Finding Harley
The road descended diagonally through dense enveloping green down the steep escarpment of Wenlock Edge. Exploring the area I first drove into the village of Hughley, which was in 1973 just a large hamlet. It was evening, with a low sun shafting a mellow light across hedgerows scattered with hay. Several little girls in long dresses with daisy chains in their hair were playing and dancing in front of a group of thatched whitewashed cottages. It felt as if I had gone back into a forgotten time. It would only be a few more days and I would stumble upon the place that would become our forever home, the neighbouring village of Harley.
I was searching for a house for my family and had planned my assault on Shropshire by starting on the map at 12 o clock north of the Telford Development Corporation Offices in Priorslee, where I was employed as a Landscape Architect, working round clockwise through the Bridgnorth area towards what is now known as the Shropshire Hills. I had discovered Much Wenlock and was impressed. Then on the agricultural pages of the Shropshire Star I came across a pair of small cottages by the name of Glebe Cottages in the village of Harley, one tenanted, both for sale by Auction.
The following weekend my wife Marlene and I went to look. I remember the large front vegetable garden to No1 and the wildly overgrown garden to No2. We battled through this to the edge of the field and glimpsed through a tangle of vegetation, a fabulous view along Wenlock Edge. Marlene said with feeling, ‘this place has got possibilities’. In truth this is what took us to the Auction which was held at the Swan Hotel in Much Wenlock (now apartments). It was hair-raising. With no experience of auctions we struggled through to the end bidding until there was only one other left with the auctioneer taking £50 bids. By sheer luck I got my maximum bid in at £7000. There was a long silent agonizing pause, and then the hammer came down on our future lives. Hammers are pretty final. We later learnt that we had been bidding against John and Barbara Gray who lived at Castlehill, an imposing house with an interesting history standing across Domas Lane from Glebe Cottages.
It is ironic in the extreme that my planning of the house search that had been like some military operation ended in a £50 bid against anonymous people.
The Estate Agents had advised us to demolish the untenanted cottage, no.2 Glebe Cottage and if, in the process, the other fell down, well, too bad on the tenant. The Local Authority would find him a home, perhaps. That, it seemed, was not only illegal, but highly immoral. Shortly after, Marlene and I, knocked on the door of no.1 to come face to face with our new tenant – Cyril Hughes. Cyril’s family had bid, unsuccessfully, at the Auction, and he was, we had been told, very worried about the situation. Face to face, as soon as we told him that we had no intention of throwing him out, we were invited in and out came the whiskey bottle. It was a very good start.
Cyril’s little house was scrupulously clean. Behind his chair was a cabinet full of silver. A green velvet table cloth draped over a small square table. Here was a hardworking, honest man who took care of his home. I can’t remember the details of our conversation but the first contact had been made and much needed reassurances given.
The immediate concern was the house, his and ours. Cyril had no heating beyond a coal fire, no water supply indoors, just an outside tap installed by the farmers next door, from an Estate supply. He had no bathroom and only had an outside earth closet for a toilet. We had even less. Our half had not been lived in for seven years, John Hughes, and his family being the last tenants. The only inhabitant in the single downstairs room was a dead pigeon.
I had never seen a half timbered house before and didn’t recognise it as such. When the builder, who was a part-time farmer, started to take it apart, the timber structure was revealed, and work had to be stopped for two weeks to give me time to drastically revise the design. Two of the original very special crucks were still intact and had to be saved. One had to be cut through in order to get into the bedroom and it took the builder a whole week to saw through it. I remember he said that apart for the first quarter inch it was like sawing through steel. The beams in 1974 we estimated were at least 330 years old.
Work started on Valentine’s Day 1974 and finished in early September. We all moved in to the partly finished house just before Christmas. Cyril now had a bathroom with a toilet, and a kitchen with taps and hot water. Luxury.
The existing front garden of Glebe Cottages had, when we bought it, been Cyril’s vegetable garden and we would take bagfuls of vegetables back with us to our rented house on the new Woodside estate in Telford. There we lost our cat Copper, the ginger tom and found Smooky, a badly mistreated blue and acquired a third, Marnie, from the Wyke riding stables, where our daughters, Andrea and Vivianne rode for a time. The fourth animal, Penny, a Westie, was brought with us from UpHolland, Lancashire.
The day the machine moved in, the first job was to demolish a section of the beautiful old stone wall fronting onto Domas Lane to make a driveway. The machine hadn’t been working long when a certain Miss Trevor who lived down the lane wound down her car window and severely harangued me for tearing down the wall. She drove off, not very satisfied with my promises. At the same time, Cyril, in his shirt sleeves, at the door of his cottage, hollered ‘are you building the M6.’ That, by the way was the only adverse comment Cyril ever made, but it was a good natured one in any case. Incidentally Miss Trevor, had demolished two half timbered cottages to make way for what could only be described as a long low pre-fab, since re-built, the last house in Domas Lane. So much for conservation in the seventies. I don’t think I ever got the chance to speak to Miss Trevor again who died shortly after we arrived.