Snippets

The Old Farm Café

A/N:  This is a true story of my younger years in England during and after WW2. London Colney in the county of Hertfordshire  is now a suburban township feeding commuters into workplaces in London and nearby towns. Before the arrival of motorways ( freeways) it largely served the needs of the commercial traffic between London and the eastern midland counties. 

                                               The Old Farm Café

I suppose it was a desire to commune with my youth that took me back to The Farm Café in my twentieth year, on a rather grey, overcast day in June 1960.

The weather offered a perfect match for my increasing sense of disappointment at the changes I found to this once vibrant and exciting venue – a mere shadow of its pulsating past.

The Farm Café had changed, and as I sipped strong, dark 'builder's' tea from a cracked pint mug I accepted the undeniable fact that the Farm Café, a source of endless excitement, entertainment and life experiences of my youth was no more.

Gone were the gatherings of noisy lorry (truck) drivers reeking of diesel oil mixed with the taints of Capstan Full Strength cigarettes or St. Bruno pipe tobacco.

The vehicle park that each night filled to capacity, harbouring the long distance commercial traffic of the pre and post war years, lay forlorn and largely empty. On the day of my visit, playing host only to a rusting Austin pick-up overloaded with scrap metal, a horsebox and, parked near the front door of the café, a neat Morris Traveller.

In my youthful days of the late 1940's, only the well-to-do  owned private cars and were never to be seen parked outside the Farm Café; known locally as a rough haunt. More ordinary people were able to buy cars in the 1960's, but seeing the little Morris parked by the front door still came as more of a shock to me than a surprise.

"Where had the lorries gone?"

My youthful gang of street-Arabs would play our games among the parked mechanical monsters; sometimes teasing their drivers and being chased by them, and at other times running their errands in return for a few pence of extra pocket money. Those drivers were tough, no-nonsense men, they had to be since they spent long unregulated hours in their cabs, driving vehicles without the benefit of power steering or air brakes, lorries whose crash gear boxes required a double-declutching routine to change gear with every shift.

In my mind's eye, I saw again the names painted on the doors of the vehicles – British Road Services, Pickford's, Hayes Heavy Haulage, Rand, Fisher-Renwick, Bishops Move.

With a sigh and a shake of my head I answered my own question.

"They've gone to the new motorways (freeways)."

The first of the new three-lane, dual carriageway super highways had opened to traffic the year before. The new M1 now carried the long-distance haulage from London to the midland shires; the drivers stopping for refuelling and refreshments at a large, service station and cafeteria purpose built at Watford Gap.

In the days before motorways, long distance travel radiated out  from London into the country beyond on six, single carriageway trunk roads identified by numbers A1 to A6. Only the A1 bore a name – The Great North Road.

At that time, the village of London Colney consisted of a mile long strip of development, eighteen miles north of Marble Arch and straddling the A6 trunk road to Leicester and the Midlands. All traffic bound for the eastern midlands passed through London Colney, and the village supported the traffic with no fewer than four transport cafés: of which The Farm Café became the most popular with drivers.