I am following up on your excellent suggestion of linking the report to the website and to the facebook page. I know Mossie, who created this wonderful look at his home place, will be most pleased to see your comment.

[ROCKY R]

This is fantastic .I have had the pleasure of visiting Elham several times so find this extremely interesting .Thanks for posting the pictures and your account of living in the village .