Tales from Longford: The Strawberry Season

The village of Longford in West Middlesex will be demolished when the third runway at Heathrow airport is built.  

  

Zion Cottage

At first light, the front door of Zion Cottage opened on a glorious June morning in 1900.  Mrs Clara Brain, dressed in a shawl and head scarf with a white apron over her long black skirt, walked towards The Farm in the centre of Longford.  Even though it was 3am she were joined by a growing stream of similarly dressed women all moving in the same direction. The village was quiet as most residents had yet to begin their morning routine.  When the women reached the field they replaced their white aprons with coarse hessian sacks, criss-crossed their shawls across their bodies, under their arms and tied them at the back. They pulled their long skirts up between their legs and hitched them into the front of the waistband.  In the field, the boy from the village with his wooden rattle had been scaring the birds away since first light.  He was pleased to have some company.  The women immediately set to work.  The foreman allocated a row of strawberry plants to each girl.  He handed out wooden punnets and the girls picked the ripest fruit handling only the stem. The punnets were lined with a strawberry leaves before the fruit was laid gently on top.  Later in the packing shed, each punnet would be weighed to make sure it weighed exactly a pound, then 36 punnets would be packed in a wooden crate and the lid nailed down.  About sixty of these crates would be stacked ten-high on a lightweight yellow strawberry van that with one fast horse could travel the fifteen miles along the Bath Road to Covent Garden market in one and a half-hours.  Strawberries with the dew still on them would sell at a premium price in the market.

 

Fruit was one of the main produce of the market gardens in West Middlesex in the nineteenth century, but there was often a glut.  An enterprising farmer in nearby Sipson, Jonathon Smith, had started a Jam Factory there in the 1890s which would buy any farm surpluses.  One of the main crops in mid-summer was strawberries.  The berries ripened in the open fields where the strawberry plants were laid out in long rows and the plants packed with straw around them so that the slugs could not reach the ripe fruit.  The strawberry-picking season was relatively short, but labour intensive, and because the plants were at ground level, back-breaking.  The warm sun of mid-summer made the job easier, but in pouring rain it was unpleasant work.  Women were regarded as the best pickers of strawberries because of their light touch and Longford had an army of women who would rise at dawn to pick them.

 

Clara Brain was born in Weston on the Green, Oxfordshire, in 1856. She and  married the boy next door, West Brain, in 1889 when they were both 33 and moved to Longford  before the end of the century. Her husband worked as an agricultural labourer for H.J. Wild the biggest employer in Longford. Most of the farmland is now under Heathrow airport, but the main farmhouse still survives as the Grade II listed Weekly House.  West Brain was always known as Brother Brain because of his way of greeting people by calling them ‘brother’.  He was a lifelong Baptist and never missed going to chapel every Sunday.  His employer described him as a “salt of the earth”.  West died in Longford at the age of 87. Clara worked in the fields at harvest times, but was mostly a housewife. She won prizes for her bread and pastry-making in local produce shows.  She died in Longford aged 90 in 1947.

My book, Longford: A Village on the Edge of Extinction, is due for publication soon. 

The Village that Street View forgot

Longford Village today

Middlesex as a county has lost its identity under the urbanisation of London. Most Middlesex towns are referred to simply as a London Borough of something. A few places to the north and west, and within the M25 unofficial boundary of Greater London, still proudly proclaim Middlesex as their county, but soon even more of its territory will be removed from our sight, our memory and our history.

The village of Longford will disappear with the expansion of Heathrow airport. To those that live there it will be a sad bitter time. To those that have yet to visit the village it will be a disappointment to find that you are unable to use Google’s Street View app to navigate through its streets. Street View cameras have only ventured to the outskirts of the village and omitted to capture any images of the historic core. Why is this? Street View has not offered an explanation to me. Was it a deliberate omission requested by the Government to stop any record of the village being preserved prior to its demolition, or just a casual mistake?

The village of Longford, within the London Green Belt and a Conservation Area, is a peaceful (ignoring the sound of screaming jets overhead) rural setting which has hardly altered over time. It has nine Grade II listed buildings, and five others of special architectural interest. The village, from Saxon times and earlier, has been a farming community. The prime horticultural land grew fruit and vegetables for London’s Covent Garden market. It straddles the Great Bath Road from where, for centuries, its four inns provided travellers with hospitality. Six miles from Windsor Castle the village was the usual stopping place for the Royals to change their horses on the way to and from London and Windsor.

Longford Village 1920

The villagers were witnesses to many events, rejoicing at some and turning a blind eye to others. Highwaymen prayed on the coach travellers who had to cross the notorious Hounslow Heath to get to Longford, but if any villagers were aware of the culprits they kept it to themselves. With four rivers (two artificial) and acres of orchards and market gardens it was a thriving rural community up to the second world war when an airfield was built nearby to aid the war effort. This airport became the country’s main civil airport at Heathrow and from then on Longford was blighted. It has been threatened with extinction since the fifties, but the cohesive supportive community are proud of its history and have fought to prevent its destruction.

Google’s Street View boasts that it now has full coverage of the road networks for the whole of the United Kingdom, so why is Longford missing? Street View is not just a tool for navigation, but is becoming a social history resource. Google has an ongoing programme of re-surveying and, whilst the current image is presented to the user first, a clock symbol in the top-left of the screen can be clicked to see older images. This is a great asset to family or local history researchers, or just the curious, who want to track the transition of locations through time.

Sadly, because the village of Longford has not been visited by the Street View cameras, when the third runway is built no one will be able to see images of the village that once stood there, and with the loss of images will also go the story of centuries of village life. To preserve Longford’s history I am writing a book on the life of the village through time. Even if the physical village disappears I hope the lives, loves, tragedies and triumphs of its people will live on in print.

The Colne River, Longford, today