‘While there is still time, I’m 83!
Memories of Langford by Michael Rutt: the author of The People at the Long Ford, the only history of Langford, published by Bedfordshire County Library in 1976.
I was not born in Langford. I first saw the light of day at the Maples Nursing Home in Bedford Road, Hitchin on 28 April 1935. My parents took me home to Tithe Farm, Langford when I was 9 days old. I had been a difficult birth – some would say I have been difficult ever since. I arrived in Langford just in time to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of King George V. The house and garden were decorated with flags and bunting to mark the event. I was the youngest person in the village. The Parish Council presented me with a commemorative mug, a small cream-coloured mug with pictures of King George and Queen Mary: it is on a shelf in my house to this day. I have to wonder whether the influence of my father had anything to do with this, he was clerk to the Parish Council at the time.
The oldest person was a 91-year-old man who had worked at Tithe Farm for my ancestor Edmund Piper in the 1850s. It made a neat connection between me and him. I was christened at the font in Langford church on Whitsunday ,of 1935. My baptismal names were Maurice Michael. Maurice, after my Dad, and Michael because they liked it. It was a popular Christian name in the 1930s. I was always called Michael, which in later life has led to some confusion. Officialdom has frequently called me ‘Maurice’. I have had to correct them. I believe this was a fashionable thing to do in the 1930s. I have cousins who are known by their second Christian name. At the time of my birth Ramsay McDonald was Prime Minister until June when he was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin. There was a General Election in November – the last one for 10 years. Our MP for Mid-Bedfordshire was Alan Lennox-Boyd who lived at Henlow Grange. He was a Conservative, the first for many years as other Members had been Liberals. All these things were above my head. I slept, was fed on Cow and Gate baby food, soiled nappies, blissfully unaware of the Abdication crisis, (‘Hark, the herald angels sing, Mrs. Simpson pinched our King’), the accession of King George VI and the Coronation of 1937, though I still have a lovely mug given to me at the time, I yelled until I was sick, gurgled and listened to Mum singing to me.
My parents were Maurice and Margaret Rutt. Mum was born Kathleen Mary Margaret Butler at Kempston, daughter of William and Kate Butler. They lived in London, but births were usually arranged in the family home of great-grand-mother Emma Hart at Bedford Villa in Kempston High Street. The birth must have been anticipated with some trepidation. Granny was pregnant when she married Bill Butler at Westminster Registry Office. She gave birth to a boy, George William, who would have been my uncle, but he died at 8 months old and was buried in Kempston old cemetery. I have a photograph of him in his coffin. The little chap looks very calm and peaceful. It may have been what we now would call a cot death.
Mum entered the world on 8 June 1902. It was Peace Sunday, a day of celebration for the end of the Boer War. She thrived, so they went back to London to live in Wilton Mews, Belgravia, where Grandad Bill was a coachman in the household of the Earl of Sefton. By the spring of 1904 Granny was pregnant again. This time twin girls were born, named Edeline and Eveline. They were, as was my mother, named after members of the Sackville family of Knole Park, Sevenoaks, Kent and Buckhurst Park at Withyham near East Grinstead in Sussex, where Granny had worked for 16 years before her marriage. They hated their names so when they grew up they called themselves Bob and Joan (I’ll explain that later. Mum Margaret, or Kitty as she was known, was sent off to Langford to be cared for by her aunt and uncle Frederick and Elizabeth Isherwood at Tithe Farm until the confinement was over and the twins were doing well. Mrs. Isherwood was Kate Butler’s sister. They did do well and became my aunts who lived in London. Mum never left Langford and lived there all her life. She mangled her Christian name Margaret to Margie (with a hard g.) and was known by that name by all the family and her contemporaries in the village. Uncle Fred and Aunt Lizzie were devoted to her. They wanted to legally adopt her but her father would not have it. They are rather like a third pair of grandparents to me although I never knew them. What tensions went on about this I do not know but things must have been pretty fraught at times.
My father was Maurice Rutt, born 15 October 1904. He was the fourth son and fourth child of Levi and Ellen Rutt who had the Post Office and grocery shop at what came to be called ‘the old shop’ after they moved to the ‘new shop’ further down High Street about 1905. Grandad bought the old shop from Susan and Ann Street in 1898. His father, James Rutt was at the new shop. Both father and son showed entrepreneurial skills. As well as groceries and the Post Office they were pork butchers and Grandma sold drapery products. Dad said socks were a strong seller. Both shops went well until a great crisis in 1902. Grandad’s older brother, George, worked in a grocery store in North London where Levi had also worked a boy. George had to be confined to a mental institution at Dartford, Kent, where he died. His wife Mary and two sons came to live at Langford in a cottage at the High Street end of Station Rd. There were two rows of small houses belonging to James Rutt. They still stand to this day. Her father-in-law paid regular visits. Whether it was rape or consensual sex we shall never know but she became pregnant. Mum described as ‘he had wrong relations with her’ – very delicately put. When Levi knew this he was so angry he went his father’s shop, dragged him into the yard punched him really hard, knocked him down and left him bruised and battered. Mary gave birth to a daughter, Elsie. Elsie and her (half) brother James were sent off to Canada as quite young children. The other boy, Walter, was sent to boy’s service in the Army. He served in the Great War, completed his time in the army in the 13/18 Hussars then became a civil servant at Somerset House. Jim lived and worked in Winnipeg. Elsie was a nurse in British Columbia. She came back to Langford about 1960 when she married Harry Smith. He was her 3rd or 4th husband. After Harry died she went back to Calgary, gave up playing the piano when she was a hundred and lived to 102. She was the longest lived Rutt of all.
Dad was a sickly child. In addition to a deformed toe on his left foot he had had double pneumonia when he was 2 years old. His chest was permanently sunken and he claimed he had only one lung working properly. In later age he had severe bouts of depressive illness and was very unwell with that. Living at the shop meant you had to work. There was the telephone exchange to be attended to and baskets of groceries to be delivered. The telephone number at the shop at 5 High Street was Langford 1.
Telegrams came by phone and had to be delivered as soon as possible. On several occasions in the Great War Dad handed in telegrams to tell of the death of a soldier, although he was only 12 years old. There was a postal delivery from the Biggleswade office even on Christmas Day. One Christmas day Dad had to cycle to Vine Farm, the very last place in Langford. He handed in the letters. The man at the door growled his thanks. Dad was biking away when the man shouted to him to come back: he gave him a threepenny piece. They were silver in those times. The spirit of Christmas giving was there that day. They went to the school which stood on the site where the Church Hall now stands. They always had great respect for Mr Robert Cater, the headmaster, indeed my uncle Robert was named for him. Dad left school when he was 12 years old having taken and passed the leavers certificate. Apart from 5 years in World War 2 he worked at the shop until 1951. On the early morning of 11 November 1918 all the telephone exchanges were called from the main exchange at Hitchin to say that hostilities would cease at 11 am. There was general rejoicing. Dad, the workhorse, was sent to Biggleswade to buy flags and bunting and a half-gallon flagon of whisky at Wells and Winches’ shop in the High Street. It cost 15 shillings – 75 pence in new money. Celebrations all round, but clouded with sorrow at the loss of men from the village they knew. In 1920 Grandad and his son, my uncle Cecil, went with a motorbike and sidecar to see the Great War battle fields in Flanders around Ypres They got separated near Hill 60. Grandad could produce a piercing whistle by putting his fingers between his teeth. Uncle Cecil heard it and knew a Langford man was there. The immediate post-war years were not easy but they worked away at the shop as gradual decline set in, until eventually the business failed. 1937 saw the end of a time from about 1870 to 1932 when the sub-postmaster at Langford had been named Rutt.
INTERLUDE: Wake up, keep your eyes open. You won’t see if you don’t.
Two old ladies in the shop in 1914. Lady 1: Did yer know the Germans a’ got Brussels.
Lady 2: Waal, gel, what they warn’t with a field o’ sprouts.
Speech impediments are not something to made fun of but they did joke about them. A man with an angry dog was nicknamed, ‘Teadem Tam’. His cleft palate denied him the ability to tell his dog to‘Seizem Sam’.
A lady who lived along Front Street (now High Street) was known as ‘Zip’: not a sliding fastener but named for the wife of the Prophet Moses in the Old Testament, Zipporah. More about names and place names later.
Grandad and Grandma, Levi Rutt and Ellen Bates, were married in Langford church on 29 October 1895. Dad had nine brothers and sisters. I knew them all except Bill who died before I was born. They were all born within 200 yards of each other, either at the old shop or the new. Bill was a sickly, frail man. He was unfit for service in the Great War, so he worked in the military recruiting office in Biggleswade. He then worked for the Inland Revenue, where he was posted to Norwich. He was a talented musician, especially playing the organ at church. At Norwich he became a deputy organist at the Cathedral. The principal organist was Dr. Bates, coincidentally the same name as Grandma’s maiden name but no relation. In the city he met and married Ivy Bullard. They had two daughters, my cousins Elizabeth and Judith. Bill died in Bedford Hospital from a ruptured appendix in April 1927. His funeral was on the same day that Uncle Fred Isherwood died at Tithe Farm. Judith was 10 days old when her father passed away.
The second son, born in 1899, was Cecil. Grandma wanted to name him Cecil Rhodes after the leading imperialist of Southern Africa but she changed her mind as they walked up the church path to the Christening! He was just old enough to serve in the Great War. After being conscripted in the Royal Enniskilling Fusiliers he was posted to Dublin where he stood guard on Mountjoy Prison when Irish Republicans were jailed. He married Mary Turner of The Leys in Langford. Her father was the village blacksmith. Cecil became a printer with Spong’s in Biggleswade and later the Relieving Officer for the Biggleswade Poor Law Union, a post which was abolished when the National Health Service came into being in 1948. A dapper man, he wore a monocle, a cravat and spats on his shoes. A keen Freemason he was Master of St. Andrew’s Lodge Biggleswade in 1945. Like so many of Dad’s siblings he did not have good health and died at the age of 58. He was the father of my cousins, Richard, John and David.
Eddie (Edwin Leslie) was third. Born in 1902 he went Canada in 1927 to work for his uncle, Harry Bates, who was Grandma’s brother. Returning a year later, he married Alice Clark from Holme Green. Uncle Eddie served in World War II in Northern Ireland and then Egypt. He took a leave to visit Bethlehem and Jerusalem. When he came home he gave me a bible with wooden covers made from olive wood said to have been grown on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, which I still have. He saw at first hand the troubles between Arabs and Jews a few years before the creation of the state of Israel. One of his memories of Cairo was seeing a dead camel floating down the Nile. In the next interlude I will put down Uncle Eddie’s silly poems. Uncle Eddie and Auntie Alice were the parents of my cousins, Philip and Charles.
Levi and Ellen’s first daughter was Helen Elizabeth born in 1906. Having four brothers she was known as ‘Sissie’, a name she grew to dislike intensely. When she went work in an office she did get to be called by her correct Christian name. She worked hard, together with housemaid Rose Sims, to help her mother bring up the younger children. She worked for Maythorns coachworks in Biggleswade, then the Igranic Works in Bedford. Closer to home she began working as a secretary for F C Larkinson, who had a shop in Hitchin Street, Biggleswade and a scrap yard. Here she learned the details of scrap metal – ferrous and non-ferrous metals, aluminium and general metal waste. She was successful and moved on to F D Odell’s at Shefford.
Auntie Helen knew all the gypsy encampments and would buy scrap from them. Billy Smith told me many years later: ‘Thas allright, Miss Rutt’ll give yer a good deal’. She lived in London Road, Biggleswade, where she, in conjunction with Maurice and Eddie, cared for Levi and Ellen until they passed away in 1965. Auntie Helen never married but she had a long-term friendship with Dorothy Sivyer, who became a family friend to Mum, Dad and me.
Edith was born in 1908. She worked at the Spirella Corset factory in Letchworth then married, in 1939, Leon Inman who was serving in the RAF. They were the parents of my cousin Helen Teresa.
Robert Harry appeared in 1911. He began work for the LNER railway at Arlesey station and apart from four years in the Royal Artillery in North Wales in World War II he worked for the LNER and British Rail until his death aged 58 in 1974. He married Phyllis Brown at Arlesey church on Boxing Day 1936. The infant me yelled all through the service. Uncle Robert and Auntie Phyll were the parents of my cousins, Christopher (deceased) and Harvey.
In 1914 the third daughter was born. Kathleen went to school in Hitchin and then to a teacher training college in Truro. When qualified she taught at Silver Jubilee School in Bedford and subsequently became Deputy Head of Goldington Green Junior School. She married Ronald Adams who was a soldier in Biggleswade at the end of the war. They were the parents of my cousin Felicity.
Denis Frederick John, born in 1917, was the longest lived and last to die of all 9 of Dad’s siblings. He lived until 2012. At Bedford Modern School he had a vocation to be an ordained clergyman of the Church of England. He went to Kelham Theological College at Newark, Notts, and was ordained at St Albans Abbey in 1943. He was appointed Bishop’s chaplain for youth in the diocese of St Albans where he began the custom of the Youth Pilgrimage in the diocese on Easter Monday. He married Mary Leach at Stockton-on-Tees in 1943. In 1948 he and Mary with three children sailed to South Africa. Denis was Rector of Empangeni in Zululand. They returned home in 1954 with three more children. My cousins with Denis and ‘Rio’ are Jane, Bridget, Stephen, Helen, Mark and Catherine.
The youngest child and youngest son was Keith. Born in 1919 he joined the RAF when the war started in 1939. He had been to Bedford Modern School and had worked at K and L steel founders in Letchworth. He was in the crew of a Wellington bomber in Bomber Command. The plane crashed in flames at Lower Brailes, Oxfordshire on 22 October 1941. It was the greatest tragedy that had befallen the Rutt family in many years.
This has been a long catalogue of people. All of them were Langford men and women and proud to claim the village as their birthplace. There are still my Mum’s family and the Isherwood family to describe.
INTERLUDE: Uncle Eddie’s silly poems:
One fine day in September, One October in July,
the sun lay thick upon the grass, the snow shone in the sky.
The flowers were singing gaily, the birds were in full bloom,
I went down to the cellar to sweep the upstairs room.
I looked around and saw a house that stood just out of sight,
and it was black-washed white.
One fine day in the middle of the night,
two dead men got up to fight.
Two blind men went to see fair play,
two dumb men went to shout hooray.
When two dead donkeys came kicking by
and drowned them all in a ditch so dry.
Oft repeated: ‘We shan’t be round tomorrer, the donkey’s dead or We shan’t be round tomorrer the donkey’s pissed on the strawberries.’
John Rutt, known as ‘Cog’, but not a close relation, sold whitening which was used to polish grates, hearths and flagstones. He had a donkey cart loaded with white balls of cleaner. At the end of the day donkey, cart and Cog were covered in white dust. At twilight he was a ghostly apparition. Mum recalled him coming into the yard at Tithe Farm. She ran into the kitchen to escape.
The first connection Mum’s family had with Langford was when Elizabeth Hart from Kempston worked at the school as a pupil teacher. She was Granny Butler’s older sister. She gained a teaching diploma and since the school was so close to Tithe Farm she met and married Frederick Isherwood. The wedding was at Kempston in October 1895, a week or so before that of my grandparents at Langford church. Fred’s father, Robert Isherwood, died only a month before the wedding so they moved into Tithe Farm straight away.
My Mum came to live at Tithe Farm in 1904. The presence of a small child did nothing to stimulate fertility in Uncle Fred and Aunt Lizzie. They remained childless. Mum had twin sisters who lived in London, successively in Wilton Mews, Belgravia; Queen’s Mews, Bayswater, and after 1924, Grosvenor Crescent Mews, also in Belgravia. Grandad, Bill Butler, was coachman to Sir Bertram Falle, who was MP for Southsea and in 1931 became Lord Portsea. On leaving school the twins went to work at Harrods famous department store in New Brompton Road, more generally known as part of Knightsbridge. Later they worked for Robert Jackson’s, the Royal grocers in Piccadilly. Edeline got herself called ‘Bob’ or ‘Bobby’ when bobbed hair was a fashionable style for young women. Eveline called herself ‘Joan’ just because she liked the name. It was redolent of the life style of the ‘flappers’ in the 1920s. Aunty Bob married Frank Jeary whose father was the catering manager at the Royal Opera House. They had no children. Aunty Joan married Leslie Sayers, who worked at the Devonshire Club in the City of London. They were the parents of my cousin Tony (deceased).
My Rutt ancestors stem from a family called Handscombe – a very common Langford surname. In the 1790s James Handscombe married Alice Gravestock. Their daughter Ann was my great-great-grandmother, born in 1802. She married George Rutt, whose family originated in Blunham. In the first years of their marriage they had no children. This all changed in 1829. In that year George and his brother John were convicted of stealing 19 ducks off the village pond. I don’t know where this pond was. It may have been on the river side of the Pound close to where the playing field is today. They appeared at Bedfordshire Quarter Sessions in Bedford, were convicted and sentenced to 7 years transportation to Australia. From Bedford Jail they were sent to the ‘Justicia’, a prison hulk at Woolwich. After 6 weeks there they were shipped to Tasmania. George worked on the estate of the Earl of Norfolk. He had a tattoo on his left arm, his behaviour was said to be poor or indifferent. At the end of their sentence they had a choice to remain or return to England. John chose to return to his home and wife. George stayed. He died of bronchitis at the age of 57.
In George’s absence things were happening in Langford. Ann began a close friendship with William Bryant, the landlord of the ‘Wrestlers’ pub. With him she had at least 3 sons. James, the oldest, was my great-grandfather. He was baptized at church. In the margin of the register the parish clerk wrote ‘adulterous child’. In 1860 age 23 he married Emma Kilby. In the entry for father, James gave the name William Bryant. So it seems evident that William was his father and was acknowledged as such. Ann’s children are the source of three distinct families in Langford with the surname Rutt. These were ‘Brassy’, ‘Brush’ and ‘Pimmy’. I am a Pimmy since great-grandfather was known as ‘Jimmy’, which was mis-pronounced as ‘Pimmy’. Unusually Ann registered and had her children baptized with her married surname. She lived to a great age living with her brother Thomas in a cottage in Back Lane. No one ever knew or heard Grandad Levi mention her. He must have known her. It’s just one of those family mysteries to which we shall never know the answer. There are no answers because Grandad steadfastly refused to talk about his family. It was probably shame and fear of derision or humiliation that stopped him. In answer to questions he would say that we had to be like Lord Nelson and turn a blind eye. He would have been quite shocked if he knew what we know today.
We should not be too quick to condemn George Rutt. Langford at that time was a very poor, not to say, poverty-stricken village. Agriculture still operated under the three-field system which it had done since the Middle Ages. The Open Fields of strips of land were still worked by gangs of men and boys for very low wages. Boys were employed to pick up stones in sacks and use them to fill potholes in the roads or to net sparrows on hedges. It took a lot of sparrows to make a pie, but they did it. It was later in the century that women and girls could work at straw plaiting. The only school in the village was in the church where children could learn, at least, the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic as well as sewing and hammering. My ancestor, Eliza Barton, was a teacher there.
If the open fields were enclosed then productivity would improve and wages might well increase. Enclosure needed an Act of Parliament. This finally came in 1829, the year of George’s crime. Previous attempts to enclose Langford were always opposed by the Stewards of Westminster Abbey. In 1815 they claimed it would ‘harm their interests’, and since they owned much of open field land and were Lords of the Manor of Holme with Langford their influence was considerable. The other social problem dominating the agricultural world at this time was the ‘Captain Swing’ riots. Captain Swing was the name given to the writers of anonymous letters sent to landowners and farmers telling them not to use harvesting machinery and any new methods of cultivation to the detriment of their workers. They burned farm barns and wheat stacks over a large area of Southern England. The destructive events nearest to Langford were at Hinxworth and Stotfold, where straw stacks were burned. The name Captain Swing was on many lips in the year 1829.
The other disadvantage facing George was the severity of the judicial system and that transportation to Australia was a major form of punishment. His term was seven years but the distance to the other side of the world meant that few returned. George died of bronchitis in Tasmania in 1857. Life in Langford went on. I wonder how much and how often my great-great grandmother thought of her husband and if she ever mused upon what life might have been had he not been a petty criminal.
The enclosure commissioners for Langford were my ancestor Peregrine Piper and Francis Pym of Sandy. Hedges were planted and larger fields created. The largest allocation of land was 660 acres of fields to Sir Montague Welby of Long Benington, Lincolnshire. He had purchased the Manor of Langford Rectory in 1804, presumably as an investment. The changes in the village led to the formation of new farms and the expansion of older ones. A lot of Welby land was farmed by Edmund Piper, son of Peregrine mentioned above. The house at Tithe Farm was built about 1834 and the old buildings, which may have included the medieval chapel of the Knights Templar, were demolished. In the garden at Tithe Farm from time immemorial was a stone sculpture of Christ bearing the sins of the world on his back. I think it is likely it came from the Templar’s chapel. It remains in my garden to this day. I cannot be sure if it was the Templar’s property but I can’t offer any other explanation for its origin – Time for an Interlude.
INTERLUDE: So it’s called LANGFORD, the Long Ford. Where is the ford across the river Ivel? There probably was a ford where we know it today since very early times, maybe pre-Roman. But what is ‘long’ about it? I offer this explanation for the derivation of the name. It is principally a geographical reason as well as an historical one, which dates from Saxon times, c. AD700.
The Roman road from Baldock to Biggleswade runs over Toplers Hill where the water tower is today. The top of the hill forms a junction with a minor road which is Roman in origin. It is almost a straight line to Langford as far as the bottom of Cambridge Road. This road is known today as ‘Ed’uth’ Way. No true Langfordian would call it ‘Edworth’ Way. The modern road goes straight on past what was the ‘Boot’ pub, crosses the river and as the ground rises slightly then turns left at Baulk House towards Henlow. The old road continues as a farm road towards Maulden and Ampthill. In very ancient times I believe it was impossible to ford or cross the river Ivel at that point. The only way to get across the river and through the marshy, boggy ground was to follow the line of what is now High Street until the bottom of what is now Chapel Hill. There the banks of the river were probably firmer, the river bed was more solid underfoot. Teams of horses and oxen needed to cross as well as people on foot. The river banks and bed would be churned up, but they would not be floundering in mud as would have happened on the direct route. This, I think, is the origin of the name, Long Ford. It took travelers out of their way to cross the river. It was a ‘long’ way round. The river name Ivel, is the oldest place name in the district. It comes from a group of families who lived in the area in about AD650. They are named in a document called the Tribal Hidage with the name Givele. The village names, Northill and Southill take the ancient name, the ‘ill’ part being the people’s name. I’m not at all sure how to pronounce ‘Givele’. It needs a guttural, throaty croak to say it and with an Anglo-Saxon attitude!
End of INTERLUDE
After James Rutt had married Emma Kilby in 1860, they worked together to start a shop business. Emma seems to have been the guiding light. James made a mark to sign the church register at their marriage, but Emma signed with a strong, firmly written signature. She seems to have been the driving force. Through the 1860s and 70s they prospered. A connection was made with a grocery shop in North London, not far from the Angel, Islington. The eldest son, George, went to work there and became a London resident all his life. Their second, Levi, my grandfather, worked there between 1887 and 1890. One of the few stories Grandad told me about his younger days was how he ran from Islington to Whitechapel on a Sunday morning in November 1888 to see the scene of one of Jack the Ripper’s murders. His macabre sense of humour must have been fostered by this event. They slaughtered pigs at the shop in Langford, so the sight of blood and guts was not uncommon to him. Auntie Helen said it was more fun watching her Dad kill pigs than a bull fight in Spain. She caught the blood in a pan so that Grandma could make black pudding to sell in the shop. Even in 2010 the old slaughter house at the shop still stood looking over into Station Road, which they knew as Back Lane.
The last years of the nineteenth century and up to the Great War were years of prosperity for James and for Levi. They got contracts for public events like the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 and the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902. They acquired property and when the Rutt and Bates families were both flourishing they made a considerable impact on the village. Both of them at different times were sub-postmasters. From about 1880 to 1932 the Langford postmaster was named Rutt. Life was not always easy. James was in trouble with Parish Council in 1901 when he allowed the drains of his houses in Back Lane to become blocked. The sewage backed up and contaminated the wells and a water main. The result was a typhoid outbreak which brought the wrath of the law on James’s head. When the family rift over the birth of Elsie was healed, father and son were reconciled. James was a Methodist having attended the Chapel in The Leys and the new chapel. A new schoolroom was added to the Chapel in 1904 and James was a subscriber. His name is on the foundation stone in the porch leading to the school room. Levi, by complete contrast, was a member of the congregation at St Andrew’s parish church. He enjoyed singing and was encouraged in matters of religion by Rev C C Ewbank, who was Vicar of Langford from 1870 to 1933. James became ill in 1904, very seriously, at about the time Emma died. He had cancer. An operation was performed on him using the shop as an operating theatre and the shop counter as a table for the doctor to perform. God knows who caught the blood on that occasion! Both parents gone Grandad Levi had two shops, the ‘old shop’ nearly opposite The Leys and the ‘new shop’ on the other side of the road about 100 yards away. 1905 was a new beginning for Grandad and Grandma.
Levi Rutt married Ellen Elizabeth Bates at Langford church on 29 October 1895. As written above they soon started producing children. Soon after the wedding it was time to make Christmas puddings. ‘Stir up Sunday’ is the day. In the Prayer Book it is the Sunday next before Advent where the collect says, ‘Stir up, we beseech Thee, O, Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people’. So stir your Christmas puddings if you have a suitable basin to stir them in. Newly married Grandma didn’t have one so she went to her mother’s house, Honey Hill farm in Back Lane to borrow one. The pudding was made. That basin survives to this day and a pudding has been made in it every year since. It is blackened and crazed and every year we have expected it to break. 2018 saw its 124th Christmas. So here’s to 2019! I’ll make sure the silver threepennies are boiled with it.