28 July 2021 – David Lawson
The cottages in Chamberlain’s Yard were originally service buildings for the coaching inn opposite (The King’s Head) and other aspects of the rural economy.
I believe that our cottage (No.9) and number 7 next door (now in the occupation of Pauline Youngs) were the granary buildings. Number 11 was the bakehouse (George Stretton’s house) and there was also an Ostler’s house. It may have been the one on the street itself, opposite the coaching inn or the next one up the yard. Either way it was probably one of the cottages opposite the bakehouse.
After they stopped being a grain store, number 7 and number 9 became homes for four families! I can’t quite imagine people crammed into four tiny cottages now, although when I was a small child, I remember us living in just half of number 9 and that was also before the current porch and side utility room/entrance hall were built.
The room that is now the kitchen/diner was pretty derelict and had a bare brick floor. I also remember having (and using) an outside toilet which faced down the yard, before a downstairs bathroom and toilet were constructed in the derelict half of the house.
When we were children, there were a number of small outhouses on our land, three or four in a row, which were owned and used by some of the other cottages. The owning properties all had a right of way over our land to the outhouses. My parents bought these, one by one, from the owners. The only one left is the one that belonged to our house, but the wall behind the outhouses still stands and divides off the driveway/parking area from the main front garden.
There were fragments of an old millstone in our garden. I don’t know the exact position of the mill but I think it would have either been on, what used to be, our land, or the land just beyond that, which was owned by Bradshaws when I was growing up (and rented by the Jackson family). The land on our side of the wall is now occupied by the relatively new build house, owned and lived in by Judith and Stephen Gregory.
On a separate note, I believe that the water supply for all the cottages in the yard was managed by the copyholders and there was a standpipe at one time.
The bakehouses
Elsie Beadsworth (known as Little Elsie) told me about carrying the Sunday roast down the hill to the Church Street bakery when she was a child and how everyone maintained that their Sunday lunch tasted better because they had a splash of everyone else’s roast in the process of being cooked. I think during that period, all the bakehouses would have offered the same service.
You probably already know that there was another bakehouse, above and behind us, which was still operational for part of my childhood. The Bidwell family had it and were the last people to run it, as far as I can remember. They carried on living in the house after the bakehouse closed. I can certainly remember buying bread there when I was little and watching a baker’s dozen bread rolls being put into the oven. The entrance at that point was on Corby Road but it may have been accessed from our side too in the past, before there were defined boundaries.