Village Matters

Nick Pollard

Sunbury Fire Brigade c1930

This photo was taken in Thames Street, Sunbury about 1930, in front of the flint wall of the Old Vicarage, just to the west of St. Mary’s Church. It shows a fascinating selection of fire engines used in the village over the previous century or so.

Kaye Bros. Store, Shepperton 1937

Longer term residents of Shepperton will fondly recall Kaye Bros. – the last of the old style shops which once occupied the High Street. By this I mean shops where you were served with goods instead of selecting from the shelves yourself and taking them to the cashier.

A Century of B.P. in Sunbury

One hundred years ago, during the First World War, the then Anglo-Persian Oil Company founded its research centre in Sunbury. Anglo-Persian had been founded in 1909 as a result of a large oil find in Persia, the first of the big Middle Eastern oilfields.

The Cowboy Wedding

The Shepperton of 1908 was a pretty quiet place, with little in the way of sensation to disturb village life. On December 8th 1908 however, it saw an event which made headlines all over the country, and indeed in countries as far away as New Zealand.

The Fire at Darby House Sunbury, 1907

One of my favourite postcards of Sunbury is this one of the great fire at Darby House in Lower Hampton Road, on June 18th 1907. My copy was sent to an address in Shepperton and postmarked June 28th 1907, which means that someone was pretty quick off the mark producing a postcard of the event!

Shepperton National School 1908

This postcard, dated 1908, is entitled ‘The Almshouses Shepperton’. Far from being Almshouses though, this was at the time the Shepperton National School. An illustration of how important it is not to take things at face value when researching history! Many readers will recognise that the building (on the right) is now the ‘School of Spice’ restaurant, at the lower end of Shepperton High Street.

Chertsey Bridge

The local bridges over the Thames are a vital part of our transport infrastructure, if often the focus of long queues of traffic. Many of them have a long and interesting history, and that between Shepperton and Chertsey is no exception.

A CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY

Charles Dickens, who knew the Sunbury and Shepperton area well, was the man who popularised the idea of the Christmas Ghost Story, in the mid nineteenth century. Whilst looking through old Christmas editions of the Middlesex Chronicle at Spelthorne Museum in Staines, I came across the following story of ghostly goings-on at Battlecrease Hall in Shepperton in the edition for 27th December 1946.

The Thames at Shepperton

Ignore the caption of this postcard dating from the 1920s, the view shown is of Lock Island and Hamhaugh Island, which are both definitely in Shepperton! These islands mark the most southerly point of the River Thames, but are both at least partly man-made.