Bob Delderfield’s History File
Autumn 1995
Memories of Old Daws Heath
The request in a previous newsletter for the memories of long term residents brought an almost immediate response from Mrs Doris Staines (née Scudder). She has spent most of her life in Thundersley, including the first 18 years in Daws Heath where she was born in 1908. The Scudders were associated with Daws Heath from the very early 19th century and her grandmother was a servant at Bramble Hall in the 1860s.
Doris remembers the old Daws Heath with great affection, recalling the rural simplicity of the place: “no buses, no paths, no gas or electricity. You chopped your wood for the fire and used paraffin lamps”. The children of the area roamed the fields and woods regarding the latter as public property — in fact, Doris was staggered in later years to discover that woods had owners. Pound and other woods were considered by the very few people then living in the area as the source for beansticks, peasticks and kindling. “Our mothers would hurl a bushell basket at us” and it was expected that the child would fill the basket with faggots. It was also common and regarded as perfectly normal for locals to set snares in the woods for rabbits. In those days before the welfare state if you couldn’t work you didn’t eat, so rabbits would be caught and then either eaten, sold, or perhaps swapped for potatoes.
Editor’s Note: Uncontrolled cutting by today’s large local population would eliminate the wood in a few weeks, but some sticks are still surplus at coppice time — come and collect them on work-party Sundays.
Although Doris recalls her childhood in Daws Heath with pleasure, she has no illusions about the behaviour of children in those far off days — “children have always been little horrors” — and she has a number of tales of childhood mischief including herself ‘scrumping’ at the age of seven. As we all know, Pound Wood produces wonderful chestnuts which Doris and her friends also enjoyed. They would pick them up and sell them if they could get away with it. Occasionally they failed and were discovered in their crime; Doris well remembers receiving the carpet beater across her behind for one such misdemeanour. Then there were the activities in and around the Daws Heath Pond which stood at the very top of Western Road on the west side. Dashing into the pond the children would claw up the silty sludge from the bottom and perpetrate minor acts of vandalism with it. Doris finds amusement in our modern idea that every wood and road has a proper name because in her youth much cruder references were, usually made. Bramble Road was known as “along the top and down the end”. St Michael’s Road was the “old back road”. Starvelarks Wood was “the coppice” and the stream in Pound Wood which we now dignify as Hunford Brook was simply “the ditch”. St Michael’s field, before the church was built, gloried in a more agricultural and ancient field name, Stoney Crop Field, which in Doris’s childhood produced crops such as swedes, tumips and wheat.
Wyburns Farm was casually reduced in size and status by many of the locals who would look from Daws Heath Road across its fields towards Rayleigh and refer to it as the “40 Acres”. Doris also recalls it being known as “Grinsteads” after the farmer of that time. If Doris and her friends fancied going to Rayleigh they would not follow the path which winds through Starvelarks but just cut across 40 Acres. As they went they might grab the odd ear of corn, rubbing and hand winnowing it in order to eat its sweet centre. The field beside the Daws Heath Road often had cows or sheep on it and Great Wyburns stood at the east end of that field at the junction of Daws Heath Road and Western Road (photographs in Tony Babbington’s book nos. 178 and 179). Here it was customary to take your can and purchase fresh milk from the farmhouse door.
Another farm providing milk was Hareslands which once stood at the far end of Haresland Close. From here a daughter of the farmer would set out on a bicycle precariously balancing a can of milk on each side of the handlebars to sell milk from door to door.
Represented above are just a few memories of old Daws Heath from Doris Staines to whom I am most grateful for her time and patience. She has plenty more tales to tell and I hope to include some of them in a future newsletter.