The association returns
In the latter part of 1945 Albert Curtis of Ifold Motors encouraged residents to revive the organisation that had existed before the war. The movement gathered pace under Edgar Keel, who had bought Trelayne in Chalk Road. More than one hundred people packed the Green Shed Barn near the end of The Drive and Hogwood Road. Keel became chairman and the Ifold Freeholders Association took shape as the body through which residents could deal with common problems.
Roads came first. Money from subscriptions bought hoggin for the potholes. Connie Bayley remembered men and women meeting on Sunday mornings with shovels and forks, dividing into gangs and working along holes she described as deep and long. A repaired section could deteriorate again under water, lorries and ordinary traffic, so the Sunday work became recurring maintenance rather than a single campaign.
Edgar Keel wrote repeatedly to the Ministry of Defence about the wartime tank damage. The argument went back and forth because the roads were privately owned and maintained. In the early 1950s the Ministry finally awarded the Ifold Freeholders Residents Association £1,900. Tenders were sought and a Barnham road contractor received the work, overseen locally as repairs progressed.
The compensation paid for a scale of work beyond the Sunday pothole gangs, but it did not transfer responsibility to the county. Once the contractor had finished, the association still had to decide which sections needed attention next, collect money and arrange the labour or materials required.
The winter of 1947
One of the clearest accounts of local road conditions comes from Connie Bayley herself. After VE Day she left London and moved permanently to Ifold. Her friend Tom Edwards was managing Hants & Sussex Transport at Loxwood after Fred Kilner had sold part of his interest in Sunbeam Coaches to the firm. Connie had driven lorries during the war and took a job driving the local buses in early 1946.
The bus stayed overnight at Loxwood Garage below Linden House. On an early shift she collected it there and drove to Plaistow Church to begin the run to Horsham. The first service left Plaistow at 7 a.m. and buses continued at two-hour intervals until nine or ten at night. At Ifold Stores the bus might wait for late passengers, and travellers called out where they wanted to be put down.
The winter of 1947 brought deep snow, freezing rain and ice over the roads. Connie remembered being the only driver from Loxwood Garage who avoided an accident during the severe weather. Snowploughs were few and road salting was virtually unknown. German prisoners of war came from Kirdford and Wisborough Green with picks and shovels to clear Plaistow Road. Connie and her conductress handed out food and cigarettes as the bus passed them each day. The conditions lasted for nine weeks.
The Loxwood garage had no piped water. Tom Edwards dug a large hole to collect enough water to refill bus radiators each morning. Without antifreeze, the radiators had to be drained every evening. On frozen mornings Connie could not crank the bus in the usual way and turned the starting handle with her feet, as she would a motorcycle.
Albert Curtis and the road-fund licence
The uncertain legal status of the roads produced another memorable episode in the early 1950s. Albert Curtis was delivering sand, ballast and cement around The Drive in an old T-type Ford Post Office van when a local policeman stopped him. Albert produced his driving licence, then explained that he carried no current road-fund licence because he was using private roads.
The case went to the magistrates at Petworth. Albert’s defence depended on the roads retaining private status, but he was told that the old practice of closing estate gates once each year had ceased and the law no longer treated the roads in the way he expected. He was fined £20 and his licence was endorsed.
Albert gave up driving after the case and used a bicycle. Customers who wanted his building materials then collected sand, ballast and cement themselves in cars and wheelbarrows. The dispute occurred while the settlement was expanding and those same materials were travelling in increasing quantities along the roads whose legal and physical condition had caused the prosecution.
The 1950s road campaign
By 1955 Harry Barrow had been re-elected chairman of the residents’ association. Heavy building lorries continued to damage the surfaces. Correspondence with the Sussex County Surveyor ended hopes that the Ministry of Transport would impose a fifteen-mile-per-hour limit on the unadopted roads, and public money was not offered for their routine maintenance. Owners continued with subscriptions and weekend work.
Fundraising became part of the repair programme. On Bank Holiday Monday, 1 August 1955, the Ifold Freeholders Association advertised a fête on The Drive with bowling for a pig, a jumble stall, sideshows, competitions, sports, teas and music. The notice stated that the proceeds were for Ifold road repairs. The road fund was raised in the same place where residents then had to spend it.
Road improvement advanced section by section. Wartime compensation had paid for a major early programme, while annual subscriptions, fundraising and resident labour covered later work. Eventually the roads received stronger surfaces and top dressing, but they remained outside the normal system of adopted highways.
A private responsibility that survived
The old estate roads carried successive phases of Ifold’s history: carriages to the mansion, timber and building lorries to the first plots, wartime tanks, buses and the post-war traffic of a growing residential settlement. Their private status outlived every one of those changes.
Residents continued to pay towards maintenance and organise repairs through the body that evolved from the early Freeholders Association. The modern road network still follows The Drive, The Ride, Chalk Road and the other lines inherited from the country estate, with the cost of maintaining those private routes carried by the people whose homes stand along them.
