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Archiver > ESSEX-UK > 2004-07 > 1090360806


From: "Lawrence Greenall" <>
Subject: RE: Haybinder/odd names
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 23:00:06 +0100
In-Reply-To: <01bc01c46e60$c2f18360$a8790650@packard>


Glad you liked it. Should have added that two of the names I've found
mentioned in this work's pages are Champion Lane and Cratchrode Wiffing -
hope I'm not descended from the second one!

My great-grandad Frank Greenall set up a haulage business in Upshire just
after the Great War with surplus army vehicles. In the 20s and 30s my
grandad (also Frank) and his brothers drove for the firm, going all over
East Anglia collecting up fruit and veg for the London markets. Though they
travelled a lot faster per hour (and had the country roads more or less to
themselves too), they still had to work around 18 hours a day, on and off,
usually sleeping outside Covent Garden overnight, trying to be first in the
queue to get inside and set out their stalls in the early morning. Not that
different to selling hay a few decades earlier, eh?

The family business was considered 'vital' enough to the country during WW2
that my grandad spent the whole of it delivering veg! In later years the
company moved into ballast, taking advantage of the huge deposits of gravel
in the Lea Valley. One of my grandad's brothers' favourite stories was how
he once had to empty a train waggon of coal into his truck at Waltham Cross
Station, using only a hand-shovel. The firm finally closed down in the late
70s, when my great-grandad died in his 97th year.

Lawrence


> -----Original Message-----
> From: colleen morrison [mailto:]
> Sent: 20 July 2004 14:52
> To:
> Subject: Re: Haybinder
>
>
>
> Thanks for posting another fascinating piece, Lawrence, this provides
> such a useful insight into the very hard lives our poor Essex (and
> other) ancestors lived. Please keep posting these little gems for us, this
> is the sort of data that brings our family history to life.
>
> This is interesting too, since it gives a journey time by wagon from
> Nazeing to London of about 15 hours - say 1.5 to 2 miles and hour?
> I've often wondered how long it would have taken my great
> grandparents to move themselves and their, then, 8 children by horse
> drawn wagon from Tolleshunt Knights/Tiptree to Walthamstow between
> 1899 and 1900. This report would seem to add weight to my view that
> their journey took over day, or a couple of days perhaps.
>
> Colleen
>

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