A London bombing makes JOAL a home
In October 1940 Tom Whiley hired a van and brought materials from London: doors, windows, beds that had been used in the family’s air-raid shelter, pots, cups, blankets and other household items. On the Friday after he arrived, a telegram called him back because six shops and a block of flats connected with his employer had been bombed. Two days later another telegram told the family to remain where they were and house him when he could return. Alice’s mother stayed in the country.
The shed had to become habitable. The family lined walls and ceiling, fitted more windows and doors, enlarged the living area and attached a privy. A bicycle shed became a lean-to kitchen. Alice and her mother built a brick porch at the front. Before the mortar had properly dried the butcher leaned against it and the porch came down during the night, so the work began again.
A local man dug a well. Cooking began on a kitchen range and later used a paraffin cooker. Coal was rationed to one hundredweight a week and could be left beside the road by Curtis Garage until someone carried it across the plot. Oil lamps supplied light. The family planted vegetables, kept chickens and geese and used surplus eggs when rationing allowed. JOAL had become a wartime house by labour rather than by a single building contract.
Shopping, buses and the working day
Alice’s account records the routine around the new home. There were no dustmen, but comparatively little household packaging: families bought fresh food and repeatedly used their own bags. Much shopping was done at the Loxwood Combination Stores and Hilltop Stores. A butcher, baker and grocer called two or three times a week, a milkman came daily and a chemist from Cranleigh visited periodically to take orders.
Kilner’s of Loxwood ran the bus service towards Horsham and would stop where passengers needed it. The household wireless depended on a heavy accumulator that required recharging at Plaistow. Alice carried it to the main road, took it on the bus, left it at the garage and collected it on the return journey. If the bus was missed, the accumulator had to be carried home on foot.
For six years Alice worked at Costrong fruit farm, owned by Mr Folwe, who also had Redlands and Lanelands. Two other Ifold women worked there through the year. In the picking season the labour force rose to between thirty and sixty, including Italian and German prisoners of war and British soldiers. Brussels sprouts were grown for winter work when the fruit season ended. The women cycled when the roads allowed; Chalk Road was full of potholes and Foxbridge Lane remained little more than a muddy track.
Evacuees, searchlights and military traffic
Connie Bayley, an early plot holder who later wrote Ifold, Loxwood & Plaistow: Forgotten Border Villages, saw the settlement change from another angle. In 1941 her mother evacuated to Ifold with Bayley’s nieces. Bayley could sometimes visit from Wimbledon, travelling by train to Guildford and then by bus to Loxwood. She noticed more little huts and garages being occupied by people who had come out of the bombing.
Wartime activity reached the edge of the settlement. A manned searchlight battery stood in the field opposite Gatehouse on Plaistow Road. A long brick building near the later council-housing site had been built for prisoners of war and was used to house Women’s Land Army workers. Chalets at Lee House Farm in the forest housed tuberculosis patients during the war and for a short period afterwards.
Uncultivated ground could be requisitioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Land around Loxwoodhills Pond grew linseed under Captain Chase of Spye Farm. Bayley also remembered Canadian servicemen, Polish airmen and refugees in the district. On a walk towards Devil’s Hole Bridge she found that the old canal lock had been blown up during army explosives practice, with large pieces of stone scattered through the field and riverbed. Tanks used the private roads at Ifold and made the existing potholes larger.
An Ifold smallholder goes to war
The 1939 Register records Thomas James Murrell at Camperdown Farm in The Lane, Ifold. Born in Kensal Green in 1913, he had left London and was living alone as a smallholder before the war, making him one of the early full-time residents among a settlement still dominated by weekend plots. The local wartime research describes the same conditions around his home: well water, paraffin and simple buildings.
Murrell enlisted in the Royal Corps of Signals and served with 7th Armoured Division Signals, the formation widely known as the Desert Rats. He died in 1943 and is buried at Tripoli War Cemetery. His name carried one of the new Ifold smallholdings into the wartime roll of local service.
1945: a different settlement
By the end of the war the physical layout of Ifold still followed the old estate roads, but the population had changed. Families had lived year-round in buildings intended for holidays; wells, ranges and oil lamps had supported permanent households; gardens and poultry had supplied food; buses and bicycles had connected residents with work and shops. Tanks, military camps and wartime labour had also left damage and practical problems.
Alice married Arthur Wooldridge, a builder, in 1947 and left JOAL for Zion House in Plaistow. Connie Bayley moved permanently to Ifold after VE Day and found work driving local buses. The post-war rebuilding soon reached parts of the former country estate that had survived the plot sales. Connie Bayley remembered the old cricket ground and pavilion still standing when she first explored Ifold in 1934; in her later book she reproduced a photograph captioned “Building work on site of old Cricket Pavilion”. By the early 1950s construction had reached the former cricket-ground area while residents were repairing roads, bringing in mains services and replacing temporary huts with permanent houses.
