The photograph above is looking up Crawley End from near the pond on the green, in 1963. You can just see the top of the bus as it comes round the corner and the roof of Wire Farm.
Irene Cranwell had some memories of heavy snow falls in Chrishall. On Christmas Day in 1927 it poured with rain and then started to snow. People said the snow wouldn’t ‘lay’ as the ground was so wet but in a few hours there were drifts 12 and 14 feet high. It blew off the fields and curled off the hedges in fantastic shapes. The men of the village with picks and shovels hacked paths through the snow as no snow plough could cope.
Almost the same thing happened in 1947. The snow started 11th February, a Tuesday. That time it wasn’t preceded by rain but brought in by the wind from the east, and “the truth of the saying ‘when the wind is in the east, ’tis neither fit for man nor beast’ was certainly proved”. At that time there was a German prisoner of war camp at Chrishall Grange, where a number of good conduct prisoners lived, still awaiting repatriation. They helped to dig the village out, shovelling right up to the doors of the cottages. The baker trudged across the fields with a big basket of bread on each arm. Pockets of snow lasted right up until May.
The road into Chishill from Barley. See: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/
Children in the snow 1947 (above).
In 1962 again it started snowing very gently on Boxing Day. It kept on and on for weeks and weeks. A bulk milk tanker got stuck down Chrishall Grange road on a Saturday. It wasn’t dug out until the following Wednesday, causing frustration that all that milk was going to waste. It couldn’t be used because it hadn’t been pasteurised!
Children in the snow 1963.
0 Comments