Between the wars, a Bradshaw's was an essential guide
during a golden age of rail travel,
when glamourous locomotives travelled at world record speed.
I'm using a 1930s edition
to explore a discernibly modern era of mass consumption...
Bravo!
..when Art Deco cinemas and dancehalls entertained millions,
while industrial Britain was thrown into unemployment and poverty
and storm clouds gathered across the Channel.
My journey will shortly bring me into East Anglia,
whose attractiveness, says Bradshaw's,
needs no emphasis,
seeing that the charms
of its resorts entertain
a much larger proportion of the nation
than any other coast in Britain.
On this part of my journey, I shall investigate a group
that came not as holiday makers,
but as refugees,
whose history is intertwined with that of my family.
I'm exploring the east of England.
I started in Kent and visited the suburbs and Docklands of London.
I'll continue my journey visiting the towns and cities of East Anglia,
and finish in Lincolnshire.
On this leg, I'll visit Witham, in Essex,
before heading into Suffolk,
bound for the county town of Ipswich.
Continuing towards the coast,
I'll make a stop at Newbourne, and I'll finish at Felixstowe.
On my trip, I'll learn
how a rural resettlement helped unemployed families...
It was great for us kids.
We'd died and gone to heaven.
Why? It was so much land, there was so much freedom.
..hear of the heights scaled by patriotic women...
Did those women give you the impression that,
at the top of those towers, they were terrified?
That's not the impression you get at all.
..and visit a country house
that received refugee children at a time of war.
We were saying goodbye to our mums.
And I still feel her tears on my cheek.
I'm arriving at Witham, in Essex.
The station is located on the Great Eastern Mainline
between Chelmsford and Colchester.
When this station footbridge was built,
the glass was held in place by metal frames,
and it was valued
because it was durable
and it lent itself to mass production.
My interest is that it offers a window on house-building
at the time of my guidebook.
Witham is home to the oldest supplier of steel-framed glazing.
Crittall Windows was established
in 1849, by ironmonger Francis Henry Crittall.
By the time of my Bradshaw's, it was a successful business,
with three factories in Essex,
and a purpose-built village for its workers.
John Piatt is chairman of the company.
John, good to see you.
Good to see you, Michael. Welcome to Silver End.
Well, thank you very much.
What is Silver End?
Well, it's the original village that was built by Crittall
for Crittall workers between 1926 and 1932.
With what in mind? What were the principles of the village?
They were looking for employees.
And this was just a rural area.
And so they wanted to get more employees
and have a community situation.
And what does it consist of?
Well, it consists of around about 500 houses,
a department store, a village hall,
and all the amenities you want in a small village.
Now, I see that they obviously put metal windows in here,
but, more generally, what contribution
do metal-frame windows make to house building?
Well, post-First World War,
there was an enormous demand for housing stock.
The Government were pushing for more housing,
and it needed a lot of products to go with it.
Crittall had designed and developed a mass-produced product,
standard modular design,
which could be fitted into housing stock very easily.
So it was the only option to timber.
And it really took off.
In 1919, Parliament passed ambitious housing legislation
known as the Addison Act after its author,
Dr Christopher Addison, Minister for Health.
It made housing a national responsibility
and required local councils to provide accommodation where needed.
The Crittall Factory manufactured
the first standard cottage windows for those housing schemes.
Apart from the fact that they were mass produced,
what other advantages did this type of window offer?
Well, it had very slim sightlines
compared with the conventional timber window.
So it allowed a lot more light
to come into the house or the building,
which was a big, big advantage.
By the time of my guidebook, metal-framed windows featured
in the Art Deco and modernist houses of middle class suburbia.
During the 1930s, private house builders
constructed nearly four million new homes
in a boom matched only by the high rises
of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Today, metal-framed windows are fashionable once again.
I'm heading to the factory to see them in production.
The galvanised steel frames must be straightened
before they're painted.
Chris Dunn will give me a lesson in window bashing.
I'm Michael. Hi, Michael.
Does this one need straightening, Chris? Yes.
Can you see the bow in that?
Err, I think I do. So it appears to be going in a bit like that.
Exactly. You take it round here.
And we'll give it a straighten with a hammer.
After all these years of technological development,
the answer is a hammer?
Yeah. A hammer.
Can I help you with that? Yeah, you sure can.
Right.
So what do I have to do now?
Well, hit it with three marks.
One hit here, one there and one there.
With what sort of force? Quite a bit.
Quite a bit. Here goes.
Too much force or not enough force?
None at all. None at all.
No, a bit more. No?
Give it some more.
GROANS
Afraid it ain't going to do anything.
GROANS
You show me, then.
Yeah, that's done it. Is that it?
Yeah, look. If you look down that bar, it's the one I hit.
Bish, bash, bosh, eh?
Very good.
And you go on bashing. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
From Witham, I'm continuing my journey into the county of Suffolk
to explore my family history.
At the time of this Bradshaw's,
Britain was gripped by the civil war in Spain.
When a small town in the Basque country in northern Spain, Guernica,
or Guer-NI-ca, was bombed flat,
the British Government agreed
to admit 4,000 unaccompanied refugee children
who crammed onto a single ship.
Some of them ended up near the University of Oxford,
where my mother was reading Spanish.
She befriended the children.
And when, at the end of the Civil War,
a newly arrived refugee academic turned up to help,
she fell in love.
Without the Basque children, my parents would never have met.
In May 1937, the steamship Habana,
carrying the 4,000 children, docked at Southampton.
To begin with, the refugees were housed
in a temporary camp near Eastleigh.
The following month, 100 of them arrived at Ipswich station.
They were taken to Wherstead Park,
just south of the town, near the River Orwell.
Today, it's a conference and wedding venue.
Meeting me there is Dr Ed Packard,
a history lecturer at the University of Suffolk.
Ed, nearly 4,000 Basque refugee children in a field
in Eastleigh, near Southampton.
What is to be done with them?
Well, the important thing
was to get them out of the field as soon as possible.
Conditions were getting quite unsanitary.
And the Basque government had said when you disperse the children
around Britain into what were called colonies,
it was important to keep them in groups.
With regard to why they came here,
this was mainly the work of two young women in Ipswich,
Chloe and Poppy Vulliamy, two sisters.
They were very passionate supporters of the Spanish Republic.
They wrote letters to the local press,
saying these children are going to come here,
they're going to need places to stay.
And in response to their campaign,
the gentleman who owned this building, Wherstead Mansion,
a man called Stuart Paul,
offered the use of this Georgian mansion for free to the sisters.
The British Government adopted a policy of non-intervention
during the Spanish Civil War.
It reluctantly agreed to accept the children,
but refused to support them financially.
Local committees organised bedding and food,
but they also had to guarantee to raise, privately,
ten shillings per child per week to cover its care and education.
That would be around £30 today.
When agreement was made to bring the children over here,
it very much relied on a humanitarian message,
rather than a political message.
So the Basque children were very much framed
as a non-party and a non-sectarian cause,
and so the committees that were formed
tended to kind of reflect that.
What sort of connection did the children make
with the Ipswich community while they were here?
While they were at Wherstead, they made a very solid connection.
Because they were quite close, they often went into Ipswich, er,
to go shopping, or to just look around, or to go to the cinema.
There's plenty of newspaper accounts of interactions with the children,
whether playing football, erm, you know,
they didn't have a common language,
but, of course, they could, er, share a common game.
Obviously, I have a great interest in this subject,
but it's much less well known than, say, the Kindertransport,
the rescue of Jewish children from the Nazis.
Do you think it deserves to be better known?
The question of refugees has not gone away.
If anything, it's got more urgent in the 21st century,
and so these events of 80 years ago are really important,
because they force us to reflect on what actually the local
and the regional can do,
and I think that's the key legacy of the Basque children.
After the fall of Bilbao,
and General Franco's capture of the rest of northern Spain
in the summer of 1937, the bombing of the Basque country ceased,
and Franco sought the children's repatriation.
By September 1939, all but 450 had been returned.
Paco. Que introduccion.
Hombre, hola. Hola.
Buenas tardes. Carmen.
But some never went back,
and I'm privileged to be meeting Paco Francisco Robles,
along with Carmen Kilmer,
from the Association for the UK Basque Children.
Paco,
do you remember going down to the ship in Bilbao?
Very much.
I remember that we went by tram, er, to Santutzi.
And I remember the, er, Guardia de Asalto,
the soldiers that helped us to get into the ship,
and I heard the women, all the mothers there,
crying their eyes out, and we were saying goodbye to our mums,
and I still feel her tears on my cheek.
Carmen, what's your connection with the Basque children?
My mother was one of the young teachers,
one of 95 teachers that came over with the children.
Er, the British Government had said that the children could come,
but they had to be accompanied by responsible adults
who were not their parents.
My mother, who was 22 at the time, volunteered,
and she came with the children to, to England.
Tell me about your arrival here.
It was beautiful there. There was lots and lots of fields.
Do you have any memories of this room?
I remember this room.
It was my turn sometimes to, er, help scrub the floor here.
What was your routine here?
Our routine was getting baths every day to scrub the scabies.
We all had scabies.
We got them from the camp.
At the end of the Spanish Civil War, why did you not go back?
I wrote to my mother and I said, "Would you like us to go back,
"my sister and I?"
She said, "Stay where you are.
"Your father's in prison,
"and he's been sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment."
He spent five years in different prisons.
She said, "You are better off where you are.
"You wouldn't like it here at the moment."
Paco was eventually sent to another refugee colony, near Oxford,
where he met my parents.
I remember your father.
This chap came over and helped us with our little luggage.
He brought us to the colony.
He told us exactly what we had to do, where to...our bedroom,
and introduced us to one of the teachers,
and there was a young lady that came over as well to help.
She was Scottish, I think.
Her name was Cora, and it turned out it was your mum.
I suppose they fell in love, the two of them.
Paco, amazing that you can remember so much, and so well.
Oh, there's a lot more to be remembered,
but there you are, we haven't got the time.
My mother fell in love with a penniless Spanish refugee
from the civil war,
in the turmoil of the Basque children,
just as the Second World War was about to begin,
and now I meet a man who knew my parents at that time
before they married.
It's pretty moving.
A new day, and I'm visiting the village of Newbourne,
just outside Ipswich.
Bradshaw's tells me that one factor which makes East Anglia so popular
is that it lies within the area of Britain
subjected to the least rainfall,
whilst it enjoys more than its share of bright sunshine and bracing air.
I'm interested in a group who'd come down from the north of England,
where it is allegedly wetter,
and the lungs now filling with bracing air
had, before that, ingested coal dust.
Some of the children of the coal miners who'd moved to Newbourne
in the 1930s still live in the area.
Gentlemen, one of you, I think, originates in the north of England.
Which is that? That's me, yes, yep.
Tell me your story.
My name is John Hedley.
My father came down here in 1937.
Erm, he came down, there was no houses here at all,
and he came down.
He left his wife and us children in Newcastle for six months,
whilst he learnt how to farm, if you like.
Did he tell you, then, why he came down?
What was in his mind?
I think, erm,
I think you'll find that it was sheer frustration.
He was on the dole for about three years,
absolutely nothing in Newcastle,
and he came down and he liked it.
He'd done his six months' experience.
He passed that, and then he was given a house.
Was it a hard life or was it a good life?
Easy. Great for us kids.
We'd died and gone to heaven.
Why?
Well, it was so much land, there was so much freedom,
there was so much food to eat,
you know, we had everything to eat,
chickens and geese and rabbits,
you name it, we ate it, you know.
Yeah, it was fun. We had fun.
To find out more about that relocation...
Hello, Lee!
..I'm meeting author Lee Beltram, who also lived here as a child.
Welcome to Newbourne. Thank you very much.
Lee, the houses here have a distinctive architectural style.
You're right, in fact, there were 50 houses like this
built on the Newbourne estate, erm, back in the late 1930s.
They were provided by the Land Settlement Association
to smallholders who had been brought in from mainly the north of England,
where there was terrible long-term unemployment with the closure of
coal mining and the depression among the shipbuilding industries.
Was the Land Settlement Association then a Government scheme?
The Government were fully supportive and the Government had been talking
to one or two voluntary organisations, such as the Carnegie
Trust, the Society of Friends, the British Legion, the Association
of Social Service, who had all been concerned about the effects
of long-term unemployment.
And they worked together with the Government to establish a scheme
whereby such men and, eventually, their families, once
they'd been trained, but such men could come and could learn the basic
principles of horticulture.
If the men were being made unemployed in the north of England
with their families, why move them so far from their homes to give them
a small holding? What was the thinking?
Well, the thinking was to give them the training that they needed
to develop skills and experience and knowledge themselves.
But it was particularly important for the children
and their education.
It would be better for them to be brought up
in a fresh environment too.
During the 1930s, the Land Settlement Association created
21 estates across England. Small holdings of approximately five
acres were set up to provide three main enterprises - horticulture,
poultry and pork.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, 1,728 men had been moved
to the estates as trainees, followed by their wives and children.
And were these people provided with a house or did they build it?
Yes.
Well, in fact, they were provided with a house in that it was going to be theirs.
They didn't have to pay for it, but they did have to build it.
You can see, in the background, the swings, the foundations of
a glasshouse, or a greenhouse, as it was in those days.
There was a piggery.
And that's obviously had a lot of bits and pieces added to it.
But that is an original piggery, as it was.
And they were able to ultimately build up a business
and be self-supporting and obviously feed their families and feed
the country as well.
It's an interesting scheme, well intentioned, on the one hand, rather
paternalistic on the other.
Did the subjects of this experiment stick it out?
I think the figure that is quoted is about 40%, certainly, in the early
days, decided it wasn't for them and they moved back to the north.
In spite of some failings,
it worked very, very well and succeeded in its original
intention of providing a stepping stone to success in agriculture.
And many of the tenants were able to make a good living and were able
to provide for their families and to educate their children.
I've left Ipswich, bound for the Suffolk coast.
Situated at the mouth of the River Orwell,
Felixstowe is an east coast town which faces south
and thus enjoys a sheltered position.
The writer of my 1936 Bradshaw's Guide could have no idea
that close by, in a house that attracted no attention,
secret work was under way.
So important
that, when war came, it would save Britain from defeat.
The hideaway is just north of Felixstowe.
To get there, I must catch a boat from the village of Felixstowe Ferry
and cross the River Deben.
Hello, Charlie!
Bawdsey Manor was built in 1886 as a private residence for wealthy
stockbroker Sir Cuthbert Quilter.
But in 1936, as the threat of war loomed in Europe, it was sold
to the Air Ministry.
Dr Phil Judkins is an historian.
What was the work that was begun here in 1936?
The development of radar into being an efficient
weapon of war.
Tell me a little bit about Robert Watson-Watt.
Robert Watson-Watt was a Scot from Brechin. He had become the superintendent
of the radio research station at Slough.
Watson-Watt put forward the idea that locating incoming aircraft
by radio location was, in fact, a potential for winning any victory
over incoming bombers.
He had already conducted a series of experiments over the sea at nearby
Orford Ness and, in February 1936, Watson-Watt and his team of research
scientists moved into the manor. Living and working in secret,
they continued to develop his aerial defence system.
If I'd been here in 1936, and immediately after,
what installations might I have seen around here?
In the later 1930s, what you would have seen would have been a line
of four enormous metal towers, some 360 feet high, towering
above this entire area.
And those were the transmitter towers from which the energy
generated by the transmitter in the block behind us was pushed out
over the North Sea.
And the reflections from that were received by a range of four
240-foot wooden towers further over in that direction and taken
to a receiver hut where the women operators of the WAAF were able
to identify the bearing, height and range of those aircraft.
On 24th September, 1937, just 18 months after the first experiments,
Bawdsey Manor became the first in a string of British coastal radar
stations codenamed Chain Home. When Britain declared war
on Germany in 1939,
the research scientists were moved to Scotland. Bawdsey continued
as a radar station and training centre for the RAF
and the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
Mary Wain has recently retired from chairing the Bawdsey Radar Trust.
Mary, what is your connection with Bawdsey Manor?
I was born here because my mother and father
were both radar operators,
I think. We're 100% certain my father was, but my mother
would never speak of it.
But she was in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force?
Yes, she was a WAAF.
And she joined up before the war.
And she came in November, drove here.
They turned the corner and their driver said,
"This is your billet, girls."
And she said, "We thought we'd gone to heaven."
Now I realise it was because my mother, who was a village girl, came
from the village school, left at 14,
she was mixing with people who knew about science and were doing
something really, really exciting and important.
In 1940, the Women's Auxiliary Air Force was a crucial support
in the Battle of Britain, doing jobs normally carried out by men.
We had the fortune to interview two WAAFs, who were in the WAAF
in the early days, who spoke about climbing the towers.
Climbing the towers?
Yes. They had to climb the towers, particularly the ones
that were mechanics, actually, rather than radar operators,
had to be able to guard the towers.
Did those women give you the impression that at the top
of those towers they were terrified?
That's not the impression you get at all. No.
And that's certainly one of the stories -
a woman was sent up to rescue a man who'd gone funny...
..up the tower, to bring him down.
It's an amazing thought, isn't it?
In 1930s Britain, hope and fear competed.
For many, a home or even a car were within grasp for the first time.
But the dreadful aerial bombardment of men, women and children in Spain
was an omen, exposing the fragility of property and life.
The fear of bombs was a major reason for appeasing Hitler.
When the Blitz came to Britain, it was indeed ghastly, but the death
toll was less than had been predicted.
That was partly because the effectiveness of radar could not
have been foreseen.
Next time, I'll experience 1930s seaside kitsch...
Do we know why they hit on the Venetian theme?
I think it was typically Yarmouth.
..put my heart and soul into shoemaking...
I think I might try a different tack.
..and meet one of the luckiest lord mayors in England.
Does your mind ever wonder for a moment to the splendour of the architecture?
Yes. And every time I walk into the building, quite frankly,
I have to pinch myself that I am sitting in that chair!