BBC Radio Bristol Lena Church (Clutton) Interview with Steve Yabsley 23 September 2013
Key - L – Lena Church S – Steve Yabsley
S- All this week on the programme, you'll find me in Clutton. I must confess, although I've passed through the village many, many times over the years, I've never really stopped and had a good look round. Well, that's changing today. My guide is Lena Church, who's lived here for how long, Lena? Is it a secret?
L – No, I've lived in Clutton 82 years.
S – All your life then.
L – All my life.
S – Okay, well, we're standing in your back garden at the moment, and let's talk first of all about your splendid house behind us. What can you tell me about the building?
L – Well, it's on an old estate map as a little dot. But we made two into one in the late 1960s, so it's a bit of a rambling cottage now.
S – Have you got happy memories of being here as a child?
L – Yes, I suppose I have. Yes, I had a happy childhood.
S – Okay, well let's talk about Clutton itself generally as a village. I was just looking at the records earlier on, it was mentioned in the Doomsday book, so it goes back a long way.
L – Yeah, it is a Doomsday village, as many others are round about.
S – And looking at Wikipedia, it says that the name Clutton could either mean rocky hill enclosure or hen's roost. I suppose either of those would do.
L – Well, that's both new. to me. We always knew that from the doomsday record it was Clutone, written with one T-O-N-E. C-L-U-T-O-N-E.
S – And it is one of those places that people just tend to pass through. Unless they live here, they just pass through, don't they?
L – Well, the main road goes through on the western side of the village. All the rest is as we're looking at it now, Steve.
S – Yeah, and going back in history a few 100 years, of course this is a great farming area. That road would have been a lot smaller in years past, wouldn't it?
L – Yes, and you came up Red Hill, didn't you? That was put there in the early part of the century, I think.
S – So what was there prior to that?
L – Well, you came along the lower road a little bit and cut through a lane before you came up.
S – And just looking out in front of us at the moment at the beautiful picturesque view, rolling hillside, lots of variable greens from the dark to the lights and that beautiful church in the distance, it's very picturesque, isn't it?
L – Is, isn't it? Yes. I'm going for the Guinness Book of Records on the number of photographs of that church from this angle.
S – As a child, did you play in the field in front of us?
L – Yes, it was a good place to play. Mr White was the farmer and we were terrified of him. If he came through the bottom gate, he always walked with his hands on the back of his hips with his coat pulled back and he came out with a sort of measured… astride and we ran then. We didn't stay, but it was a good place for a cricket pitch.
S – You must have seen so many changes in the village during your time here.
L – Absolutely. I could see Maynard Terrace, which is way the other side of the village. Those are houses that were built by the Earl of Warwick for his workforce. And now I can't see them at all.
S – We can hear the A37 rumbling away in the background, but it doesn't really slice through the village because most of it's on this side, isn't it?
L – Is, to the east of the main road.
S – It wasn't just farming that the place was built on. There was mining in the area for a while, wasn't there?
L – Oh yes, the last mine in Clutton was right in the middle of the village. It closed about in the 1920s.
S – It must have been an awful life there going down those mines.
L – Oh, terrifying. I should think my father was a miner.
S – Can you tell me anything about that?
L – Well, he didn't cut coal. He worked on the pumps at Pit Bottom. I won't say his work was really hard, but he did seven days. He didn't work five days or six days.
S – There was also a brick factory here for a short while, I think.
L – Oh, brick works, yeah, a couple of brick works. One in the village that came after the pit closed near the railway line. The other one was at the top of Clutton Hill. And there was also a brickworks at Greyfield, which again was on the edge of Greyfield Pit.
S – And you must be one of the oldest livings still in the village. With respect.
L – With respect.
S – But what I mean is a lot of people have moved here as commuters from Bristol and Bath or wherever.
L – That's right. I know I'm not the oldest inhabitant because my sister lives just along the road and she is five years older than me.
S – Nonetheless, there must be fewer and fewer old troopers like yourself.
L – Bound to be, yes. I know that people who've been here in Clutton The people I was at school with have gone, sad.
S – You're glad to stay here though.
L – Oh yes, I think I should go out feet first from here.
S – Well, once again on the programme, here I am in Clutton where I am all this week and my guide is Lena Church. And today, Lena, we've come to your old primary school.
L – Yes, Clutton County Primary School.
S – What was it like when you were here as a child?
L – A good school, I think. It's always been a good school and I've got good and bad memories of it.
S – Do you remember the early days when you started here as a little poppet?
L – I insisted on coming to school when I was 4 and then I didn't like it and I cried a lot and my sister had to keep coming to sit with me.
S – How strict was it in those days? What days are we talking? Roughly what decade did you come here?
L – I came here in 1935 as a four-year-old.
S – So what was it like? Was it strict?
L – I can remember. Miss Evans smacking me. Don't know what for. And I can remember crying because I couldn't get my knitting right.
S – That's enough to upset any child.
L – Going on through the school, and although in that very early, must have been in the first year, the dentist would come and you paid sixpence, you brought sixpence to hand in if you were going to the dentist. If you were given a clean bill of health, your sixpence was refunded. So I was going to the dentist, I brought my sixpence and then I sat in the big dentist chair which was put in the little staff room and opened my mouth wide and he started counting and whether he was counting how many I had teeth or how many he was going to pull out or how many he was going to stop as it was called in those days, you got a stopping, I jumped out of the chair and ran home. I have memories of the war years here. The evacuees came and we were all squeezed in in 1939 and a whole school from Dagenham and Barking, they came here.
S – What a shock that must have been.
L – It was a shock. We couldn't even understand what they were saying.
S – It was all cor blimey, was it, and that sort of thing.
L – Yes. And then, of course, lots of them went home. And we had to learn all the air raid signals which the headmaster taught us, or thought he taught us. And he had a series of whistles and sticky tape all over the windows, of course, and the least glass was in the cloakrooms. And we were sent, if it was going to be an air raid, into the cloakroom to sit on the floor, cold slate flagstones. And if it was one whistle, you took cover. If it was 2 whistles, it was incendiary bombs. And if it was 3 whistles, it was gas. I may have it all wrong. and we all sat in the cloakroom on the floor and the headmaster came through the door and we'd obviously got the whistle signals wrong because he was very angry and said, well, you're all dead.
S – Did you have any perception as a young child at the time about what was really going on with the war?
L – I can remember being frightened. We had bombs falling in fields across the other side of the main road and once when it seemed to be very close, a screaming bomb coming down, my mother pushing me into the cupboard under the stairs.
S – Did you have any favourite teachers at the time?
L – Not favourite, but one of the best teachers when I was here was Mrs Seymour, who was the last year but one. And on Monday lunch times she used to do mental arithmetic for the last five minutes and she would put a row of figures one underneath the other or all down the board and whoever could give her the answer first could go early. But it was never me.
S – Overall, looking back on your childhood, was it a happy time?
L – Oh yes, I think so. In the early days, we ran the roads, we ran the fields, we raced about the village. I can remember a boy putting a ha'penny on the railway line and we waited for the train to go over it and he thought he'd have a penny because it would have been squashed that big.
S – So there was much more freedom in those days to roam around the roads. There wasn't so much traffic.
L – Very little traffic. Not many people had cars.
S – Was there much horse manure on the roads? Be honest.
L – No, don't remember that, but I remember two of the local farmers had horse and cart, or horse-drawn vehicles, with which they delivered the milk.
S – So Clutton has changed an awful lot, although you still get your doorstep deliveries, don't you?
L – Yeah, comes in a van in the middle of the night.
S – Once again on the programme, here I am in the village of Clutton, which Lena Church, who's my guide all this week, you say it's in the middle of the triangle of Bristol, Bath and Wells.
L – It's a very good way to describe on the map where we are.
S – Yes, and it's a lovely spot. It's a village that's expanded enormously over the years, hasn't it?
L – Oh, yes, there's been a lot of development.
S – How have you felt as a local who's lived here over 80 years as they started to fill in the little gaps with housing?
L – Not just little gaps, big gaps as well. In the beginning, I think we all felt they were comers in, but they brought a lot to Clutton, I'm sure.
S – Sure. You have to limit it. I mean, you can't cover all the green spaces. You won't have any village left, will you?
L – That's right.
S – Well, we're on what was the old platform of the old railway here. And you remember this when it was working.
L – Oh, yes. We went to school on the train. Those of us who went to Norton Hill, which in the days when I first went there was Midsomer Norton County Secondary School. And after that, it became the grammar school, and we caught the train here at 20 past seven in the morning.
S – Well, the railway line was closed following the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, but you, as you say, caught it as a child. Just paint a picture. What was this area like when you were a youngster?
L – It was quite busy. On the side where the trains would go to Bristol, there was the waiting room and the ticket office. There was even a separate waiting room that was called the Ladies' Waiting Room. And the bit that we're looking at here with, what have we got, some Copper Beach and some Scots pine, they were always there because in those days, stations up and down the line competed for the prettiest garden. You probably know about that.
S – And where we are at the moment on the green grass is where the lines were actually running.
L – We are standing where the track would have been, but of course it's been infilled and we've got a nice bit of grass under our feet.
S – I understand a member of your family actually worked here.
L – Two of my in-laws, my husband's uncle. He was on the gang and then he was a porter. Further down the. the line at Hallatrow, but my father-in-law worked his way up from being on the gang to being a porter to finally being a signalman.
S – I suppose in addition to people like you who were using it to go to school or swimming or whatever, and also those that used the train for holidays, there must have been farmers who used it for their work.
L – Yes, the milk churns would have been taken on, and old photographs of the station show a big trolley with the milk churns on. And later, After that, there was an engineering worked at Brislington, I think, and there was a clothing factory too at Brislington, and some young girls, when they left school, went to work at the clothing factory.
S – And that milk you mentioned a moment ago in the Churns, that would have been full fat West Country milk.
L – Oh, absolutely. Yeah, full fat cream.
S – Do you remember the trains themselves? What were they like?
L – Always single compartments, not corridor trains.
S – And what about the engines huffing and puffing at the front?
L – Yes, they did huff and puff, and that I remember well, because I was terrified. Where the signal box sat on the end of the down platform, it jutted out so that the platform became narrower then, and the engine stopped by the signal box, and the signalman didn't have to get out of his box. to exchange the key, they could reach each other. And all the way coming back from Bristol when I was, and I'm talking before the war, when I was a horrible little girl, I would be saying, you will wait for the train to go before we cross the line, won't you? will wait for the train to go before we cross the line. And my mother would say, yes, of course, yes, of course. And then just sometimes she'd lose patience and we'd have to go past this snorting monster. squeezed in this four or five feet of platform and then crossed in front of the engine on the wooden footpath across the line and I hated it.
S – Once again on the programme, here I am at the village of Clutton, which is on the A37, about 10 miles outside of Bristol. And with me, my guide all this week, is Lena Church. And we're at the church today, Lena.
L – Yes, St Augustine's.
S – Although that's not its full name, is it?
L – No, this particular church is St Augustine of Hippo.
S – Now, we don't know much about him, but he's different from the other St Augustine.
L – I've always been able to understand that, yes.
S – Now, this is a lovely church, and it's a special one for you, because you were married here, weren't you?
L – I was married here, yes, I remember I carried a prayer book and not a bouquet of flowers. And it wasn't a white wedding. I was married, very practical me, in a smart little stone-coloured suit.
S – What can you tell me about the church itself? I mean, it's a splendid, attractive church. Do you know much about it?
L – The church itself is Victorian and there's a grave stone not far from here that can give us indication of that. And it says on the tombstone. to be buried by the church that she had helped to rebuild.
S – So it was a payback for her for putting her hand in her pocket.
L – Sounds like it, yes.
S – I understand that John Wesley was a visitor here.
L – He came and preached three times, but on the final time they wouldn't allow him in the church. So not to be outdone, he stood on a tombstone and preached in the churchyard.
S – He was indefatigable, wasn't he?
L – Was. He was, yes. He and his brother Charles, between them, they wrote all those hymns, didn't they? He did write in his diaries that it was whilst he was at Clutton that he had a very, very sore throat and the cure was to rub garlic on the soles of his feet and it cured his backache in three hours and his throat was better in eight. I may have the figures wrong, but it was something quite ridiculous like that.
S – And the church itself, we've said you had your wedding here, but I guess you've been in here many times over the years for various services.
L – Yes, I can remember the bells being rededicated after they were re-hung, having been silent for many years. And the rectors, I remember several rectors, and the most memorable one, I think, was the Reverend Hayden Jones. who was here for about 10 years. He went on from here to be the first Anglican Bishop of Venezuela.
S – Wow.
L – And when he died, he came back in retirement eventually, and after he died, his wish was to be buried in Clutton Churchyard, where he had such good friends.
S – Is it your wish to be buried here eventually?
L – Oh no, I'll go up in smoke.
S – Oh, fair enough. What do you remember of Hayden himself? Was he a bit of a character?
L – He was very much a character. He swanned about the village with his cassock flowing out behind him. He liked to go to the pub. If he came in on a pastoral visit, you could offer him a whiskey perhaps, rather than a cup of coffee. He was a man of the village. Everybody liked him. But he had bright ideas. He would have events at the rectory, a Spanish evening. He'd ask people who would cook certain things and he'd go around telling you what to do and what to put in your Rayburn or your Aga. And he had Screaming Lord Sutch at one of these events. In those days we used to have an evening treasure hunt by car, which they were always great fun, following clues all around the different villages. And then he told us once how he was in Cardiff and he saw the name of the impresario up over the theatre, and Neil Sedaka was performing. So he made it his business to go and see if the impresario was the man he thought it was, and it was. And he said, you must come to the rectory for lunch, and Neil Sedaka came as well. And the boys in the choir said, Rector, you didn't have Neil Sedaka at the rectory. You didn't. Oh, I did, he said.
S – For the final time this week on the programme, here I am at Clutton, or at the outskirts of Clutton, with me my guide all this week, Lena Church. Lena, where have we come today?
L – We've come into Highbury Woods. For me to point out to you, Highbury Hill, which has a fair bit of history to it.
S – Now, I've lived in the West Country all my life and I never knew anything about this area. It's very pretty, isn't it?
L – It's very pretty through here. I believe that at one time a few years ago the parish council tried to get it designated as an area of natural beauty but I don't think anything came of it. But we're coming along this path into the woods and in a minute we shall come on the stream which makes it even more picturesque. And of course the trees at the moment still full of leaf. Nature all around us, wonderful. Many times, yes. It's where we brought the children. A long way to walk, but it's where we brought the children. And when we get to the waterfall and you see it, you'll see if you haven't climbed up beside the waterfall, you haven't lived.
S – This is so pretty. The tinkling stream, the lovely cover of woodland flowers and trees and bushes. Some leaves already fallen. We're into autumn now.
L – I think these have been here for a bit, don't you? Good bit of compost. It's been used here for filming. They filmed Robin of Sherwood here at one time.
S – I'm not surprised. This looks like the sort of area he would have hung out.
L – We'll go over the footbridge.
S – What's nice about here, Lena, is that it's clean. There's no rubbish all over the place.
L – That's good, isn't it? No beer cans, no crisp packets. Good.
S – It's funny that this area is tucked away. I would never have known this was here.
L – A lot of people don't know it's here, but of course all the old residents do.
S – It's on a need-to-know basis.
L – Oh, that sounds good. This footpath is part of the limestone link, and from where we came off the A39 through the fields, eventually into Clutton, and then from Clutton way across the A37 and on.
S – I hope you don't mind me saying this, but for 82 you're pretty sprightly.
L – Yeah, walking's good for you. have to keep doing it. And I've always enjoyed it.
S – Quite a romantic place, this. I imagine if you came here in springtime, you could woo a lady here.
L – Carve your initials in the bark of a tree.
S – Have you ever been here when there's been a dusting of snow?
L – I've been here after we had very severe frosts and the waterfall was frozen, still running down through the middle, but all the spray had made big balls of ice and I took slides of it.
S – Well, we've now come to the waterfall itself and you can hear it rushing beneath us. That is so pretty, Lena.
L – Yes, it is. And of course, when there's a good spade of water running, it's quite spectacular.
S – And it falls down, not in one constant stream, but in a series of levels.
L – Yeah, I would think about 20 feet altogether.
S – Have you ever put your bikini on and had a dip in there?
L – No. but you paddle upstream in your wellies, of course, if you want to get a good shot of it with a camera. And I talked just now about climbing up the rocks beside it, and you can see the big steps at the bottom and then the smallest steps up to the top.
S – So yet another reason why Clutton is such an appealing area to live.
L – I suppose it is. And as you keep saying, it's so picturesque. Look at the ferns growing down the side there. The stream comes along from Clutton. It rises at Slate Farm just in the parish of Camley and comes down through Clutton and on down there and eventually runs into the Cambrook.
S – You've obviously enjoyed living in Clutton over the years.
L – I suppose I have. It's home. I've never wanted to live anywhere else.
S – Thank you so much for being my guide this week.
L – I think the pleasure has been all mine, Steve. We like reminiscing about things. When you get old, you do. And this trip out to the waterfall today it was a bonus for me.