Watford's buildings of the past drawn by Benskins accountant

During his time at Benskins, he was given art instruction by Colonel Charles Healey, whose father established a brewery in King Street in the mid-1800s.

Colonel Healey had written and illustrated a series of articles entitled Notes on Old Watford for The Pennant, Benskins’ house journal. He also opened the Watford Association Football Club’s ground in Vicarage Road in 1922.

By October 1948, Benskins was commemorating its Golden Jubilee, and the artistic and nostalgia baton was passed to William Stanley, who had retired the previous year. The Jubilee issue of The Pennant carried his four-page illustrated article entitled More Notes on Old Watford. Following Colonel Healey’s lead, he recalled his memories of buildings near the brewery when it was founded 50 years earlier, illustrating them with drawings from his old sketch books. By the time his article was published, practically all the buildings were demolished.

Old Lamb Yard. Image: W.G. Stanley

He included The Lamb and the Three Tuns at Old Lamb Yard, opposite Benskins. The two were separated by a tiny building with a narrow frontage and rooms above the archway that led to a cobbled yard. He recalled a ‘huge’ man and his family who lived on the premises; a ‘cycle maker’ who made ‘many of the early bone-shakers in Watford’. The archway was demolished when the Three Tuns was rebuilt in 1904 and the delicensed Lamb on the right of the drawing was demolished in 1938.

Within Old Lamb Yard were eight cottages, with windows and entrance doors facing the yard and no rear exits. The residents obtained water from a communal tap, sharing a ‘water closet or two’ in the yard, and waste thrown onto the cobbles drained into the middle of the yard. William Stanley noted that when the cottages were demolished, a brick was found marked ‘AD 1550’. He believed it was incorporated into one of the cottages from an earlier building on the site.

William Stanley added that opposite Benskins was the High Street Post Office; previously the site of a ‘quaint old shop’. He added with some disdain that ‘early in 1700, a builder lived in Watford who was the forerunner in a smaller degree of those modern builders who have put up row upon row of houses in Watford which are as similar as peas in a pod’. He also built a number of shops ‘to this design at intervals in the High Street’, only one of which was still standing in 1948.

Jimmie Ransom’s shop, 1904. Image: W.G. Stanley

Jimmie (John James) Ransom, a well-known Watford second-hand furniture dealer, was a bird fancier. He put caged birds as well as chairs and other items of furniture on the pavement outside his shop. William Stanley remembered his ‘very colourful vocabulary’ and, as young boys passing from school, he and his friends would knock over a chair ‘solely for the pleasure of hearing him swear’. In later years, young apprentice brewers from Benskins also played ‘monkey tricks’ on the old man.

Chapman’s Yard, 1914. Image: W.G. Stanley

Chapman’s Yard was beyond the archway under Jimmie Ransom’s shop and, according to William Stanley, typical of the numerous cul-de-sac yards behind buildings on both sides of the High Street. He gave first aid to a badly scalded child in a Chapman’s Yard cottage and found the yard ‘very poverty-stricken and slum-like’.

Shops between the Railway Tavern and Benskins main gates. Image: W.G. Stanley

Until 1938, there were old shops between the Railway Tavern and Benskins’ main gates. According to a brick on the facade, they were built in 1714 but demolished when alterations were made to Benskins’ office frontage. The middle shop was the home of old William Archer, a Bushey-born character of ‘benign appearance and a ruddy face ornamented with flowing white side whiskers’. A postman for many years, he was committed to feeding hungry drovers and farm hands who visited his stall in Watford Market. William Stanley described the big coke brazier on which he cooked sausages and served them with a chunk of bread and a dab of mustard from a big bowl for a penny. William Archer’s stall provided a ‘gossip’ as well as a sausage before the men went home.

Leathersellers’ Yard, 1947. Image: W.G. Stanley

Leathersellers’ Yard opposite Benskins was standing in 1948 and adjoined the Leathersellers’ Arms; the former Brewers Arms extending above the archway. The ‘picturesque’ yard had long been the favourite haunt of artists from various art schools. A footway led from the High Street to Sedgwick’s Brewery, which became Benskins maltings, and by the river to Water Lane. William Stanley added that the stream was not original, but an artificial mill stream that supplied the old mill.

Swan Alley, 1941. Image: W.G. Stanley

Swan Alley was a very narrow passageway under the Swan Inn leading from the High Street to Watford Fields, the rear of which can be seen in the drawing. William Stanley recorded the Swan Inn as one of Watford’s oldest, referring to an early deed of the brewhouse, malthouse, mansion and inn, dating from 1635. He noted that in 1704 the property came into the hands of Dame Fuller who ‘used the rent to help support the free school that she built and endowed; the school that became the Grammar School’.

Sadly, the Swan’s long history did not save it from demolition in the late 1950s and it was rebuilt in a modern style. None of the buildings illustrated exist today. In William Stanley’s words: ‘Time has no master’.

• Lesley Dunlop is the daughter of the late Ted Parrish, a well-known local historian and documentary filmmaker. He wrote 96 nostalgic articles for the ‘Evening Post-Echo’ in 1982-83 which have since been published in ‘Echoes of Old Watford, Bushey & Oxhey’, available at www.pastdayspublishing.com and Bushey Museum. Lesley is currently working on ‘Two Lives, Two World Wars’, a companion volume that explores her father’s and grandfather’s lives and war experiences, in which Watford, Bushey and Oxhey’s history will take to the stage once again.