# 14. Marsh View

I was born, almost 70 years ago, in Drove Cottage on Monkton Court Farm. In about 1958/59 we moved to what was then known as 4 Marsh View (now 101 Monkton Street). The 8 Marsh View houses, along with 4 in Millers Lane, were all Council owned. My parents lived there until they both passed away in 2014 and 2015.

There were two things about this house that I remember well. The first was the enormous garden that surrounded it (before the car park was laid). The other was that the toilet was outside, only a couple yards outside the back door, but still outside. The situation was changed only 3 or 4 years later when the kitchens and bathrooms of all 8 houses were restructured. It was OK having an outside toilet except for wanting to go during the middle of the night and yes, we did have a chamber pot under the bed.

Another downside of the toilet facilities in those days was that there was no main drainage in the village. There were only two cesspits for all 8 houses. Although they were emptied on a regular basis, on the odd occasion they did fill up before their time and someone had to go down to the phone box outside the Post Office and phone the Council. The main drainage was laid through the village in the mid 1960’s, and these are the same drains that we use today!

The two blocks of four houses were known as 1 to 8 Marsh View until the early 1970’s. They were built in the early 1920's. Numbers 1 to 4 were built by W S Cole and 5 to 8 were built by Harry Crow (of Minster). My maternal Grandparents, Mr and Mrs Harris, moved into no. 3 when they were first built. My mother and her two brothers were born there. My Grandfather died in the early 1940’s but my Grandmother continued to live there until the retirement bungalows at The Fairway (opposite Parsonage Fields) were built. She lived there until she passed away in 1974.

I am not sure how far my mother’s side of the family goes back in the local area. If you look at Minster archive, the Bray family (my Great Grandparents) once owned the shop known to everyone as Attwells.

The late Bob Hood remembered seeing Mrs Bray weighing out loose tobacco on a set of balance scales for a customer, twisting the product through finger and thumb, to the last strand, to weigh-out the required ounce.  These were the days before rolling and pipe tobacco was sold in packets.

*Terry Marsh*

Originally published in the Monkton News (October 2023).