A talk by Rodney Dale delivered to the Histon & Impington Society on 29 February 2000, concerning the author’s years in Histon (a village some four miles North of Cambridge), and especially his experiences at The Old House, 2 Station Road.

I should begin by presenting my Histon credentials. The Dale family moved from London to Cambridge in 1939. All except grandfather (who died in 1948) and with the addition of my sister (born in 1941) moved to The Old House – 2 Station Road, Histon – in 1954.

 After we married in 1958, Judith and I lived at 41 Saffron Road from 1959 until 1968 – a house previously inhabited by the Wynn family with their four sons, and then the Tunstills with two sons. We have three sons, but I’m not blaming the house. The first two of our sons went to the new nursery school at the end of Saffron Road, and to the old Primary School in New School Road. We moved to the new village of Bar Hill in 1968, and after 18 years there moved to our present house in Haddenham in 1986.

 My father died in 1972, and my mother remained at The Old House until she died in 1993. My sister and I then sold the house, severing a connection which represents well over half of my life. My present connection with the villages is through the company I set up in 1984 which now occupies Chivers’ old farm shop – Flag Communication Ltd. Judith and I still have friends we first made when we were members of the baby-sitting circle nearly 40 years ago, and I still buy our cornflakes from the Home Stores. And we eat at the Phœnix from time to time.

 Why am I here anyway? Last April, I published a book – Halcyon Days – recounting my post-war vintage motor experiences. Many of those experiences took place when we were living at 142 Chesterton Road Cambridge which backs on to Sandy Lane. Sandy Lane may not look as it does now for ever, because the incredible amount of infill building in that area has so far passed it by. That seems set to change, and that’s why Derek Stubbings of the Chesterton Local History Group was one day making a photographic record of Sandy Lane when who should come along but Chris Jakes of the Cambridgeshire Collection. Chris told Derek about my book, in which Sandy Lane features prominently, as a result of which I was invited to talk to the Chesterton Local History Group, as a result of which I was invited to come along here this evening with a few memories. So many thanks to Ann Whitmore for picking up the reference, and to Eleanor Whitehead for lending me some refreshing archive material.

 In the very early days of the war, before my mother became too pregnant with my sister, we used to do quite a lot of cycling – at least my parents did, with me in a sidecar attached to Father’s machine. The sidecar served a double purpose: Father chose it primarily because, in spite of plentiful evidence to the contrary, he never felt it safe to balance on two wheels. I was a secondary reason for his having a sidecar and, when I became too large for it, Father changed to the first of the tricycles he rode thereafter – one of his distinguishing characteristics. It was during our cycling excursions that Father first saw The Old House, a Tudor oasis of tranquillity in a village whose buildings were, in the main, much less old.

 I’m not sure who lived in the house at that time. Right from the start, records are sparse. Documents show that the house belonged to the Sumpter family in the 17th century, and to William Howlett in 1806 (see map 138), when it was Howlett’s Farm, and remained so until 1886 at least (see map 211).

 Histonian FW Saunders writing to the CDN in 1956, towards the end of the 19th century the Old House was the home of a Mr Peter Symonds, described as ‘a well known cattle and sheep dealer’. It was subsequently occupied by a Mr Liddiard (a Cambridge cycle manufacturer), a Mr Bowles, Professor Frank Brown of Emmanuel College, and then Colonel Lovelace, a Cambridge bank sub-manager who does not, at that level, appear to merit a mention in Kelly’s Directory.

 From other sources, I find that one Smith Howlett Rowley sold it to an un-named lady in 1919, and a clergyman named Humphreys lived there before Mr Bowles. This seems to contradict the Symonds information, but then I found that Humphreys was Liddiard’s father-in-law, and that the Liddiards rented the house anyway, so it all hangs together.

 Frank Brown was an antiquarian bookseller whose catalogues featured views of the Old House, and show the hall with its book-lined walls. Brown moved to Dorset, and the Lovelace family moved in. Colonel Lovelace died suddenly late in 53, or early in 54, and his widow Margaret decided to sell the house privately. She put a small advertisement in the Cambridge Daily News, offering it for £5,000. Luckily, Father spotted the ad and was on the case like a limpet.

Mr Royce the surveyor said that it was worth perhaps four-and-a-half – or five if you really wanted it. And Father certainly did really want it. I should mention that the £5,000 should be considered in the context of the strip of land Lovelace had earlier sold to the Home Stores for £100, on which now stands the lean-to bit of the shop on the right. Where the cornflakes live.

 While all this was going on, I was in Germany as a National Service Education Sergeant, teaching signalmen English, maths and map reading, so the excitement of the times had to be conveyed by the letters which Father wrote to me daily, and the rest of the family somewhat less frequently. So when I was demobbed, on 17 February 1955, I returned not to Chesterton Road, Cambridge, but to The Old House, Histon.

 Naturally, Father wanted to find out something about the house – as well as the people who had lived in it – but there seemed to be a paucity of information. He tracked down Frank Brown, now living in the States, who had already done some research on the history of the house but had come up with very little. Brown did, however, write that the distinguished architectural historian Professor Sir Albert Richardson had visited the house often, and described it as a ‘small Manor House built in 1485’. Some time later, the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments stated that the roof is of the style of 1520, and that the bricks date from 1620. The long and the short of it is, as far as I can make out, that nobody knows for certain what date the house is; one has to make an inspired guess and stick to it. And of course this principle applies to many so-called ‘facts’ of history.

 We settled for the romantic 1485 – the year in which on 22 August Richard III lost his crown – literally – at Bosworth Field to Henry Earl of Richmond, who became Henry VII, thus bringing the 30 years of the Wars of the Roses to an end.

 So forward to 1955. Father had a number of bigger-than-usual cars, so a large, spider-filled ivy hedge outside the back door had to go. Then cars could run forwards to the standing outside the range of outbuildings joined to the house. Reading away from the house, there was a passageway, a pair of stalls for horses complete with hayracks, a storage shed, a double garage and a loose box, all in one range. The garage was not deep enough for a long car, so Father took out the wall at the back to allow the doors to shut at the front. Although the façade of the outbuildings, by the way, was of brick, the rest of the construction was of venerable wood, so modification was quite easy. The garage doors were not two cars wide, but Father let that go; there was room for both my Lady C tucked in a corner, and a large car beside it.

 At that time, Father taught English via correspondence course for the University Correspondence College which shared the late lamented red brick Queen Anne Terrace (along Gonville Place, opposite Parker’s Piece) with a nurses’ home. It’s now the Kelsey Kerridge Sports Hall and multi-storey car park. Father’s usually daily journeys enabled him to keep tabs on developments en route, and in due course he noted that certain large houses in Parkside were being torn down (as they say in the States) to make way for the new Police Station.

He thus obtained therefrom a quantity of stout joists, from which he built a carport large enough for four Daimler Straight Eights. I use the Daimler Straight Eight as a measure of area, by the way, much as the Japanese use the Tatami, which (I understand) corresponds to a sleeping mat two foot by six. Father never had four Daimler Straight Eights at one time, by the way – only three.

 He had many cars over the years, and sometimes the premises became quite crowded. When Halcyon Days came out, people often asked me what was my favourite vehicle, and it has to be the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, one of the long-running models of all time, built between 1906 and 1926. The Ghost had a 6-cylinder, 7-litre engine developing a modest 48bhp, and one of the prototype’s noted feats was driving from Land’s End to John O’Groats wholly in top gear. It was majestic, smooth and silent. Father had two Ghosts in his time. The first was an ex-taxi he bought for £50:

‘That’s a bit steep for a 1919 car.’

‘Well, it had a new engine before the war.’

‘Oh, all right then.’

The other Ghost was a 1923 hearse. ‘I’m not going out in that thing’ said my mother, I expect, so Father took his hacksaw and a large tin of aluminium paint and turned it into Dale’s Sports Hearse. I’m sorry I have no picture of this car, as it was therein that Judith and I agreed to get married.

 We were, of course, well acquainted with CJ Ison, the Millwright in Narrow Lane. When CJ retired, and turned into Torvac, Father was back and forth, back and forth, with the Sports Hearse, loading it with planks which would doubtless come in handy, and each with a story to tell. An enormous sliced yew-tree enabled me to build a loft in the garage.

 The only connection I can remember is the fine walnut plank from the tree ‘out of which Dick Norman fell – and perished’. But I don’t know what happened to that plank after it arrived at the Old House.

 CJ had a wonderful home-made frame saw for turning trees into sets of planks, driven by a Austin Seven engine. Fortunately, someone else secured this feat of engineering, and thus I was not required to dismantle, shift, and re-erect it at the Old House. I don’t suppose that the disappointment was too bitter. Of course, the Old House did consume a fair amount of firewood, for the fire in the main hall was kept in virtually all the year round for nearly forty years.

 Talking of fires, I should say that there was one memorable evening when Father thought he’d get rid of a box of celluloid knitting needles by dumping them on the open fire in the hall. Of course, they went up – all too literally – like a house on fire, and the thick coating of tar within the chimney caught alight. We had some visitors that evening, who clung steadfastly to their seats in the front row as the fire brigade came running in to extinguish the blaze. The men found that the seat of the blaze was well up the chimney, so upstairs they went to the attic and attacked it at its seat by knocking a hole in the brickwork of the chimney. The fire was soon out, with remarkably little damage from their draughts of water. Father flattened the lid of a tin trunk, and sealed the hole up. He and Barry subsequently tried to scrape off some of the tar, but it was not an easy task, and certainly a dirty one.

 Father did at one time acquire a 1930ish Dennis fire engine – whose relevance to what I’ve just said will become clear in due course. He got it from Les Rich, down Coldham’s Lane towards Cherry Hinton. I think that he thought the ladders and hose reels would look rather dashing, and was disappointed to find that they were not part of the sale. Nevertheless, he did use the fire engine quite a lot for his trips to Queen Anne Terrace, and that year took it to Cambridge to the Coleridge School Summer Fete.

 Coleridge had a standing order with us to go along every year with some interesting vehicles. Lady C was always welcome. When Father took the fire engine along, the wide area where the ladders had been acted as a stage for that well-known local entrepreneur, printer, and pioneer Indian restaurateur, Devi Das Agarwala, playing the part of an Indian fakir, performing feats of strength as Father drove slowly around the arena.

 One day there came a knock at the door; it was Mr Simpson from Customs & Excise. He was checking on the fire engine because, he said, as an emergency vehicle, it was exempt from Purchase Tax, and now that it had passed into private hands we would have to pay the Purchase Tax on it. The odd thing was, we discovered, that there had been no such tax when the vehicle was originally bought by the Huntingdon-shire Fire Authority, so the tax couldn’t have not been paid.

 Customs & Excise declined to accept that argument so, rather than move into the expensive realms of appeal, Father decided to avoid the tax by scrapping the vehicle. It was then that we decided to turn it into a circular saw. I bought a lovely shaft with an arbor on it from Mackays, and connected it to the power take-off that had driven the water pump. In top gear, the two-foot saw blade made a most impressive whine, competing with Unwins’ cyclones next door. I took the side members of an old bed frame and mounted them so that they acted as tracks for a sliding table to help pass the wood across the blade. It didn’t take very long to cut enough logs for months to come. Not being able to use the fire engine on the road any more, it became something of a liability.

 For a short time, Father owned a small orchard up Cottenham Road – bought from Knightley the greengrocer, I think – and it was there that the fire engine was laid to rest, ready to cut any logs that might come to hand. But the orchard was soon sold again, and for all I know the engine may still be resting there. I went to look for it recently, but I couldn’t find it.

 I’m now going to ramble back again to our early days at the Old House in ’55. We were of course very interested in the construction of the house. It is essentially F-shaped, at quite an angle to Station Road – as the removal men found on their first attempt at backing in when they demolished one of the gateposts.

 The centrally supportive part of the structure is the main chimney stack built on two large open fireplaces, the one looking forwards into the hall, and the other back into the dining room. As was the practice in those days, the timber roof frame was built on the ground, and then reassembled in place on the wooden wall plates.

 Much of the timber in the roof was clearly very old, and some pieces bore evidence of having been used for some earlier construction. The peg-tile roof is very heavy, and gravity encourages it to settle. Because of the mutually supportive angles of the F shape, the most vulnerable wall is the long front one, which was pushed forwards over the years (helped, my mother always averred, by the heavy lorries rumbling past: ‘stand still – you can feel it’) but is now, I think, securely tied in place.

 Access to the roof – or wool loft – or chapel – is via a winding stair opening from the smallest of the four bedrooms at the back of the house. To make it easier to get things – of which the Dale family had – and has – a huge volume – up and down, I cut a trap-door in the front landing ceiling in the long, hot summer of ’55. That summer, some very old friends whom my grandmother had met in Italy in the ’20s came to stay from the States. During their visit, Father and I slept on mattresses in the attic: quite comfortable, but very dusty. It was there one morning that we thought we heard what we described as a ‘heavenly choir’; we never determined what it was but, standing in the ruins of Whitby Abbey a few years ago, I heard the echoing noises of the town-going-about-its-business as though it were plainchant. Certainly, the environment has its effect on what one thinks one perceives. But that was the only time we heard the heavenly choir.

 Our other investigations in the long, hot summer of ’55 concerned the priest’s hide and the tunnel. I don’t know whether it was CJ Ison who put Father on to the hide, or whether Father just consulted him about it after finding it.

Certainly it was CJ who told the story of the cavity under the floor of what was now used as an airing cupboard in the smallest bedroom, which was discovered when there was some electrical work in progress. It was there that CJ found a roundhead’s hat and gloves – ‘in perfect condition, but as we looked at them, they crumbled into dust’. Not such perfect condition after all. I should say that it’s a well-known property of such artefacts that they ‘crumble into dust’ after a tantalisingly short glimpse, as those who have studied urban legends will attest.

 Anyway, there under the airing-cupboard floor was this cavity, three or four feet deep – not deep enough to stand up in – with a dirt floor. It occupies the space between the central chimney stack and the outside wall of the house, its other two walls being beside the open fireplaces in the hall and the dining room. There were tales of a door to the outside so that the hiding priest could escape, so Father started to excavate the floor of the cavity, and over the next few days he exposed the brickwork to a depth of eight or nine feet: down to outside ground level, in fact. Neither on the inside, nor on the outside, was there any sign of a door wherethrough the concealed cleric might effect his egress, but any door would have been somewhat obvious to diligently searching soldiers, especially with the getaway horse revving up – or at least champing at the bit – outside.

 The priest, of course, would have held his papist ceremonies at a portable altar in the chapel in the roof, sliding down into the hide at any sign of danger. There is what might be that escape shaft running from the chapel in the roof beside the main chimney stack and emerging in the excavated hide.

 One Sunday afternoon, I decided to climb this shaft from the hide into the attic but, once in, found I could scarcely move my arms and had to call for a rope to haul me up. Since in those days I was a mere ten-and-a-half stone, any priest attempting to descend must have been slim indeed, with the danger of his ecclesiastical robes re-enacting the old umbrella-in-a-drainpipe scenario. My sister, smaller than I, attempted the escape from the other direction, but even she became wedged at the bottom, and it took her some time to wriggle free. Nevertheless, she later tried to upwards – and got stuck again.

 The great authority on secret hiding places was Granville Squires, who wrote a book of that name – Secret Hiding Places – published in 1934. Father enlisted his aid in the authentication of the hide, and also in establishing the reality of suggested secret underground tunnels. On tunnels, Squires wrote to him that: ‘every discovered tunnel is labelled "secret" when it was never anything of the kind and nearly every one is said to run to the church. Nobody has ever been able to give an explanation of why it should.’

 In this case, the secret tunnel was supposed to run to Impington Hall – which made a change. When you think about it, why should our forefathers have been obsessed with digging secret tunnels between one building and another; life was hard enough without all that. Any underground cavity, usually designed to catch sewage – and often identified by an apparently spurious flue to act as a vent pipe – would be romantically interpreted as evidence of a tunnel.

 Talking of sewage, I should mention that the Old House – like many other local properties at the time – had a cesspit. Father at first monitored the liquid level carefully, getting Tovey Transport’s sludge gulper in every other week to empty the cesspit, until it dawned on us that we were trying to lower the local water table.

 Father did quite a lot of exploratory excavation without actually bringing the house down, but never found any tunnels or anything. We dug a pit by the wall in the garden, but found nothing apart from a squashed spoon identified as ‘probably 17th century’. Some years after Father died, someone found a mysterious copper crescent in the garden, which polished up handsomely. This was also ‘identified’ by ‘experts’; I can’t remember how wrong they got it, but when my mother told me about it, I explained that it was actually from the helmet of a Japanese suit of armour that Father had bought before the war in the Caledonian Market; he had had it as a mascot on the radiator cap of the 4-1/2-litre Bentley in 1946 until he realised that it was illegally spiky.

 Some time in the late fifties, the thatched Tithe Barn in Impington was demolished and luckily Father got wind of this and went in to save one of the main posts. He took it home on his strong little trolley towed behind the Sports Hearse. It must have been 14 or 15 feet high, with a lower section eight feet or so long carved with longitudinal decorative grooves, surmounted by a carved capital, and the remainder of the length a businesslike square section with mortices for the tenons of the roof structure timbers.

 We cut the top section off and stood ‘Burgoyne’s Post’ – as it became known – by the back door, where it remained until we sold the house in 1993. I understand that it is now being preserved by William Graves.

 Another of Father’s acquisitions was Edwin Rutter’s Black Museum. Mr Rutter died last year at the age of 90 something; he was thought to be the oldest working tailor – or perhaps the oldest working anything – he traded as ‘Stuart’ opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum. The Black Museum was a curiosity at the rear of Rutter’s shop. Father, being interested in locks and keys, and mechanical security devices in general, had borrowed one or two pieces from the Museum even before our Histon days, and the connection had resulted in his buying the Museum lock, stock and barrel (so to speak). Thus he found himself in possession of a glass case containing skulls reputedly from Bosworth Field (there it is again), a mantrap, a scold’s bridle, cats o’nine tails, knuckledusters, truncheons, tongue clamps, bone crushers, handcuffs, &c, &c – and the gallows from the old Cambridge Prison (last used in 1913).

 After a few years enjoying many of these items displayed around the house, Father decided to get rid of many of them and arranged a Black Museum sale at Hammonds Auction Rooms in Cambridge Place. The sale, in 1970, realised £1,300; about a third of the items were bought by a Mrs Morgan from Cornwall who had a mind to open what we would now call a theme restaurant – although I’m not sure what the theme was to have been, and how it could have been designed to attract family trade in fun cream teas.

 The sale attracted a great deal of press attention – not only local but national – with inevitable pictures of Father holding a hangman’s rope. It was therefore a bit of an anticlimax when the gallows lot came up and, in the teeth of apathy, Father bought it in at £20. So the gallows came home again, and hung around – as you might say – for a year or two, until he swapped it for some ephemerablia with Syd Dernley, the Assistant Public Hangman from Mansfield, Notts, who set it up in his cellar – for old times’ sake, presumably.

 Father retained certain pieces, feeling perhaps that it was ‘not quite right’ to sell them – the rope that failed to hang John Lee, the Babbacombe murderer – they tried three times, and each time the trap failed to open – and another rope from Marwood, the well-known Victorian hangman, with his authenticating letter listing the names of the murderers it had despatched and explaining the reason for the ‘slight staining’ on the noose.

 Most people seem to assume that the Old House is haunted, or at least to ask about the possibility. It is easy to pooh-pooh what others say they’ve experienced, although I do question accounts of full-scale battles between Roundheads and Cavaliers on the lawn – at full moon, of course. On the other hand, there were unexplained happenings, one of which I experienced, and others of which were attested by so many people that it’s difficult to dismiss them.

 There were tales of a ‘girl in white’ both in the house and in the garden. In fact, returning home with my mother late one foggy evening, we both saw in the headlights the girl in white at the gate with her arm upraised in greeting.

 We thought at first that it was my sister come to open the gates, but the figure disappeared. However, returning home late at night on a non-foggy evening some time later, I again saw the girl in white at the gate with one arm raised in greeting, but this time it turned out to be a white cat with its tail sticking straight up. That, of course, doesn’t explain any indoor girls in white.

 According to the notorious Cambridge Daily News article of 7 August 1956, the occupants of the house – that was us – reported ‘a debonair cavalier, a copper-headed Puritan, a malevolent Roundhead and a solemn but kindly priest.’ My mother, who I felt at the time – although I now feel more kindly-disposed towards the matter – wanted to see ghosts because she thought they ought to be there, told me of the cavalier who came from one bedroom, crossed the landing, and went into the opposite bedroom. Granny, I think, reported the malevolent Roundhead, but I must say that she was nearing the end and not very well, and at the same time as these supposed sightings questioned me closely about the men who were going up and down ladders in her room through a [non-existent] trap-door in the ceiling.

 Ma kept a Boots Scribbling Diary for recording ghostly matters, but the entries tail off towards the end of 1956. An explanation – which I’ve heard more than once – is that ghostly activity takes place when new people come to a property, and dies down when the ghosts have satisfied their curiosity. I’m now prepared to keep this on my list of possibilities, though at the time I wondered whether perhaps the down-side of going public on haunting had begun to bite.

 Later, we found that Frank Brown was supposed to have seen a lady in a blue crinoline dress, and a cavalier, as had Margaret Lovelace’s father. So it wasn’t solely a figment of resident imaginations.

 The one phenomenon I did experience, along with the rest of the family, occurred on a Sunday afternoon. We were all in the hall, and we all heard footsteps run along the upstairs passage from front to back. Of course there was no one there. We had no rational explanation for that. People suggest, by the way, that it might have been an intruder but, apart from other lack of evidence, I always understood that one of the secrets of a successful break-in is silence.

 Another phenomenon which I cannot dismiss, although I never experienced it myself, concerned the sound of the latch on the door at the foot of the back staircase, followed by footsteps coming up the stairs and stopping on the landing outside the back bedrooms. Coupled with this were accounts of the doors of the back bedrooms swinging open or shut against their bias. This was reported by my sister, Frank Brown, Margaret Lovelace and her brother, and Gillian Campbell who stayed at the house on a number of occasions. We had several visits from that well-known local ghost hunter Tony Cornell; he slept at the house many times, and set up recording apparatus – but all to no avail. My mind is still open on ghosts in general, but if they’re going to appear anywhere, the Old House seems an appropriate place.