David Harry Cotton
Born in St Ives in 1937, David emigrated to Australia in 1961. He now lives in Bendigo, Australia. Here are his memories of St Ives and its people.
I am David Harry Cotton, born 30 March 1937 in St Georges Road (off The Waits), St Ives in Huntingdonshire. My parents were Harry Cotton and Agnes Muriel Course, who married in All saints Church in 1935.
I really only resided in St Ives for 16 years. I started work at Barclays Bank, Chatteris, in 1953, then completed 2 years National service 1955 to 1957, then Barclays, Biggleswade, 1957 to 1961, when I migrated to Australia.
There is history even in the previous paragraph. I used to catch a train from St Ives to Chatteris on a Sunday evening and return Saturday lunch time to play cricket. There is no train now nor does Barclays have a branch in Chatteris.
My father, Harry Cotton, worked at Enderby’s printing mill as a compositor. He started there aged 12. His older brother James Judd Cotton served in First World War and was badly disabled. My father was the local part-time St Ives reporter for The Hunts Post for many years. He was also a local photographer and pictured many St Ives weddings, various events and babies. I can recall when I was about 10 trying to get babies to smile as they laid on the lounge room table at 9 Ramsey Road.
Some of the photos on St Ives 100 Years Ago, I am certain, were taken by my dad. The Anderson family cricket team is one of them.
The Cotton family came to St Ives in 1855 when James Judd Cotton and his wife Mary Pepper took over a baker’s shop on The Quay. They came from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, and Barrowden, Rutland. How they found there was a business for sale and made the move I do not know. I do know that what remains of the shop was/is a tea room on The Quay. It was badly burnt around 1923 and if you look at old Quay photos pre and post 1923 you can see a change in the roof lines. It is directly across the river from Enderby’s mill.
My father was born in 1905, started work in 1917 for Enderby's Printers, married in 1935, moved to Ramsey Road 1937, and worked at Enderby's until about 1965 when they closed. He pedalled his bike from home to work at 8am, home for lunch at 1pm, back to The Mill 2pm and home 5.30. Over The Bridge, down Bridge St, Merryland, The Waits, past The Church and up Ramsey Road.
When dad went down Merryland he would have passed by Hewson’s pork butcher shop. His mother was Mary Ann Hewson, and his father, James Cotton, son of the baker on The Quay. I believe that what was the Hewson shop is still there. A low roof line building on the left going towards Bridge St.
I was born in 1937, so was only 8 when war finished in 1945, therefore these are just fleeting memories.
Helping my mother dig out potatoes from our nature strip in Ramsey Road.
Listening to a Doodlebug in the sky with mother and a boarder. I believe it fell on Somersham.
The boarder was an aircrew member from RAF Wyton. We had a spare bedroom and many aircrew members were boarded in St Ives and surrounding villages. RAF Wyton, Upwood, Warboys, Oakington are all close and, I believe, part of The Pathfinders group. There is today a Pathfinders walk, taking in these old airfields. The boarder idea was to stop a lot of aircrew all sleeping in one hut on base, and the possibility of them all being killed by one bomb. Most schoolboys in St Ives had a collection of bits of British and German airplanes that crashed locally. Ghoulish thought now.
My first primary school teacher around 1943 was Tom Palmer. He was an elderly man, called back to teach as younger men were in the war. He called me ‘young Judd’ and that nickname stuck with me till I left St Ives. He had taught my uncle James Judd Cotton, who was the older brother of my father Harry Cotton. Even in 1990 when I visited St Ives, a few of my old school day friends, Geoff Hookham, David Anderson and David Bull called me Judd.
My home was only 200 yards from the Ramsey Road Cricket Ground and I played there from about 1950 to 1960. I was quite successful at local level and played for Huntingdonshire a few times. The ground had a row of poplar trees down one boundary. They were surface rooted which made the outfield very bumpy. Nobby Clark (E W Clark Northants and England) took over The Dun Horse about 1950. Although in his 40s he was a bit quicker than most village cricketers were used to. He used to walk down from The Dun Horse with his MCC cap and sweater on and half the opposition was out before they were in!
One of my teammates was John Handscomb. His father Syd worked at Enderby’s and was part time groundsman. John later moved to Australia, married and his son Peter Handscomb has played test cricket for Australia. Peter now plays in the UK for Leicestershire in your summer. He is captain of Victoria here.
In the 1950s St Ives cricket club ran The Kiddle Cup. The midweek start was 6pm, finish 9pm because of double daylight saving. Twenty overs a side. The knockout competition was for local businesses; a team of builders, bankers, the law, farmers, shop keepers, medicos, etc. Mr Kiddle was a mayor, they had a furniture shop I think. Maybe this was a fore runner of all the modern twenty over stuff? I think a few St Ives locals could have made a fortune in the Indian cricket league today.
My uncle, James Judd Cotton, was the third of that name, born in St Ives in 1897. He was the son of James Judd Cotton, the second so called, a publican and baker born in St Ives in 1855. His mother was Mary Hewson. His father was the first James Judd Cotton, born in Melton Mowbray 1820. He was the son of James Cotton and Martha Judd. I did not know why I had the nickname Judd until I started family history.
My uncle was in the First World War. My father Harry told me he came home badly injured from shrapnel wounds and could only do light work. He worked as a gardener in a big house at Virginia Waters, Surrey, that may have belonged to a senior army officer he had served with. I know that in about 1947 we visited there, but have only vague memories. I know that he authorised the sale of the bakers shop on The Quay in 1926 (the sale advertised in the Hunts Post 4 Feb 1926) and he was best man at my father’s marriage in 1935 in St Ives He died in 1961 when knocked off his motor bike somewhere in London. He married Mary Axtell in 1936 in Surrey. They had no children.
Another sad aspect of St Ives life affected the Cotton family They had a daughter, Doris Evelyn Cotton, born in 1901. Doris drowned in the river at The Quay in July 1904 (Cambridge Independent Press 8 July 1904).
My mother was Agnes Muriel Course born at St Ives 11 January 1911 (easy to remember 11.1.11). Her parents were Ambrose Bone Course (ABC) born at St Ives in 1875, and Etheldreda Lydia Barnsdale, born at Cambridge. They married 13 April 1903 and had seven children, two dying as infants.
The Course family arrived in Hemingford Gray in 1800. They were watermen sailing barges on the River Great Ouse from the Bedford area between 1750 and 1810. They then took up market gardening in St Ives. The parents of ABC were Thomas Course (born 1841, died 1923) and Hannah Avory (died 1912). A headstone in St Ives cemetery also mentions their son Walter, who died at Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia, in 1896. I can remember ABC telling me he had a brother who had died in Australia.
The parents of Thomas were Thomas Course and Sophia Bone, hence the Bone in the name of ABC. The Bone family were also watermen from Bedfordshire who moved up the River Great Ouse and associated waterways to St Ives and Ramsey. Sophia Bone’s father was William Bone (born at Blunham, Bedfordshire, in 1791. He had a brother, James Bone (born at Blunham 1793) . James Bone married Margaret Saunders and they had a daughter, Jane Bone (born at St Ives 1834) . She married at London in 1853 to a young railway engineer, Richard Clarke Pauling, who was building railways around St Ives about 1850. They had several children (1854 George Craig Sanders Pauling, 1855 George Clarke Pauling, 1857 Henry Richard Clarke Pauling). They all attended St Ives Grammar School (Manchester House, Ramsey Road) from about 1860 to 1865. They all built railways in Rhodesia. George C S Pauling married three times, his third wife being Spanish and a Catholic. He contributed to have a Pugin church in Cambridge moved to St Ives brick by brick in 1902 to start the Catholic Church in Needingworth road.
My grandfather Ambrose was successful at many things. He went to London about 1919, bought a bus and started the first bus company in St Ives. About 1924, one of the buses caught fire in the yard of 16 North Road, St Ives. After that he sold the bus company and started making ice, which was delivered around the town. He also moved into orchards and sold fruit for many years at St Ives market and took fruit to London. Two of his orchards were on either side of the road from Houghton up the hill to Wyton airfield.
I can remember him and my uncles, Bert and Tom, in the yard at North Road covered in feathers. They used to fatten day old chicks, then slaughter and defeather them, selling the feathers to a mattress maker. You could say granddad was into everything where there was a bob to be made.
To a young boy he was a dour man with a cigarette permanently in his mouth. He was a devout Methodist and canny with the money. If you owed him 5 shillings and sixpence halfpenny there was no 'five bob will be close enough', but my mother did tell me he lost money buying shares in an Argentinean railway scheme. Their home at 16 North Road is called Brooklands, next door to a house called Beulah. It was in that yard that the bus caught fire.
The Methodist Church on The Waits was rebuilt about 1903. There is a line of bricks at the base for families who 'bought a brick' to help finance the rebuild. My uncle, Albert Herbert Course, is on one of the bricks. Using the Bone connection, you have both a Methodist and a Catholic Church being built in St Ives.
About 1943, I started school as a five year old at an infant school in Pig Lane which now has a more “real estate” type name of Broad Leys. I really have no memory of this but about 1946 infants moved to Primary School in North Road opposite The Queen Adelaide Hotel Green St and North Rd. There must have been a slaughter house close by as I can remember seeing blood flow down the gutters.
A more pleasant memory is calling in to my grandparent’s house at 16 North Road on the way home. Grandad would always be out working but my grandmother Etheldreda Lydia Barnsdale ( wife of A B Course) was always there. I did not realise what an influence she would have on my life.
She would be making blackberry jam, getting honey out of honey combs, have some embroidery on a table, preparing a meal for workers making baskets for fruit, doing the paperwork for the business and still had time to show me the latest two pennyworth of stamps she had bought. Out would come a map of the world about 1947 on her kitchen table and she would show me where the stamps came from…..New Zealand, Australia, Canada, various West Indian islands…..she awakened my interest in geography and history that I still have today.
Her parents were George Henry Barnsdale and Ann Harrison Noble. They were from Peterborough but the Barnsdale family has roots through Donnington Lincs back to Notts/Lincs border c 1600. He was a stone mason carver and worked at Rattee and Kett in Cambridge and became the first working class man to be a JP in Cambridge. Her mother Ann Noble came from a long line of Noble families around Peterborough including some who married into a family surname English who were watermen on The Nene. It is a good story to say that I descend from a Noble/English family even if it is only in name only and not blue blood line.
In 1948 I took some exam called the 11 plus. No idea what it led to but having passed I found myself going to RAGS 1948/1953 (Ramsey Abbey Grammar School). What it did mean was a daily bus trip St Ives to Ramsey and return via The Hursts, Warboys,Wistow toll and Bury. I think Ramsey Road was closed off for RAF Wyton c 1950 so the bus then went via the aerodrome entrance to the Huntingdon Warboys road. What it also meant that when one “won the honour’ to play cricket or football for the school the St Ives boys had to bike on a Saturday morning to Ramsey to play. There were two hills that I remember one near Bury Church and Shillow ? hill near Wistow.
My schooling achievements were average and so at 16 I joined Barclays Bank at Chatteris. I can still remember how pleased my father was that I had a job in a Bank….”A job for life”. How times have changed.
Back to my grandmother .She was a well educated lady and had a brother Louis who attended Clare College Cambridge. When I came home from RAGS with some algebra homework my mother would say ‘Go and see grandma she will know how to do it” She was certainly a great help to ABC with her business acumen.
The Hunts Post of 25 August 1921 has an interesting letter to the editor re The Stands at St Ives which would certainly have been written by her. The Stands were where Buses could park……I would say wherever you are in the world nothing has changed re parking in 104 years.
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