Memories
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Joan Gurney (Appleton 1938-1951)
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The upper terrace at Grey Friars, overlooked by the attractive bow fronted garden room with its balcony above, has always intrigued me. In all the documents, plans, diagrams and illustrations which Alan Skinner and I searched through in preparing the Grey Friars book, this terrace, since its creation, appears to have always been set aside for activities. This made me consider how the grass was cut and controlled in the days before mechanised mowers were common.
In the 18th century battledore and shuttlecock, which was a gentle game and not competitive, was usually played amongst the buttercups and daisies and did not require a highly manicured lawn. Croquet and lawn tennis, which certainly did require a manicured lawn, are both recorded as having been played here in the late 19th century.
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For the former an occasional scything in Poldark style, by servants, would have been sufficient not, of course, in view of the gentlefolk of the house but at dawn in the dew and dark before the residents of the house were awake and about. The earliest piece of photographic evidence of a tennis court here comes from the time that the Fenn family occupied Grey Friars, 1891-1903 (above).
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Mechanical lawn mowers were still not common even during the time that the French nuns opened their school here, 1904-1920, not in the early years from 1920 when the Preparatory and Junior Departments of CCHS moved in. I can remember the school gardener very well from my time here. I should do because he released my trapped finger from a hole in the wall after an innocent investigation of a hollow flint. He kept his implements in the garden shed which was the space behind the Gothic style door in the western boundary wall (right).
It later became the kiln room for the Adult Community College. I never saw the gardener’s mowers, nor did I see him mowing - but I heard him! He seemed to have a noisy mower and a quiet one. Was one a mechanical mower and one a push mower? Whatever he did, the lawn always seemed to be immaculate. Gym displays were performed there in summer, high jump posts were erected there, sports day took place there and, of course, there was the tennis court.
The assumption that tennis had been played on this terrace for some decades before CCHS arrived in 1920 was confirmed when a large, very heavy cast iron base for a tennis post (left) was found in an excavated heap of soil just before the new Grey Friars Hotel opened. Bearing the name Ayres in raised lettering around its circumference, this was made by a sports equipment firm based in Cambridge between 1910 and 1940. From its condition and design, it could date from just before 1940 when the firm closed, or it could go back to the late 1800s when the game of lawn tennis, as we know it today, first began. This base, therefore, might have been handed down from the Fenn family to the nuns' school, to CCHS.
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It is a coincidence that, during my time as a schoolgirl at Grey Friars, there was often only one tennis net support and as a makeshift post the wire, which was threaded through the top of the net, was wound
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round the trunk of a yew tree almost opposite the ancient holm oak on the opposite side of the court. It still bears the scars of this tight restriction. Was the 21st century discovery actually the base of a tennis post which kept disappearing?
Many large houses of the 18th and 19th centuries not only had extensive areas of grass to keep under control but also coach houses and stables - as Grey Friars did and East Hill House had over the road. Herein lies the workforce and the solution to the mowing. The first horse-drawn mower was patented in 1832. Others followed (right c1900) and it is likely that the first suppliers to this area was Ransomes of Ipswich (later Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies) 1789 to the present day. But problems arose because the horse’s hooves made permanent marks on the turf and so a set of four protective leather boots had to be devised to slip on easily, stay on and remain functional amidst the strain of work (below).
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Some makers of lawn boots offered them in different sizes - donkey and pony, to cob and van horse, to cart horse. Fortunately a good saddler was on hand in Colchester to make and repair these boots. W Claridge was at 125 High Street from 1888 to 1890 and a relative, R G Claridge, was at 16 Butt Road in 1933 and 1937.
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Horse drawn mowers were still in use in some areas until the 1940s but the move to motor mowers had already begun around 1925 when the number of horses in England had begun to drop dramatically. As far as Grey Friars is concerned, the end of work horses would have been in or before 1904 when the French nuns acquired the building and extended it to the east, replacing the coach house and stables with additional rooms for the 1755 house.
Leather horse boots do survive in soil and water, and tucked away in dark corners of barns and former coach houses. In my searches of Grey Friars before it changed hands I never found anything equestrian, no buckle, bit or browband - not even a horseshoe or two in the heaps of soil or the smell of horse manure, which often pervades the site where horses have been kept. But Grey Friars keeps yielding its secrets and one day, perhaps, a horse lawn boot will be uncovered. It would be the ultimate treasure.
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