War brought another problem to farms and dairies. Men and horses were required for military service while food still had to be produced, collected and delivered. Kirdford Creamery needed workers able to handle hundreds of gallons of milk each day and get the consignments to Billingshurst station. A military tribunal later heard that the loss of an essential employee threatened the dispatch of some 300 to 400 gallons daily. The tribunal was being asked to consider a man’s work at the creamery alongside the Army’s demands for recruits. From the fields around Loxwood to the railway sidings at Billingshurst, farm produce depended on a chain of labour and transport that could be interrupted by a single missing worker.

In December 1914 a matter of much older origin occupied the trustees of the former Loxwood Chapel. Maurice Botting chaired their meeting in the Reading Room on the 29th. An unnamed buyer had offered £200 for Church Cottage and the ground on which the demolished church had stood. The trustees did not accept the offer. As the war entered its second year, the possibility of selling the entire chapel estate came under discussion.

The chapel properties and the losses of 1916

On 20 August 1915 Maurice Botting and his fellow trustees considered an offer of £600 for the chapel properties. They chose to offer the land and houses in six separate lots. A further meeting took place on 19 November at Botting’s home, Hillside, in Alfold, where correspondence from the auctioneers was read. The proposed sale concerned property that had provided income for the upkeep of Loxwood’s chapel across many generations. The earlier deeds named fields, crofts and cottages; some of the same land could now be identified beside the pond, on the village outskirts and towards Rudgwick.

Botting died on 1 February 1916.

He had helped to establish the new parish church during Edward VII’s reign and had served as churchwarden as well as chapel trustee. His burial took place in St John the Baptist’s churchyard on 4 February. At the next trustees’ meeting, on 6 March, Corrall Farmer took the chair. Dr Frederick Nicholas Heygate and Percy Pace of Hall House were among those present. Consent had been obtained from the Charity Commissioners, and the trustees agreed to proceed with offers for the lots.

Two sales enlarged the land held by the Dependants around the Combination Stores. Aylward, Smith & Co purchased Pond Field and the pond for £125; earlier records had called the land Cokkes Field. The company also paid £250 for two cottages adjoining Pond Field. E. Wannop, a Littlehampton solicitor involved in the negotiations, was associated with the sales of the Caddicks for £100 and Gravel Pit Field near Rudgwick for £85. Chapel Field, also called Stevensfield in the estate history, went unsold.

Church Cottage and the former church ground formed the sixth lot. On 13 June the trustees recommended accepting £125 for this property from Thomas Wells, a woodman of Alfold, and the transfer to Thomas and Catherine Wells is recorded on 14 June. The house stood where worship had begun in the early fifteenth century, although the adjoining chapel had disappeared thirteen years earlier. Its oak frame, roof and rooms passed into the hands of a private family. Five days after the transfer, William James Wells joined the 27th Reserve Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.

At their meeting on 5 July the trustees decided to invest the money received from the property sales in Indian government stock bearing interest of two and a half per cent. In September they considered an offer of five shillings a year from Mrs Dunlop for Chapel Field, subject to the vicar’s approval. The little field had survived the larger sale, so the trustees still had to find a tenant and collect the rent.

The fighting in France was meanwhile taking men from the same small circle of households. Private John Puttock of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, died on 4 July 1916 and was buried at Loxwood. On 15 September, during the Battle of the Somme, Maurice Botting’s son Maurice was killed while serving with the London Regiment. His father had been buried at Loxwood only seven months earlier. The trustee who had presided over the sale discussions and the son whose name would be placed on the war memorial died in the same year. The Somme offensive lasted into November. Other families in the Western Weald received notices of men killed, wounded or missing, while those serving overseas sent news whenever they could. At home the farms required harvest workers and livestock still needed feeding.

The last war years, 1917–1918

In 1917 George V changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. The king was responding to hostility towards German associations during the war, when German aircraft had been bombing British towns. He also visited troops, factories, hospitals and naval installations. For the families of men at the front, public announcements from the Crown and the government were heard or read against the immediate anxieties of military service.

At the Combination Stores the Dependants were operating a substantial business in groceries, drapery, furniture, hardware and agricultural supplies, with bread from the steam bakery and deliveries to outlying farms. An account of the community in 1917 described members sharing meals, organising their employment and attending worship at Spy Lane on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. The women employed in the shops took responsibility for counters and departments, while staff working in the bakery and stores served villagers and customers from the surrounding countryside.

Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act in February 1918. Almost all men aged twenty-one or older gained the parliamentary vote, and some younger serving men also qualified. Women aged thirty and over who satisfied the statutory qualifications could now vote in parliamentary elections. The change reached households such as those near the Combination Stores, where women had worked in retail and management for many years. Their younger colleagues would wait another decade before the voting age was equalised.

William James Batchelor, serving with the 1st Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, died on 24 September 1918 and was buried in Loxwood’s churchyard. The Western Front fighting ended with the Armistice on 11 November. Servicemen gradually returned to their homes and occupations; the bereaved began arranging how their dead would be commemorated.

A war memorial and a meeting hall, 1919–1923

The sale of the chapel estate had left the trustees with Chapel Field. In December 1919 they accepted an offer from William Cole to rent it for fifteen shillings a year. When Catherine Wells died on 15 October 1920, Church Cottage was already part of a private household; Thomas Wells and members of the family lived there. The cottage and land once associated with the old chapel were now divided between several owners and tenants. Aylward, Smith & Co made another acquisition in 1920. The Dependants bought the Post Office premises beside Hall House and acquired Hall House itself in a separate transaction. The Post Office was operated by tenants, while the community owned the buildings. At about the same time its members were farming Loxwood Place, the old moated farmhouse near High Street. Produce from the farms could be handled alongside the groceries, bread, coal and household goods sold from the Combination Stores. The religious community that had acquired Pond Field and the adjoining cottages in 1916 now owned a substantial group of properties around the centre of Loxwood.

The Loxwood memorial took shape in the church opened in 1901. A faculty dated 23 October 1920 authorised the tablet, which was unveiled on Palm Sunday 1921. It recorded twenty-four men, among them Basil Constable, Maurice Botting, John Puttock, William Batchelor, Wallace Ede, Charles Ketcher and Percy Sopp. The memorial brought together men killed at Gallipoli and in France, servicemen buried overseas, and men whose graves were in the local churchyard. On later Armistice Days the vicar read their names aloud while relatives and former comrades assembled for remembrance. Other parishes were erecting their memorials. Rudgwick commemorated thirty-four men; Alfold recorded sixteen. A memorial in one village might name the son of a family known in another, as the Constables’ connections with Ifold and Loxwood showed. Some families had lost more than one son, and the memorial services drew people together who had been separated during the war by military duties and distant postings.

Returned servicemen created another institution. Captain Arthur Gerald Bayfield Spear, a retired Army officer living at Spoofhurst House, founded the Loxwood Comrades Club in 1921. Hugh Hope Nelson of Lakers Lodge agreed to act as patron and offered land beside Vicarage Hill, opposite the churchyard and near Fletchings. The former soldiers obtained a wooden Army hut from a nearby camp and brought it to Loxwood. On Nelson’s land they re-erected the long, single-storey building, giving it boarded walls, windows down each side and a corrugated roof. A military hut erected for wartime purposes had become a meeting hall for the men who had survived the war.

On 12 December 1922 the chapel trustees met on Vicarage Hill and discussed a proposal to let part of the former church ground. They decided to seek advice from the Church Commissioners.

The first concert at the Comrades’ Memorial Hut was held on Saturday 20 October 1923. Captain and Mrs Spear arranged an evening of music and entertainment, attracting an audience of about 200. The performers included Dorothy Collings on violin, soprano Dorothy Young, Gwendoline Shaw with recitations and tenor Herbert Norton. Frances Stirling accompanied the performers, and Charles Harris supplied comic entertainment. Reverend W. H. B. Mainprice thanked the Spear family and the club members who had prepared the building. At the end of the evening, the audience gave three cheers for Mrs Spear and the visiting entertainers. More than fifty people attended a whist drive in November. The Christmas gathering was larger: 164 players sat beneath evergreens and paper chains, competing for a remarkable collection of donated prizes. These included poultry, joints of meat, fruit and a live pig. F. Remnant of Plaistow won a turkey; Mrs Crouch of Bucks Green won the pig. The prizes had been provided by supporters from the village and neighbouring parishes, including Nelson and several of the families connected with the Comrades. A room erected for ex-servicemen was already drawing in people who had never served in uniform.

At their meeting on 18 December 1923 the trustees read a letter from Winfrid Burrows, Bishop of Chichester. He advised that they lacked authority for the proposed letting.

The memorial service, village stage and telephone wires, 1924–1927

By 9 January 1924 a Loxwood telephone exchange had been operating long enough for a subscriber at Whitelea, Baynards, to advertise the number ‘Loxwood 12’. The first exchange was housed in the Post Office beside the pond. An operator answered a caller and connected the requested line by hand at a switchboard. The Post Office was listed as Loxwood 1, Ifold House as 2, Aylward, Smith & Co as 3 and Hilltop Stores as 4 in the early number sequence recorded locally.

The Comrades marched from the Post Office to St John the Baptist on Palm Sunday 1924. Captain Spear led the procession, with the Rudgwick Band playing as the men approached the church for the anniversary of the unveiling of the war memorial. The short route connected the shops beside the pond with the churchyard, where some of the men named on the tablet were buried.

On 26 April the Memorial Hut hosted another concert. About 120 people attended and danced until midnight.

In June 1924 Hugh Nelson offered £30 for Chapel Field, then let for fifteen shillings a year. The trustees had another decision to make about land once given to maintain the village chapel.

The Comrades also organised outdoor sports at Lakers Lodge. At their fete in August more than 400 spectators assembled, the Rudgwick Prize Band played, and Mrs Nelson distributed prizes. The grounds of Lakers Lodge provided space for running events and games that could not have been held inside the village hall.

The first meeting of Loxwood Women’s Institute took place in the Memorial Hut in January 1925. Baroness Zouche chaired the gathering, and Miss Marshall of Steyning introduced the aims of the movement before demonstrating a method of repairing knitted garments. The women drank tea and played games afterwards. By March the Institute was organising practical talks, while the Hut was also being used for a lantern lecture and a performance by the Domino Entertainers. One programme followed another, and the booking of the building became part of village organisation. The Institute’s later meetings included demonstrations with tin, the making of artificial flowers and domestic skills. The Comrades staged whist drives and raised money for wider causes, including wireless receivers for hospital wards and workshops employing disabled former servicemen. At a Sunday-school treat in January 1926 the children played games and watched lantern slides, while prizes were distributed. The vicar’s church and the Comrades’ building were separated by the road, and both were used for gatherings involving children and adults from the surrounding settlements.

The new equipment soon altered the roadside. A postcard taken in 1926 shows a pole carrying overhead wires and a public telephone kiosk outside the Post Office. It was an early K1 design, made from reinforced concrete and introduced nationally in 1921. Someone who had no telephone in a house could now make a call from the village centre, near the same counter that handled letters, money orders and telegrams.

A national change in the way people received news was occurring at the same time. The first regular radio broadcasts had begun in 1922, and in 1927 the British Broadcasting Company became the British Broadcasting Corporation. Wireless sets brought music, speeches and news into homes and public buildings fitted to receive transmissions. Loxwood’s own communication network was also growing, this time by wires carried into houses and shops.

Equal votes, a new bishop and the economic crisis, 1928–1931

On 2 July 1928 the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act became law. Women could now vote in parliamentary elections from the age of twenty-one on the same basis as men. At the general election of May 1929 younger women from households throughout Loxwood, Wisborough Green, Kirdford and the surrounding villages were eligible to vote for the first time. In the village shops some had been earning wages for years before reaching the age at which Parliament allowed them to vote.

In February 1929 Bishop Winfrid Burrows died, and George Kennedy Allen Bell was appointed to Chichester. Bell had previously been Dean of Canterbury. He took charge of a diocese whose parishes included agricultural communities spread across Sussex, as well as the seaside towns and larger settlements along the coast. The bishop’s letter to the Loxwood chapel trustees had been read during Burrows’s episcopate; responsibility for the diocese now passed to his successor.

Later in 1929 the Wall Street financial collapse helped precipitate an international depression. In Britain unemployment increased sharply in major industrial districts, and the crisis contributed to Ramsay MacDonald’s formation of a National Government in 1931. The local sources examined for Loxwood record changes in businesses and transport during these years, but provide no reliable count of unemployed villagers or a specific account of how individual farms’ incomes were affected. Milk still had to be collected from the farms, goods sold from the shops and passengers carried to market towns. The means of doing these jobs were changing rapidly.

Individual numbers began appearing in advertisements and directories. Corrall Farmer of Linden House was assigned Loxwood 23 in 1928, while A. E. Whowell of Spye House received 26. The Onslow Arms used Loxwood 28 in 1929, and Burnleigh, the guest house beside the pond, had Loxwood 55 by 1931. Farms and businesses joined alongside private houses. A caller could arrange a delivery or speak to another subscriber without making the journey by cart, bicycle or bus.

Milk lorries, automatic calls and Kilner’s buses, 1933–1935

At Kirdford Creamery, A. E. Mitchell had become manager in 1921. During the next decade motor lorries began collecting milk from farms across a wider area, replacing much of the earlier horse-drawn journey to the depot. Workers unloaded the churns, weighed and sampled the milk, and prepared consignments for the larger dairy companies. By the middle of the 1930s the depot was handling about 2,000 gallons each day. A tanker carried milk to United Dairies at Streatham, using the roads that connected Kirdford with London and the south coast. The railway station at Billingshurst had once been central to the daily dispatch; the lorries provided another route to market.

In 1933 the manual switchboard at the Post Office closed. A Rural Automatic Exchange was installed in a separate building on Guildford Road, where electromechanical equipment connected local calls in response to the pulses from a telephone dial. The brick building now associated with the Old Telephone Exchange belongs to 1939, when later equipment replaced the first automatic installation; the change made during George V’s reign was the arrival of automatic switching in 1933.

Motor buses were also becoming part of village travel. Small operators had served Loxwood during the 1920s, running towards Guildford and Horsham on selected days. In 1933 Fred Henry Kilner, who owned Woodlea Garage at Clemsfold near Broadbridge Heath, acquired the Sunbeam Bus Service from Jesse William Wise. The purchase included a fourteen-seat Dodge bus and the licensed route serving Plaistow, Ifold, Loxwood, Alfold, Tismans Common, Bucks Green and Horsham. Kilner paid £450 and obtained approval for the transfer of the licence. He moved the business to Loxwood and parked the bus in William Cole’s former coal yard on Guildford Road, between Linden House and the later telephone-exchange site. The arrangement was practical: the yard already stood beside the road, and the route passed through the village. A wooden garage was added as Kilner increased the number of vehicles. He purchased a larger Bedford coach and began taking bookings for outings, school transport and private journeys alongside the scheduled service.

The timetable offered six journeys in each direction between Loxwood and Horsham from Monday to Saturday, three of them extending to Plaistow, together with Sunday services and an additional late Saturday journey. Villagers could travel for shopping, work, appointments or connections at Horsham without depending entirely on a lift in a private car. Kilner’s wife Mary also held a public-service-vehicle driving licence and drove when needed. Their daughter Freda would later work as conductor and driver. Passengers brought all kinds of possessions to the bus. One recollection concerns a traveller who arrived at Plaistow with a live calf and expected to board. Kilner would carry poultry in baskets, but he refused the calf. The episode belongs to the years when motor services were replacing older carriers who had transported a mixture of people, packages and small goods along the same roads.

By 1935 the Sunbeam service was issuing more than 39,000 tickets a year and covering about 57,800 service miles. The Loxwood–Horsham stretch carried the busiest traffic. A bus had become as recognisable on the village road as the shopfronts, bicycle deliveries, farm carts and telephone wires.

The Silver Jubilee and a departure from Lakers Lodge, 1935

On 27 April 1935 Loxwood United Football Club held its first annual supper in the Memorial Hut, with F. S. D. Atherton presiding. The Women’s Institute, the Comrades and other village clubs used the building for gatherings and entertainment, while Lakers Lodge supplied grounds for outdoor sports. Football, cricket and other games brought players from surrounding parishes to Loxwood.

George V celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession on 6 May 1935. Large ceremonies took place in London, and villages organised their own observances. In Loxwood Cordelia Molineux Smallpiece of Merryhills planted a holm oak near the village centre as a memorial to the Silver Jubilee. The king had reached a new audience through radio: on Christmas Day 1932 he had delivered the first royal Christmas broadcast from Sandringham, and his voice was heard by listeners with wireless receivers.

Loxwood Place also returned to the market. The house faced High Street, near Willetts, with its earlier oak frame concealed in part by later masonry and alterations. Its sale particulars described a large hall, dining and drawing rooms, kitchens, scullery, larder and dairy, and six bedrooms upstairs together with accommodation for servants. Heavy oak beams and inglenook fireplaces were advertised as attractions. Outside stood a wash house and garage, with orchard, garden and paddock bringing the immediate holding to about seven acres. The asking price was £4,700. Water came from the well; the village’s mains supplies were to arrive in the following reign.

One of the people who had supported Loxwood’s organised sports and fêtes was now leaving the district. Hugh Nelson had provided the site for the Comrades’ Memorial Hut and allowed his grounds at Lakers Lodge to be used for the annual Fair and Show. In November the society met at the Onslow Arms, where the Earl of Winterton presented Nelson with a silver salver subscribed for by officers and supporters. The gift acknowledged the years in which he had supplied land and financial assistance. Nelson departed before the next annual show, and those responsible for the events had to plan without their former chairman and patron.

January 1936: Edward VIII succeeds

George V died at Sandringham on 20 January 1936. His eldest son succeeded him as Edward VIII. The new king inherited a country recovering unevenly from the Depression while European governments faced growing tensions over German rearmament.

The next change would concern the village’s relationship with Wisborough Green. Loxwood had become a separate ecclesiastical district in 1873 but belonged to Wisborough Green for civil-parish purposes. Later in 1936 West Sussex County Council would hear the case for a separate Loxwood civil parish, meeting in the very Hut that the former servicemen had brought to Vicarage Hill thirteen years earlier.