Thrale history
Historic Sandridge. The story of a Hertfordshire parish (1952).
The first substantial chronicle of Thrale history, written by R.W. Thrale (1931-2007) & E. Giles. Reproduced in full with consent of the author.
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Divinity, paid occasional visits to Sandridge on Sundays and once took a wedding.
Robert Welton lived at Sandridge for forty-seven years, seventeen as curate to Dr. Langford and thirty as vicar. He was also curate of St. Stephen’s three and a half miles away and Rector of Chaldon, a small village in the Surrey hills. As curate he received £44 a year from St. Stephen’s and £30 from Sandridge. He lost his only son at the age of sixteen and one of his four daughters. The boy had been trained as a chemist. During Welton’s curacy the oldest surviving chalice and paten were made for the church. Thus Sandridge had a varied collection of priests, good, bad and indifferent.
Book Three. 1800-1900
Chapter One
THE WAY OF LIFE
The nineteenth century has far more in common with the century which preceded it than with the one that followed. If Jonathan Parsons, who died in 1768, had come back a hundred years later, he would have found village life much as it was in his own day. If, however, the school mistress of 1651 could see the Sandridge of today, she would scarcely recognise the parish as the one in which she lived, and would no doubt find our habits and outlook on life very strange. The changes which occurred in Sandridge, however, during the nineteenth century were by no means negligible; two of the most important were the foundation of the school in 1824 and the attempt in the middle of the century to relieve poverty by voluntary clubs augmented by the rich.
The village school as part of the great national system is nowadays taken for granted, but like everything else it had a beginning. The work of those poorly paid teachers in the early days was really heroic and deserves more recognition than it usually receives. It was Kenneth Bayley, the curate, who took the initiative in founding Sandridge School, and aided by the Martens of Marshalswick and the leading farmers it met for the first time at the workhouse in January 1824, the meetings being on Saturdays and Sundays only. The first teacher was Mrs Ephgrave, but she resigned after six weeks and was followed by Mrs Mardlin who was paid eighteen pence a day. A school costing £200 was built in about three months, and meanwhile William Paul, the village joiner, was making eight long forms, four dozen cotton reels at half-penny each, a ruler for one and six, and what he called a “wrighting desk” seventeen feet long. When the children arrived at the new building in January 1825, they found a well built whitewashed room, and a floor of white paving bricks. The room was fourteen feet high, with oak doors in oak frames; the walls were nine inches thick, and the was a well-pitched slate roof. The one fireplace consumed six sacks of coal during the first year. As often happens with new work the windows and doors stuck a good deal, but Mr Paul only charged one and eight pence for half a day’s work in putting them right. The teacher now was Miss Sawyer who received £45 a year, and it may reflect on her power of control that during her five years only eleven window-panes had to be mended. The school was financed by voluntary subscriptions, the sale of children’s needlework, and the fees of a penny a week for five days instruction. There was an average attendance of fifty children out of a population of 820.As time went on the farmers ceased to support the school and it was only due to the gentry that it survived. A cheaper teacher was appointed called Mrs. Postern, and the bills for mending windows went up fivefold. When Queen Victoria came to the throne the salary was still further reduced to £25 and ten years later it was down to £20 with the use of the attached cottage. Then with the arrival of Reverend T.H. Winbolt and the death of William Paul both in 1847 the school took on a new lease of life. Paul’s son William succeeded to the business and proceeded to erect a gallery in the school at a cost of ten guineas, presumably for a class room. The school cottage was decorated and the roof re-thatched and the new Head Mistress, Miss Hooker, received a bonus of five pounds. All this was possible because Mr. Winbolt persuaded the farmers once again to take
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