First published West Sussex Gazette 17/12/92

Last week's Remember When feature based on the Broadwater memories of Joan Wood(nee Winton) and her parents now continues with more fascinating tales of an age gone by.

In Victorian Broadwater, Joan's father, William Winton, was a carpenter at the Warren, a large private house and grounds where the Wisden family lived at that time, and which later became a girls school. More recently the estate was purchased by the Excess Insurance Company who demolished the mansion, but left the lodge house.

'I would love to have a look inside it!' she exclaimed, 'It would bring back such treasured memories, for my parents used to walk me past there on the way to the Downs.'

Joan, who remembers when Forest Road was Butchers Lane, and Poulters Lane was Shady Lane, reminisced about times even further back, that her father had recalled, when three big employers in the Broadwater area were all residential mansions -- the Warren, Charmandean and Sompting Abbots -- which were all later turned into schools, two now demolished and the third, Sompting Abbots, still standing, and furthermore it is still a school.

These were truly the days of Upstairs Downstairs with local girls employed there as domestic staff and young men as gardeners, grooms and so on.

'Everything had to be just so, and it was hard work in those days,' Joan recalled, 'and I remember when there were cows and sheep along the driveway that led to Charmandean.'

As well as the mansions there were other large houses employing staff: Muir House and Broadwater Manor for example.

'When I was young the Manor Ground was a corn field,' she smiled.

Today, Broadwater Boulevard marks the site of Muir House, and Broadwater Manor still stands, a timely reminder of those earlier days when servants hurried about their routine chores and household duties, although today it is used as a school.

After leaving school, Joan's elder brother Dick Winton joined the Ham Road Old Boys Football team who played regularly at the Rotary Ground in Hillbarn Lane.

When Joan married she and her husband moved into a small cottage in Harrison Road, approached only via a muddy lane.

'I could see Sompting Church from my scullery window,' she announced proudly.

In front of the house, one of a pair of semis, was Greenyers Nursery surrounded by barbed wire to keep children out, 'but we used to get in there somehow to look at the water in a little brook.'

That small water course is connected with the Teville Stream.

The house, Glencoe Cottage, was lit by gas and had only one simple water tap -- in the scullery -- right up until Joan moved out in 1966.

Seemingly by some miracle, Glencoe Cottage has survived the advancement of an industrial estate and is still there today, strangely nestled among modern factories, but now of course it benefits from electric lighting and hot water, as well as mains drainage which we all take for granted now.

'Some people talk about the good old days, but I wouldn't go back, no, no!' she blurted.