Chipperfield

Chipperfield
Hertfordshire
Chipperfield Common and the Two Brewers
Location
Grid reference:	TL043016
Location:	51°42’14"N, 0°29’26"W
Data
Post town:	Kings Langley
Postcode:	WD4
Dialling code:	01923
Local Government
Council:	Dacorum
Parliamentary constituency:	South West Hertfordshire

Chipperfield is a village in Hertfordshire, found in the woods about 5 miles southwest of Hemel Hempstead and 5 miles north of Watford. The parish includes the hamlet of Tower Hill.

The village centre is on a large green on the edge of nearby Chipperfield Common. It is a village with five pubs, three churches, a newsagent's, a post office, Kia and Land Rover garages, a delicatessen and two garden centres.

Churches

• Church of England: St Pauls
• Baptist
• Roman Catholic

Associated with the church is a Church of England primary school, St Paul's, which is located adjacent to the church. Next to the school is a village club called Blackwell's, and tennis courts owned by CTC. Every year, a pantomime is held in the Village Hall, which is organised by the Chipperfield Theatre Group.

Pubs

The Two Brewers stands adjacent to the common and is a popular summer meeting place to drink out of doors. It was founded by Robert Waller as an ale house in 1799, originally the middle one of a row of three cottages. It eventually took over its neighbours to make a long frontage on the green. A modern hotel extension has been built to the rear.

The pub acquired fame as the training quarters for many famed 19th century prize-fighters such as Jem Mace, Thomas Sayers and Bob Fitzsimmons who sparred in the Club Room and took their runs round the nearby Chipperfield Common. Pictures of the great prizefighters of the day hang in the Two Brewers in memory of their place in the village's history.

In addition to the Two Brewers, there are four other pubs: Blackwells Café & Bar, The Boot, The Royal Oak and The Windmill.

The History of Chipperfield

For centuries Chipperfield was an outlying settlement of Kings Langley consisting only of houses. However, by the 1830s Chipperfield was large enough to warrant the building of both Anglican and Baptist churches and became a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1848.

The former American President Jimmy Carter can trace his family roots to John Carter of Jeffries Farm in Chipperfield.

Since the end of Second World War the village has dramatically expanded with housing estates during the 1940s and an extensive council estate to the east of Croft Lane in the 1960s. However, since the 1980s the rate of new building has considerably diminished.

Manor

The Manor House

For a number of years the Lords of the Manor were the Blackwell family, of Cross and Blackwell. They were great benefactors to the village. Two of Samuel and Elizabeth Blackwell's sons, Charles and William Gordon, were killed during World War One. In memory of them they gave the village the village club, which remained a club until quite recently. It has now been renamed Blackwells and is both a club and café next to the common.

Samuel and Elizabeth were equally devastated by the loss of two sons. Charles Blackwell was wounded at the second battle of Ypres and died in France in July, 1915. William Gordon Blackwell, the younger of the two brothers, was killed in action on October 5, 1916.

Local folktales

House on The Street

The village's common also holds an interesting history. Up until the early 1900s, the local people reported strange 'happenings' in the woods on the village's common. These happenings included sightings of strange, humanoid like beings that would only ever appear at night.

Whilst these 'spirits' were reported quite regularly, sightings abruptly stopped in late October 1911. The sudden end of the ghostly sightings elicited more odd speculation: a tale was put about that King George V had an exorcism conducted in the woods on Chipperfield common due to an 'incident' one of his advisers had whilst riding through the woods one night. The King vowed that not a single one of these "spirits" would haunt the woods with their presence for the next one hundred years.

Though it is just folk tale and superstition, these stories have been passed down through generations of the local people and are still believed by some to this day.

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Chipperfield)

• Chipperfield Village Website
• Chipperfield News - Village History
• Chipperfield Theatre Group
• The village cricket club