In August 2014, Diane Livesey, the great niece of Captain Fred Ward, brought his photograph and military details to the Bushey WW1 exhibition ‘A Village Remembers’, to enquire if he was the F Ward commemorated on the Bushey Memorial and at St James’ Parish Church. Members of our research team have confirmed that the F…
When the Bushey First World War Exhibition, ‘ A Village Remembers’, was over in August 2014, Roger and I went on holiday to the Lake District. We stayed in a small guest house in Borrowdale at the foot of the Honister Pass, seven miles south of Keswick. Seatoller House, originally a small farm house, is…
The Christmas Truce has become one of the most famous and mythologised events of the First World War. But what was the real story behind the truce? Why did it happen and did British and German soldiers really play football in no-man’s land? Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)…
In 1914, ‘Lime Kiln Cottage’ stood close to the Bushey railway arches, near the kilns where local chalk was once burned to provide lime. Up the hill towards Bushey village, just beyond ‘The Merry Month of May’ alehouse, was a row of cottages with the intriguing name ‘Crook Log’.
The Ibbott family lived at ‘Osborne Villa’, 57 Chalk Hill, Oxhey, a house high on the bankside on the corner of Villiers Road, which still stands today. Arthur Pearson Ibbott was a secretary and accountant to an investment company and he established a small independent Baptist Chapel in Oxhey, where he became the superintendent. His daughter, Grace, was an art student and all his sons attended Watford Grammar School for Boys.
Tucked away quietly in Bushey Heath is a magnificent garden that is open daily to the public. It is the garden of Reveley Lodge, 88 Elstree Road, a Victorian house bequeathed to Bushey Museum in 2003. Nicholas Boyes, the professional gardener, has recently planted a swathe of Flanders poppy seeds
Ernest Farmer, an agricultural labourer and shepherd, lived at Bushey Hall Farm Cottages, Bushey Mill Lane. He was 5ft 4 inches tall with a fresh complexion, brown eyes, dark brown hair and a slight curvature of the spine. When war broke out, he enlisted as Private 43078 with the 6th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment…
Over a period of twenty years, Hubert Herkomer taught about 600 students at his Art School in Bushey village. By 1914, the school had been closed for ten years but a number of former students settled in the village and the surrounding area. When Arthur Langton Airy was killed in France in 1915, friends remembered…
R G Alexander, a pupil at Royal Masonic School in Bushey from 1911 to 1919, had affectionate memories of his former House Master and long wished to pay tribute to this most unusual schoolmaster, whose influence was so profound and so impressive. Ronald Morley Hooper, MA, a Master at the school from January 1904 to December 1915 was killed in action in France on 18 March 1918.
Bernard Stebbeds was born in Harleston, Norfolk in 1891, the youngest son of Alfred and Mary Stebbeds. Alfred was a coachman and stableman and worked in Norfolk, Suffolk, Leicestershire and Northampton before moving to Bushey Heath in the early 1900s. The family home was The Cottage, Two Oaks, Elstree Road, Bushey Heath, which stood opposite…