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Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Thursday, 9th September 2010

 
PART 11

FIRST WEEK AT WORK INSIDE THE NEW CENTRAL TOOL FACTORY

WITH the arrival of the first new townies in Hemel Hempstead in 1950, attention focused on the local jobs situation.
The year began with local employers warning that the labour shortages meant existing firms could absorb an extra 2,000 workers and if work on building new town factories began a “serious position might arise.”
But the Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation took a different view and general manager Mr W. O. Hart warned that if the factory building programme was delayed Hemel Hempstead could become a dormitory town.
The corporation feared that central government finances might lead to a delay in the factory building programme, but that was not to be.
On Thursday, March 23, 1950 work began on the first new town factory for Central Tool and Equipment Company. The factory was in what became Maylands Avenue on the junction of Wood Lane End, and was eventually demolished in 1983.

Mr W. Samuel, managing director of the company, came to Hemel Hempstead to watch work start on the new factory. His company made machine tools for the motor car industry and for use by the air force and navy. The firm employed about 50 people at its existing premises in Richmond and expected that about half would move to Hemel Hempstead. The firm, however, only employed four women.”
The new factory was to be opened in the autumn, but at the end of April 58 employees of Central Tool with their families visited Hemel Hempstead to see the factory being built, the houses and new school.
They were entertained at the Greenhills Club and welcomed by the mayor, Councillor P. J. White.
A typical family group among them were the Tinworths of Anerley, Crystal Palace. Mr Tinworth was a storeman and painter and had worked for the company for seven years. It took him more than two hours a day to travel to and from work at Richmond and his wife told the Gazette that she had chosen a house near to the new factory and was looking forward to seeing more of her husband.
Mr Tinworth’s son Laurence also worked for Central Tool and he and his wife had chosen their new home in Hemel Hempstead, too. “It will be grand getting out into the country,” said his wife.
But the first ‘new’ factory to be opened in the new town was, in fact, a long-established local business.
In June 1950 the new works of the Hemel Hempstead Engineering Company, formerly based in the High Street, were opened at Cupid Green (See part 8).

The Mayor, Councillor White, who performed the ceremony, was presented with the last piece of metal that had been moulded at the old High Street works and the development corporation chairman Lord Reith described the ceremony as “the cast that’s moulded old and new together.”
Another local firm in the limelight that year was Brocks Fireworks, whose works were where Woodhall Farm is now.
A BBC Television unit visited Hemel Hempstead for a programme on making fireworks and the commentating was done by Mr Richard Dimbleby. The programme included a firework display arranged at the Greenhills Club and Brocks at work.

Mr Fred Whybrow demonstrated the charging of rockets, Mr W. Thaxter demonstrated the finishing of the rockets, Mr Reg Harden filled Roman candles and Mr Harry Edwards was shown making jumping crackers. The workers were introduced to Richard Dimbleby by Alan and Roy Brock.
Other TV stardom for the town that year didn’t go down well with the ‘old townies.’
A BBC TV crew filmed the opening of Hemel Hempstead Engineering and then went on to show pictures of two or three tumbledown cottages in Cotterells near the Spotted Cow which leant several degrees out of the vertical, and at once switched to the brand new estates at Adeyfield.

Foul! cried the Hemel establishment. Councillor A. W. Mayo wrote: “The cottages were shown in such a way as to imply that they were a typical part of the old town soon to be transformed by the fairies from Westbrook Hay” - a reference to the development corporation headquarters.
Next week there was a full blown debate on the issue at a meeting of Hemel Hempstead Borough Council and a resolution that a full-blown complaint should be lodged with the BBC was only narrowly defeated.
There were dark suggestions that the BBC crew had been directed to the leaning cottages by the development corporation.
One of the transformations brought about by the coming of the new town which many old townies comment on is how their favoured “country walks” had vanished.
For almost two years a sub-committee of the Hemel Hempstead Council of Social Service has been carrying out a survey of field paths in Hemel Hempstead.
They’d been helped by the town’s scout groups and by pupils at Corner Hall School. The report showed that many old paths had been closed and many had fallen into disuse.

The new town development was partly to blame, but the committee also pointed out that “walking as a method of getting from one place to another has gone out of fashion.”
The development corporation was urged to provide new paths in its developments and local farmers were urged not to obstruct paths that crossed their land.
Old town or new town, one building that has been admired for centuries is St Mary’s Church and the people of Hemel Hempstead turned out in their thousands - many on foot - to watch a pageant to mark its 800th anniversary.

The pageant was opened by Gillie Potter from that famous radio village of Hognorton. The pageant involved more than 20 groups in the town.
The youth council of Christian Churches re-enacted King Offa of Mercia visiting Hemel Hempstead to select the site for the original church.
Hemel Hempstead Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society provided Elizabethan Merrie England and Mr S. W. Hancock played a typical squire. View older pages
 
 

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