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March 2004 - News and Features |
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Agreement Reached on Rebekka Commemoration
South Gloucestershire Council’s Community Services Department has been working to resolve a sensitive local issue that has been ongoing for a number of years. The issue has developed into local community conflict with regards to the green embankment that was central to the tragic death of Rebekka Hudd, an 11-year-old local resident. This place became a central point of attention for the family, who campaigned against the use of mobile phones while driving and for the reduction of speed limits in residential areas. The national campaign, as we all know, has now been successful, and using mobile phones whilst driving is now banned, with a heavy penalty levied for violations.
Members of the Community Development Unit have been consulting separately with Pucklechurch Parish Council, local ward members, Rebekka’s family, and the elderly residents living directly by the embankment. An acceptable compromise was agreed to commemorate Rebekka’s place of death and ensure that this green bank enhances the local area. Colourful year-round flower bulbs will be planted on the whole of the embankment and maintained by South Gloucestershire Council, starting in autumn 2004.
We ask that everyone in the village of Pucklechurch support this decision and hope that the conflict will cease on this matter. We are grateful to everyone who participated in the consultation. Members of Rebekka’s family have registered an interest in participating in the planting of the bulbs, and we would also like to invite anyone else who would like to take part. Please contact me at the Community Development Unit, tel 01454 865838, if you would like to participate in this activity or discuss anything else.
Many thanks,
Pauline Barker
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New After-School Club at Pucklechurch Primary
You may have noticed the new Elliott building on the school fields. This will be used to home the after-school club, which will cater for children aged 4 to 11 each day between 3.10 and 6.00pm during term times.
We are now in the process of hiring of a play leader and play assistant. Our hope is that we will be ready to open the doors of the club on the first day of the summer term. However, this is dependent on us finding high-quality staff and on Ofsted not taking too long to carry out the inspection.
Please encourage anyone interested in the posts of leader or assistant leader to apply for more details. We are looking for enthusiastic and motivated candidates with suitable qualifications and at least two years of childcare experience. Apply to Georgina Wynter, Pucklechurch Primary School, Castle Road, Pucklechurch, Bristol BS16 9RF, tel 937-2579.
It is taking longer than expected to get the club up and running; however, we will soon have a great club in first-class facilities that the children will enjoy. Contact the school if you would like to register your child’s interest in the club.
James Gardner, Chair of Governors
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Design-a-Sign Competition
This article contains additional information to that in the printed version.
Due to a rather disappointing response, the closing date for entries in the search for a suitable design to go on the Pucklechurch road signs has been extended. Designs should now be submitted by April 16th. 
The design should fit in an area that measures 575mm wide by 345mm tall and take the shape of the space into consideration. All entries will be considered, and the decision of the judges will be final.
Entries should be submitted on a single sheet of A4 paper in either single or full colour. Please remember to include your name, address, phone number, and age (if under 18). Designs must be submitted by 16th April 2004 to Jackie Sexton at jacqy.sexton@btinternet.com
The following summary of key events in our village’s history might give you some ideas for a design.
- Once the site of a Saxon royal manor, the name Pucklechurch is said to have come from early Briton (Celtic) and Saxon interest in the supernatural. “Puca” is an ancient term for goblin, and the area was reputedly the home of elves and goblins. In 950, during the reign of King Edred, it was known as “Pucelancyrcan”. In the Domesday Book (1086), the village and its manor are recorded as “Pulcrecerce”.
- In the summer of AD577, a battle was fought at nearby Dyrham when Ceawlin, king of the West Saxons, defeated the Briton armies of Cirencester and Bath. Many of the dead from this battle, including a Briton chieftain, are said to be buried in Pucklechurch.
- On the 26th May 946, Edmund, king of all England and grandson of Alfred the Great, was stabbed to death by a local thief called Leof while attending a banquet in Pucklechurch.
- The village was on the edge of the royal hunting forest of Kingswood favoured by Saxon and later medieval kings. The Star Inn in is reputedly built on the site of the royal hunting lodge.
- The splendid Parish Church of St Thomas à Becket was built in 1225 on an earlier Saxon site.
- Pucklechurch prospered through agriculture during the Tudor and Elizabethan periods when many houses were built by rich merchants.
- After his return to Bristol from the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, William III visited his friends, the influential Denis family, who were lords of the manor of Pucklechurch.
- In the early 18th century, a Reverend Berrow endowed the village with a school for the children of the poor.
- Coal has been extracted from the area since early mediaeval times and in 1851 Handel Cossham established the Kingswood Coal Company, which included a mine in Pucklechurch. By 1900 the Bristol coalfields were producing nearly 400,000 tonnes. (See article on Parkfield Colliery.)
- During World War II the village was one of the first to put up barrage balloons to frustrate the Luftwaffe. What is now the trading estate was an airfield, which was renamed RAF Pucklechurch in June 1952.
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Ashfield to Hire Additional Staff to Support Programme Expansion
HMP & YOI Ashfield has turned itself around and has now been recognised as comparable to the best juvenile centre in the country by the HMCIP, Ofsted, and ALI Inspections. Ashfield staff work with external agencies, including the police, youth offending teams, Connexions, and resettlement services, to give their young charges a better chance of not re-offending when released back into the public. A number of programmes are being changed or expanded, and additional staff will be taken on to fill a range of full-time and part-time roles, including learning support assistants, prisoner custody officers, general assistants, operational support staff, teachers, crèche workers, admin clerks, and cleaners. Local people are invited to find out more about these job openings by contacting Ashfield’s HR department on 0117 303 8058 or ashfieldrecruitment@premier-serco.com.
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Pucklechurch Produce Show
This year’s Produce Show will be held on Saturday, 11th September 2004. The Show Committee has introduced a new novelty class to this year’s show schedule: Class 55--Grow potatoes in a bucket.
The seed potato and bucket will be provided at a cost of 50p from the Gardeners’ Club meeting in March and April or from Tony Pratt direct. The exhibitor will plant the potato in the bucket, water and feed it, and allow it to grow until show day. The exhibit -- i.e., the potatoes in the bucket -- must be entered in the show in the usual way via an entry form.
On show day, the potato (including haulm) will be tipped out of the bucket by the show judge and the resulting potatoes weighed. The exhibitor with the heaviest potatoes will win a first prize of £5 donated by the show committee. Have a go!
This year’s schedule also contains a page on hints and tips for showing, which we hope will be beneficial to new exhibitors. Schedules will be on sale in the local shops from June onwards, priced 40p, which also includes entry to the show.
Tony Pratt, Chairman
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Best-Kept Village Plaque
Parish councillors show off certificate, shield and plaque received in the 2003 Village of the Year competition sponsored by Calor Gas and organised by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).
From left to right, top Alan Holder and Mary Whittock;
Bottom: Les Whittock, Diane Bailey, Marilyn Palmer
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Tales of the Village:
A Parkfield Miner’s Son
Pucklechurch News Talks to Roy Wiltshire
This article contains additional information to that in the printed version.
Born and raised in 6 Parkfield Rank, Roy Wiltshire had a boyhood beyond the imagination of today’s Pucklechurch lads. His was an era of hoops and conkers, pit ponies and reading by oil lamp. I interviewed Mr Wiltshire last month to get a feel for what it was like growing up in the village in the 1920s and ‘30s. 
From the age of five, Roy went to the little school that was built in 1895 for the children of Parkfield (near the Rose and Crown). It was one room with no playground, but the children knew how to make their own fun. They roamed the fields, ate the nuts and blackberries they collected, and played Fox and Hounds. A favourite pastime was hoops, rolling an old bicycle wheel down the road with a stick. Hide and seek was best played over by the mine because there were so many places to hide. They didn’t have television, of course, but they did do a lot of reading. Electricity didn’t come to Parkfield until the late ‘40s, so oil lamps were used in the winter. To read by oil lamp, you had to have your book right up to the lamp. “We often went to bed at 8 o’clock. There wasn’t really a lot to do in the evenings. We had an old wireless, and my dad would listen to the news or Rob Wilton, the comedian.”
At seven, Roy went to what they called the “big school” in Pucklechurch, the old schoolhouse on the corner of Castle Road, now a private home. This school had two large rooms that were further partitioned off for the different classes. Because it was a C of E school, the vicar was the manager of the school. Reverend Lewis, who was very strict, would come down once a week. “He’d rattle the door before he’d come in,” says Roy, “which would give us boys time to stand up and salute him. Can you imagine kids doing that today?”
“There was no such thing as school dinners. We had an hour and half for dinner, and we crossed three fields to walk home… about a mile,” remembers Roy. “On a Thursday, Mother would give me money so I could get two pennies’ worth of chips and a piece of bread and butter from the fish and chip shop. We’d come up and sit on the swings. That was a real heyday to us.”
“Another thing we looked forward to was Mr Pratt’s birthday party. Edward Pratt, his name was, but we called him ‘the squire’. He manufactured shoes in Kingswood, but he lived in Pucklechurch, in Grey House off Kings Lane. He had a couple of horses and some small terrier dogs, which he’d take out every morning. In January every year he’d hire the miners’ hall and throw a birthday party with jam and cake. He’d stand upon the stage smiling… I can see him now. All the kids were invited. When we were 11 to 14, we’d stand all in a line and he’d hand us each a sixpence. If you were 5 to 11, you’d get a small present, a book or something. He used to have little headstones in his lawn for his dogs that died. Maybe they’re still there.”
In those days, Pucklechurch did not have a local doctor. “Dr Leggett came up from Staple Hill twice a week. The surgery was the last cottage on the corner, between where the Fleur de Lys and the Post Office are now. You had to queue up outside whatever the weather, so if you came with a cold, you left with pneumonia.” If you needed the doctor to come round, you left a note on his table. Treatment was free for the poorer people, but the better off had to pay.
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A Brief History of Parkfield Colliery
Coal mining provided most of the employment in Pucklechurch for over 80 years. Handel Cossham, a young man who had studied geology and believed he had a method of determining whether a location would yield coal, thought that Parkfield was a prime location. He convinced investors, and construction began in 1851. Cossham was right: The seams proved good enough to provide a viable business until 1936.
At its peak, the mine employed over 300 men underground and another 50 or so above ground. The 50 cottages of Parkfield Rank were built to house the miners and their families. The coal seams had names like “Hollybush”, “Hard”, “Rag”, and “Stinking” (working that last one must have been fun). The deepest was 237.7m (780 ft) below the surface, and the biggest was only .9m (3 ft) thick. The major problem for most mines in the area was not gas but water. This proved the undoing of Parkfield mine when it flooded in 1936 because water was seeping in faster than it could be pumped out. The pit closed, but other mines in the area remained open for a few more years, the last one closing in 1949 (Coalpit Heath).
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Roy’s father was a miner at Parkfield Colliery, where he worked for 40 years. “Dad was what they called a ‘rough engineer’. He worked underground all the time,” says Roy. Most people in the village worked in the mines then. The shifts were a standard eight hours -- 6am-2pm, 2pm-10pm, and 10pm-6am -- but it was hard work. There were no breaks except for 20 minutes to sit down with your bread and cheese for lunch.
The only time Roy went down into the mine itself was one Saturday morning when one of the teachers took a group of boys for a visit. “We were about nine or ten. I’ll never forget it. Going down in that cage frightened me to death,” declares Roy. However, one of the best places to play was down by the shaft. “We’d push the trams up the slag heaps and whiz down in them. That was our playground. You’d never get that today, would you?”
The pits would shut down for a week’s holiday in August, and the pit ponies were brought up one at a time in the cage, much to the delight of the local children. “There were eight of them. They were funny little things. When they came up, they would go round and round and round the field because they hadn’t seen grass in a year. I did feel sorry for them, but they did look after them well.”
Parkfield mine closed in 1936, when the mine flooded beyond repair. Although this was in the depth of the Depression, Roy does not remember this as a traumatic time for the village. His father went to work in the mines at Coalpit Heath for a few years, then after the war broke out, he moved to Parnall’s in Yate, a factory making war machinery. His dad was shocked to find that working in a factory earned him twice as much as mining: £6 a week instead of £3.
Boys from the village went to Mangotsfield Senior Boys School from the ages of eleven to fourteen. Roy and his friends didn’t like it. They went on the bus, and it seemed a long way away. At fourteen, Roy left school and went to work. He had always been determined to go down the mine, but his father put his foot down; he wanted something better for his son. Instead Roy went to an office job at Parnall’s, cycling 5 miles there and 5 miles back each day.
Despite spending his formative years in the midst of the Depression, Roy doesn’t think back on it as hard times. “I suppose they were, compared to nowadays, but I was only a kid. I didn’t realise there was a depression.”
Roy learned to play the piano and joined a local a jazz band. During the war years, they played in the miners’ hall every Saturday night for the homecoming forces. The Pucklechurch RAF station, No.11 Balloon Centre, had opened in 1939. “They called us the Pucklechurch youth orchestra. The piano wasn’t up to much, but I enjoyed it. The RAF lads would come up because there wasn’t much else to do on a Saturday night in Pucklechurch,” says Roy.
Roy met his wife Evelyn, an evacuee from London, at those Saturday night dances. They married in 1948 but didn’t move far. They bought 25 Parkfield Rank for the princely sum of £300. Still, this seemed a lot in those days. During the mining years, Roy remembers his parents paying 3/6d in rent per week for their two up-two down cottage -- that’s 17½ pence in new money!
Now 80, Roy still lives in Pucklechurch with Evelyn, though no longer on Parkfield Rank. Full of tales from a long and interesting life, including 34 years as the clerk of the parish council, he is a delight to talk to and clearly cherishes a childhood from another era. We hope this little story gives the young people of Pucklechurch an idea of how people enjoyed life before computers and telly.
Interview by Jacki Berry
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Broadband - A Guide
(Due to space limitations this article was not featured in the printed version.)
As reported in the last issue of Pucklechurch News, the Abson telephone exchange was upgraded to broadband late last year, so anyone within this exchange area using a BT line can be connected.
Broadband is a high-speed connection to the Internet using the ADSL system (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line). This works by splitting the signal into two channels: one for voice transmissions, the other for data signals.
Most of us connect at present using a dial-up modem, with speeds of up to 56Kbps. The most popular broadband speeds are about ten times this, normally around 512Kbps. Broadband is an always-on connection to the Internet; if your PC is on, you are online.
All of which means:
- Your phone line would be open for calls while you surf the web.
- There would be no waiting for a dial-up connection.
- If you work from home, you would have fast communication with your customers.
- You could browse or do email while downloading files.
- Large attachments could be emailed in seconds.
- You could download music at speed, play interactive games, shop or bank instantly, and listen to the radio with a multitude of stations to choose from.
- All online time is free. You just pay a monthly fee from under £20 per month.
- If you have any questions or would like more information, please call John Hayden at 937-3344.
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