Gidea Park: a suburb and its syllables
For six and a half centuries, a mansion at Romford in Essex was known (under various spellings) as 'Giddy Hall'. In the early twentieth century, the estate was developed for housing, and the resulting suburb acquired the trisyllabic name 'Gidea Park'. Because English spelling is often approximate and sometimes arbitrary, it is difficult to trace the process by which the pronunciation changed, and harder still to explain it.
In the summer of 1911, a well-organised exhibition publicised the new Romford Garden Suburb, a project of the wealthy and philanthropic Liberal MP Herbert Raphael. The project was intended to raise the standard of suburban housing and it generally stood high in public esteem – but there was one discordant note. A correspondent of the London Daily Chronicle accepted that there were "beautiful homes" at "Gidea" – but there was a problem. "This writer has not been to see them, because he cannot pronounce the name. ... Gidea should hire a poet to give the definitive rhyme."[1] This element of uncertainty over the pronunciation of Gidea Park is a reminder that we know remarkably little about the way in which people spoke even as relatively recently as a century ago, when sound recording was still in its infancy. The Latin alphabet, as used in English, is moderately efficient in conveying consonants (although the letter G can be ambiguous and C is responsible for multiple confusion), but its use of just five symbols to designate around two dozen vowel sounds causes a great deal of imprecision. Notably, English makes no use of diacritical marks or accents to delimit or emphasise individual syllables. The result of this obscurity is that we have here missed an early twentieth-century change in pronunciation, in which [Giddy] Hall gave way to [Gid-ee-uh] Park.[2]
The appeal of the Daily Chronicle for poetic intervention was answered by Claude Greening, a prolific versifier who wrote in a whimsically helpful mood.[3] He considered various possible pronunciations in turn: "What's in a name?' Pronounce it how we may / The air will be as fresh, the sky as clear; / But, for a start – suppose – well – let us say / We'll give it this attractive sound: Giddeer." But this did not solve the problem. "Some friends of mine – for instance Tom and Jack / And many more, including Rose and Lydia – / Object to that, and so I'll take it back / And, just to satisfy them, call it: Giddier." But consensus still eluded him. "Opinions differ. Many folk, I find, / In their desire to lend their aid to me, / To this pronunciation are inclined – What say you, friends? – to them it is: Giddee." Greening continued through two further verses, for instance speculating whether the G was soft or hard. "The man to solve the problem's not a bard!" Yet he made one more attempt, calling upon "the patience of King Bruce's spider", he offered "[t]he tuneful and melodious form of Jider".[4] We may safely ignore this final suggestion, but Greening's cheerful verse left the basic question unresolved: was Gidea [Giddee], [Giddier] or even [Giddeer]?
The origins of Giddy Hall For six and a half centuries, the answer had been clear enough, ever since the first recorded reference in 1250-1 to land held in the royal manor of Havering by an unnamed daughter of Simon of Gidiehulle.[5] Seven years later, it was Gidiehall, Gidehall or Gediehalle, the last version surfacing again in 1307. In 1376 and again in 1412, it is Giddyhall (with variant spellings), and in 1466 it is firmly identified as "Gydihall by Ramford [sic]".[6] We may safely disregard the unstable vowel sounds: this was a building called Giddy Hall.
There is a minor difficulty about the date of the earliest examples of the name, although it is a pleasant problem to have. For reasons that I have never seen discussed, let alone explained, Essex has far more surviving documentation after about 1200 than before. Major locations – towns, most villages and some manor houses – were sometimes identified in earlier charters, and many were listed in Domesday Book, compiled in 1086. But smaller settlements and individual farms frequently only appear in the thirteenth century or after. The historian has to determine (or guess): was the place new or was the earliest recorded example simply the first time that it was first written down? With Giddy Hall, we can be reasonably certain that the building referred to was relatively new, partly because there is evidence that the district was called something else, but also – and perhaps more important – because we are obviously dealing with a nickname which was probably of recent origin. The area that later became the Giddy / Gidea Hall estate was almost certainly called Abenhatch. A hatch was a gate into forest, and there are surviving local examples at Aldborough Hatch in Ilford and at Pilgrims Hatch and Kelvedon Hatch near Brentwood. The term would have been appropriate here since the higher ground to the north was probably still wooded. Aben- suggests the possessive form of a personal name, perhaps the Abba who was believed to be at the root of Abinger in Surrey.[7] In the thirteenth century, as surnames were beginning to form, Simon of Abenhatch was one of Havering's most prominent residents, frequently witnessing legal documents. Indeed, as Simon was not a popular name in Havering, it is very likely that he was the Simon of Gidiehulle referred to in 1251, and we may take the leap of assuming that he erected the mansion that aroused the satirical mirth of his neighbours. The Abenhatch family sold the land sometime before 1321: an agreement that year for the maintenance of a boundary hedge with "Risebregge", the property to the north, confirms that this was the subsequent Giddy Hall estate.[8] The fact that Abenhatch disappeared from the mental map of Havering (and has never been recorded by any real-life cartographer) is further proof that it was shouldered aside by Giddy Hall.
There was also a specific place-name in the south-west corner of the estate, where the main Essex highway crossed a small brook that fed into the River Rom. In 1469 this was recorded as "Yokkesford". It is dangerous to try to explain the meaning of a place-name on the basis of a single example, but the similarity with the well-documented Yoxford in Suffolk makes it likely that it described a ford that required a yoke of oxen to cross.[9] The stream to the north of the road now forms Raphael Park Lake, and traffic passes comfortably over a bridge which perhaps few drivers even notice. But from the Romford town side, there is – by Essex standards – something of a slope, and it is likely that, in earlier centuries, the valley of the stream, although small, was sufficiently steep (and muddy) to require a contemporary form of heavy goods transport to shift loads from one side to the other. The subsequent damming of that narrow ravine has a part in the story, and I return to it below.
Giddy Hall, then, was a nickname, and probably of fairly recent origin when it was first recorded in 1250-1. Serious scholars have not always felt at ease about its derivation, a concern apparently also shared by later owners of the property. George Terry, one of Romford's first historians, insisted in 1880 that Gidea "not very likely to mean, as some have thought, giddy or frolicsome".[10] P.H. Reaney, whose Place-Names of Essex still holds sway ninety years after publication, was also perplexed, calling its interpretation "obscure". "The first element looks like the common adjective giddy (Old English gydyg) but it is difficult to see how, except by way of a nickname, this could be applied to a hall." However, he acknowledged that there were similar examples elsewhere in Essex: a Giddy Hall at Clacton, and Gydiebernes at Canewdon, presumably a name for outbuildings on farm.[11] However, as Terry's definitions reveal, those who expressed reservations about the derivation were thinking on terms of its relatively narrow modern meaning. The Middle English etymological examples cited by the Oxford English Dictionary indicate that, in the thirteenth century, the word was used in a broader sense than 'frolicsome'. A poem of about 1250, The Owl and the Nightingale, advised that "me ne chide wiþ þe gidie" (one should not argue with the foolish). A contemporary version of the Rule of St Benet, which offered guidance for monks, was helpfully accompanied by a Latin translation, which used "stultus" (a foolish person) to clarify the meaning of "se gidie". The nuances of terminology for mental disturbance were illustrated by Robert of Gloucester's 1297 account of the descent of the Emperor Nero into insanity: he "bicom sone þer after pur gidy & wod" (he became soon thereafter completely deranged and mad").[12] On balance, we may deduce that, at the time when Giddy Hall acquired its name, 'giddy' carried something of the meaning of 'crazy' in modern English. If we brand a proposal 'mad' or dismiss a project as 'insane', we classify it as evil or dangerous, but if we call an idea 'crazy', we are much more likely to characterise it as absurd or bizarre. Thus we have crazy paving, to describe a path made from a jigsaw of broken slabs, while crazy golf is the game of putting combined with an obstacle course. A popular consortium of British comedians in the nineteen-thirties were known as the Crazy Gang, whose most popular show was a musical called These Foolish Things.[13] Calling Simon of Abenhatch's residence a 'Hall' was itself tongue-in-cheek, just as today we might scoffingly refer to a pretentious house as a mansion or a palace. To the Havering people of 1250, Giddy Hall was Crazy Mansion.
But why did Simon's house attract such an unflattering designation? The most obvious reason would have been its size. This is confirmed by the prominence of some of its known occupants. For instance, one of the owners who succeeded the Abenhatch family was Sir John of Havering, one of the few fourteenth-century locals to sport a knighthood. Maybe an awkward extension had been added to an existing farmhouse, arousing the derision of neighbours. Perhaps more likely that it was the first two-storey residence in the district: to peasants accustomed to ground-hogging cabins, a building with an upstairs may indeed have seemed giddy, in our modern sense of being at risk of toppling over. However, the more pertinent question is surely, how did the creator of Giddy Hall acquire the cash to erect such a large building? Three possible, indeed likely, reasons may be suggested.
First, as Marjorie Keniston McIntosh noted in her detailed scholarly history of medieval Havering, the Abenhatch [Abenhache] family were "busily clearing land in the first half of the thirteenth century".[14] A belt of heathland, almost certainly the former royal hunting ground, had stretched from west to east across the centre of the manor of Havering, along a former Thames terrace at about 80 to 120 feet (26.4 to 36.6 metres) above sea level. From about 1200, this common land was gradually enclosed, a process that was only halted by the massive population loss caused by outbreaks of bubonic plague, especially between 1348 and 1361.[15] In its early years of cultivation, this previously fallow land may well have yielded bonanza crops. The second contributing cause to the loadsamoney phenomenon of Giddy Hall was the establishment, in 1247, of Romford Market, complete with a generously spaced market place within a few hundred yards of the Abenhatch property, making the estate ideally placed to benefit from access to what quickly became an important link with the London market. Of course, it may be objected that the chronological link is too close to explain the creation of wealth sufficient to pay for the construction of a very large residence: even if the market swung into immediate action and Giddy Hall was newly built in 1250-1, four years was a short time in which to amass a fortune. However, it is likely that Romford Market was chartered because the town was already a trading centre. The Havering manor court met at three-weekly intervals, and almost certainly held its sessions in Romford: by the mid-fourteenth century, as many as 200 people were under obligation to attend, although the actual turn-out was probably lower. It is easy to imagine their thirteenth-century forebears making the most of the chore by bringing eggs or chickens to barter with their neighbours, and the narrow High Street becoming clogged with impromptu stalls. In Romford history, the date 1247 has acquired something of a '1066' aura, but it is highly likely that the formal establishment of the Market was as much the result as the creation of a local trading structure.[16] Moreover, there is a third reason that explains how the Abenhatch property was able to exploit the emergence of Romford Market on a profitable scale.
In 1904, a slice of the western side of the Gidea Hall estate became a public park, named after its donor, local benefactor Herbert Raphael. The new amenity included a lake, then known as Black's Canal from the name of a nineteenth-century owner of the estate.[17] It was easy to assume that Raphael Park Lake, as it soon became known, was the product of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century landscaping, particularly since its outline resembles a tadpole, a solid body of water at the south end twisting and tapering away to the north. However, the 1618 field plan of Havering shows that the larger section, adjoining the highway, already existed, and names it as "Mill Water".[18] Domesday Book in 1086 had recorded a watermill in the manor of Havering, but this was almost certainly at Dovers in the far south of Hornchurch.[19] The Giddy Hall watermill certainly existed by 1469, when it was referred to as "Yokkesford Melle" ('mell ' was a frequent Essex variant spelling for 'mill').[20] Since windmills came into use across England in the thirteenth century, it is unlikely that anyone would have undertaken the much larger engineering task of building a watermill after that date. Thus we may assume that the Giddy Hall mill was constructed between 1086 and 1250, probably at the same time as the central belt of heathland was being enclosed for farming. Owning a mill in the Middle Ages was a licence to coin money: millers were rarely popular members of the community. Here we probably have the key element that explains both the size of the Abenhatch residence, and the negative attitude to it shown in the local nickname.
The Londoners arrive The key point is that Giddy Hall was almost certainly the grandest occupied residence in the district, and its occupant necessarily a dominant figure locally. The royal palace at Havering-atte-Bower was probably more extensive, but it received only occasional and brief visits from medieval monarchs. However, by 1376, a new element had entered the situation: that year, Giddy Hall was described as belonging to William Baldwin, saddler of London, who had purchased it from the family who bore the surname Havering. This was one of the first examples of London wealth buying Havering property. For there could be little doubt that the Giddy Hall estate was profitable. In 1392, it was one of three Havering properties to employ a full-time herdsman; a century later, its fields were farmed by a professional bailiff, and there was a concentration on the production of grain and dairy products, mostly sold direct to the London market.[21] But Giddy Hall was something more than an investment property run for the benefit of absentee owners, for it was close enough to the metropolis to allow plutocratic City businessmen to live there for at least part of the year, perhaps using it to provide their families with a refuge from the disease-ridden capital during the summer months. Nor were the Londoners nervous incomers who anxiously sought to ingratiate themselves with the local population. Rather, they expected to have their way in Havering. In 1412, Giddy Hall was recorded as belonging to Robert Chichele [Chicherley], who had served as Lord Mayor the previous year, although he had almost certainly acquired the property some time earlier. Robert Chichele's brother Henry was a priest and also a high-flying ecclesiastical lawyer who was involved in negotiations with the Papacy, which helped him to add the bishopric of St Davids in Wales to his collection of Church appointments. The spiritual needs of the Romford side of the huge manor and parish of Havering were supplied by a chapel about half a mile south of the growing town, at a spot still called Oldchurch. Robert Chichele wanted it to be removed to a location more convenient to himself. While he was in Rome, brother Henry used his knowledge of the inner workings of the Curia to secure permission to build a new chapel on a site alongside the Market Place.[22] Giddy Hall might have a flighty name, but its owners knew their way around the corridors of power.
It might seem hard to believe that Giddy Hall could climb any higher through the stratosphere of importance, but in 1452 it gained a new owner who cherished even more magnificent ambitions. Thomas Cook (also spelt 'Coke' and 'Cooke') is conventionally labelled as a "London draper",[23] which conveys the image of a shopkeeper. In fact, he was a merchant with extensive interests in the manufacturing districts of north Essex and East Anglia (he came from Lavenham in Suffolk), which made Havering a strategic location for the establishment of an estate.[24] Cook was also a shipowner who traded through London and Southampton, exporting cloth and importing valuable commodities. To call him wealthy would be an understatement: he was very rich indeed. A contemporary chronicler called him "a man of great boldnesse of speke [speech] and well spoken, and syngularly wytted and well reasoned". But a modern account balances this by stressing that he was arrogant and ruthless in his business methods. Cook could hardly avoid becoming involved in the unstable dynastic politics that enmeshed Edward IV and Henry VI – he was lord mayor of London in 1462-3 – making enemies who twice succeeded in throwing him into prison. In 1468, he was forced to pay almost £6,000 in fines to escape a charge of treason (despite being acquitted), and he later claimed (but failed to receive) almost £15,000 as compensation for the looting of his property, notably including his house and park at Giddy Hall. Yet in 1469, he had enough cash to purchase another Havering property, Redden Court, in the northern part of Hornchurch.[25]
By the fourteen-sixties, Thomas Cook was running Havering, dominating the Crown offices that controlled local affairs.[26] In 1465, the year in which he was knighted, he formalised this arrangement, joining with two other Londoners who owned Havering property in securing a charter from Edward IV which promoted the royal manor of Havering into a kind of county-within-a-county. The Cook / Cooke family remained at Giddy Hall until 1658, and were usually represented among the key offices in what became known as the Liberty of Havering.[27] Sir Thomas Cook decided to mark his elevated status and local dominance by rebuilding Giddy Hall which, after two hundred years, probably needed a makeover. In 1466, he secured the King's permission to convert two hundred acres of his estate into a park, and to construct a crenellated mansion – in short, a castle. In the Middle Ages, a royal licence was required for the construction of a building with battlements since, once the fortification was completed, an over-mighty and disgruntled subject could raise the standard of rebellion and retire behind his walls where the king could not touch him. But this had all been changed by the development of artillery: between 1450 and 1453, the king of England – who had ruled south-western France for three centuries – was chased out of Gascony by the king of France, who used cannon to blast castle after castle. Thus by the time of Sir Thomas Cook's application, owning a castle was simply a matter of swank, although the ambition of a mere merchant to live behind crenellations and machicolations probably encouraged his many enemies to bring him down a few pegs, and helps to explain the challenges he faced during the next few years.[28] Left unfinished at Thomas Cook's death in 1478, the project was eventually completed by his great-grandson, Sir Anthony Cooke (spelling of the surname changed) in time for a visit by Elizabeth I in 1568. Listing the country seats of Essex in 1594, the cartographer John Norden singled it out for special mention as "a proper howse", the adjective recalling another forgotten nuance of English meaning: Giddy Hall was special, in a class of its own.[29]
At much the same time as Sir Thomas Cook was planning to rebuild Giddy Hall as one of the grandest houses in Essex, another shift in meaning was taking place in the English language, one that would further trivialise the adjective from which the property took its name. Perhaps there is a built-in process in the English language which downgrades and eventually infantilises terms that initially carried strong and pejorative connotations. "Thou naughty knave" in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has come to sound merely comic: a word that once conveyed a quality of evil so total that it implied a total moral vacuum (hence the derivation from 'naught') now merely conjures the disobedient behaviour of an indulged child. 'Wicked' seems to be following the same downward path. In the case of 'giddy', a contraction in meaning seems to have resulted from the unexplained retreat of an expressive compound word. 'Turngiddy' superbly captured the sense of feeling dizzy after being spun around: in 1382, Wycliffe had used it in his translation of the Bible. Yet for some unknown reason, during the fifteenth century, its use went into decline, thereby narrowing and devaluing the core term. The Oxford English Dictionary notes 'giddy' as meaning light-headed or frivolous from 1547, and disoriented by whirling around from 1593. Dismissive compound phrases also multiplied: 'giddy brained' is dated from 1561. Examples of earliest usage in the OED are, of course, the first that can be traced, usually from a printed source: the term may well have been in circulation decades earlier. The process of linguistic change was necessarily fluid, but one point about the shifting significance of 'giddy' stands. In the hundred years that the Cook[e] dynasty upgraded their home to palatial splendour, its already-embarrassing name moved in the opposite direction: Crazy Mansion degenerated into Silly Castle.
Massaging an embarrassing name There was not much that the owners could do about the pronunciation, but it seems that they did attempt to dictate a form of spelling that was intended to hint at an alternative etymology. It may have been the brainwave of Sir Anthony Cooke, who described himself in his Will of 1576 as "of Guydyhall".[30] A humanist scholar, a product of the Renaissance and a skilled linguist, Cooke probably hoped to redefine the origins of his estate – in effect, to rewrite its history – by massaging its orthography. I have traced seventeen examples of versions using –uy– or –ui– for the first syllable, the last of them in 1707 (and there may well be more). What is striking about them is that they are overwhelmingly associated either with the house itself, or from sources that had some reason to show deference to its owners.[31]
Of course, the attempt to manipulate the spelling was unlikely to affect the pronunciation. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spelling followed pronunciation, and in no way attempted to define it. Nor did the –ui– form convey any precise sound. In modern English, which has been standardised for almost two centuries, 'buy', 'guide' and 'guile' rhyme with 'rye', 'ride' and 'rile', but 'build', 'guild' and 'guilt' are each voiced with a short –i–. In any case, literacy was restricted. Of 170 men who left property in Havering between 1580 and 1619, only fifty signed their Wills. Even those appointed to responsible local positions were frequently illiterate, including half the churchwardens in Romford and Hornchurch in that period. These statistics probably slightly overstate the problem: some testators were too ill to wield a pen, while the ability to read was more widespread than the skill of writing.[32] However, even those who could read would hardly ever have perused legal documents, the most fertile course of 'Guydy' spellings. Nor should we forget that women, who rarely owned property or engaged with lawyers, were even more likely to lack literacy skills. Yet it was women who bore the main burden of child-rearing, and hence of the transmission of language from generation to generation. The Cooke family's property was not referred to in print until 1594: even then, John Norden called it "Giddye hull". (It is doubtful if his Speculi Britanniae Pars was a best-seller in Romford anyway.) Indeed, sources independent of the Big House rarely indulged the owners' preferred spelling. The 1618 field plan of Havering was the initiative of the Crown, and very much not undertaken at the behest of the local landowners, who stood to lose from James I's determination to increase his income from the royal manor. The map unambiguously identified "Giddy Hall Parke". A more remarkable example had its origins in a bizarre episode in 1638, Charles I's mother-in-law, Marie de Medici, Queen Mother of France, decided to pay him an unannounced visit. In a further complication, her ship was blown off course and she landed at Harwich, where nobody expected her. Giddy Hall was one of the great houses of Essex that were hastily commandeered to provide hospitality for the Queen and her suite of attendants. It also happened to be the meeting place where the King of England arrived from Westminster to welcome her, which Charles I probably did through clenched teeth. A print commemorating their departure for London was produced in France, our only record of the appearance of the "chateau de Gidde Halle". The engraver used capital letters for the caption, a form that permitted the omission of accents, but it is highly likely that the French visitors heard the name of their overnight lodging as "Giddé Hall".[33]
The mother-in-law from France. Charles I could hardly have welcomed the unexpected arrival of his wife's mother, Queen Marie de Medici. Their meeting at Giddy Hall was commemorated by a French artist. The visitors evidently heard their overnight lodging called 'Giddé Hall'.
Even the estate's own legal documents found it necessary to adopt a belt-and-braces approach when it came to nomenclature: a set of deeds dating from 1652 carefully specified that the property was "Giddy alias Guiddy Hall Park".[34] Whether successive owners used the –ui– spelling in an attempt to make 'Giddy' rhyme with 'tidy', we shall probably never know – although it seems unlikely. However, we can be reasonably sure that any such attempt was ignored by the local community. Above all, we can be certain that the name was pronounced as two syllables and not three.
Faking a pedigree Sometime around 1720, another Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Eyles, demolished the Cooke family's mansion and erected the third Giddy Hall, which survived until 1930.[35] In 1745, the property was purchased by Richard Benyon, who had a particular status concern of his own.[36] Benyon had made his money in India, where he had risen to become governor of the East India Company's trading post at Fort St George, the core of the town of Madras, now the city of Chennai.[37] Returned officials from India ("nabobs" as they were sarcastically called) were regarded as adventurers, and Benyon seems to have wanted to cut a dash in Essex.[38] It was obviously a coup to acquire what Morant called "one of the most compleat Seats in this County". Yet there are indications that Benyon disliked the frivolous overtones of its name, which undermined his claims to social acceptance. In subscribing to Morant's History and Antiquities of the County of Essex – to finance major publishing projects in the eighteenth century, customers had to sign up in advance – he gave his address as "Gidding Hall". The name sounded plausible – it was probably borrowed from two parishes in Huntingdonshire, one of which, Little Gidding, would subsequently be made famous by the poetry of T.S. Eliot – but it was utterly without precedent or historical validity for the Romford property. Morant incorporated the Gidding Hall version into his general narrative,[39] but for the specific entry about Benyon's estate, he came up with a breathtaking alternative derivation of his own.
Essentially, to understand what was attempted in this 1768 first attempt at a comprehensive history of Essex, we need to grasp the deep need for respectability that was felt by new money. If, say, Master Smith rose from obscurity and acquired wealth in trade, he sought not just a country estate and perhaps a knighthood, but also a romantic ancestry that could link him, if possible, to the Norman Conquest. Hence he would go to the College of Heralds, who would – for an appropriate fee – supply him with a conflated genealogy tracing his relationship to Lord Smythe who fought at Agincourt and came from an ancient line that could be traced back to the battle of Hastings. To his credit, Benyon never indulged in such fiction, but – whether in response to a formal demand from the patron he described as "the present worthy possessor" or simply by an intuitive sense of what was required – Morant supplied Giddy Hall with a fake pedigree that might help override its embarrassing name. He boldly styled it "The Maner of Geddyhall". (Morant was a Jerseyman, for whom English was almost certainly his second language. Even by eighteenth-century standards, his spelling could be arbitrary.) It was certainly true that Essex speech interchanged short –i– and short –e– words: Redden Court, a Cooke family property for a century and a half, was usually called some variant of Ridden Court. The process had indeed occasionally been applied to Giddy Hall: Reaney's Place-Names of Essex notes three examples of variants of 'Gedy' between 1258 and 1478, but I know of no instance of its subsequent use. Morant's defence of this blatant invention involved a further leap in credulity. At the time of Domesday Book, he asserted, the property had been called Geddesduna, and had belonged to Westminster Abbey. Geddesduna certainly did appear in Domesday Book, but its location was a mystery .[40] However, it was listed in Chafford Hundred, to the east of the river Ingrebourne, whereas Havering was then part of Becontree Hundred which stretched to the west bank. More to the point, Morant would have known that in 1086, there was simply one manorial authority in Havering, and that belonged to the king. True, in the later Middle Ages, some of the larger property portfolios in the locality began to organise themselves on quasi-manorial lines, holding regular courts to enforce the payment of ground rents.[41] Giddy Hall was one of these irregular entities that were sometimes styled 'sub-manors'.[42] Morant went a step further and elevated them to the status of full manors-within-a-manor. But his association of Giddy (or Geddy) Hall with the monks of Westminster Abbey was pure fantasy, as he virtually admitted: "How they lost it, or when they parted with it, doth not appear." Even more mysterious, the property was "not mentioned in records" until the reign of Edward IV.[43] Of course, the story can be traced back a further two hundred years – but Morant passed over the inconvenient gap without comment. In the immediate term, the attempt to rename Giddy Hall and to give it a Norman origin by annexing the lost Geddesduna proved a total failure. The works of historians are rarely influential, and I have not traced a single subsequent example of "Geddy Hall".[44] However, Morant's line of thought would make an incongruous reappearance in 1880, through a solemn but equally unfounded attempt to explain away the meaning of the name.
The emergence of Gidea Hall Just as the Reverend Philip Morant was attempting to falsify the origins of Giddy Hall, a new version of the name was emerging, the one that appears familiar today. 'Gidea' was an artificially concocted spelling, one that evolved from no previous precedent. It seems to date from the Benyon era, and may have been in use on the estate itself by the seventeen-fifties.[45] "Gidea Hall" probably first appeared in print in Chapman and André's atlas of Essex, published in 1777.[46] I have traced nine newspaper reports between 1786 and 1801, including a robbery at "the house of Mr. Benyon, of Gidea-hall, in Essex" in 1787.[47] The printed word was beginning to impose consistency in spelling, but it was yet to assert its dominance over pronunciation. The –ea suffix no doubt looked plausible, as it appealed by implication to Essex place-names such as Brightlingsea, Creeksea, Mersea and Wallasea. It compromised with the prevailing popular usage without submitting unconditionally to 'giddy', perhaps encouraging a slight emphasis on the second syllable, Claude Greening's "Giddee". However, in the light of subsequent comments, we may be reasonably sure that it was pronounced as two syllables, not three. We can also conclude that there was no attempt to break the syllables between the fourth and fifth letters, to make the name rhyme with 'glider' or 'spider'. Two Essex historians. Elizabeth Ogborne in 1817 and Thomas Wright in 1836, gave "Giddea Hall" as an alternative spelling, the double-d confirming the short –i– sound.[48]
This print of 1787 is by the landscape designer, Humphry Repton, who lived in nearby Hare Street. The eastern entrance to the semi-circular drive was immediately opposite the junction of the main road with Balgores Lane. The official spelling of the mansion was now 'Gidea Hall', but it was still pronounced as 'Giddy Hall'. My thanks to Havering Libraries Local studies for the illustration.
The 'Gidea' spelling also hinted at some independent derivation, perhaps allowing wealthy owners like the Benyons and the Blacks to shrug off the implications of the name by pointing out that there was nothing foolish about the Scilly Islands.[49] In 1880 there was even an attempt to explain its etymology. As noted above, the Romford historian George Terry had a Victorian distaste for the notion that the town's finest mansion had some frolicsome connotation. In his Memories of Old Romford, he offered an alternative. "The name is not unlikely derived from Ged – pike, and ea – water."[50] It was ingenious in its focus upon the property's distinctive lake, but it was also utterly unfounded. For a start, Morant's manufactured attempt apart, there was little evidence (and, it seems, none after 1478) that the property had been called 'Geddy Hall'. It was true that 'ged' (with a hard –g–) meant 'pike', in Scotland and the Border counties of Cumberland and Northumberland (where, in fairness, it may be noted that it was sometimes written as 'gid'). However, it does not seem to have been used in southern English, and it certainly did not rate an entry in the 1923 Essex Dialect Dictionary.[51] If the 'pike' derivation was highly unlikely, Terry's translation of 'ea' was downright wrong. In Essex, the term denoted either an island, as in Mersea, or marshland, such as the coastal peninsula of Dengie. Upney in West Ham suggests a conflation of the two, a low-lying boggy island, and a related word is still used for Chiswick Eyot, which is essentially a reclaimed mudbank in the Thames.[52] As his "not unlikely" conceded, Terry was offering a guess. Nonetheless, his explanation was adopted by the promoters of the Gidea Park Garden Suburb in 1911, as a convenient if silent dismissal of any derivation from 'giddy'. Indeed, it allowed them to draw attention to the charms of the adjoining Raphael Park: "There are still pike to be trolled for in the waters of Gidea Hall."[53] Terry's well-meaning attempt to explain the name was misleading, but it is useful in confirming that, in 1880, 'Gidea' was still bisyllabic.
Enter Herbert Raphael Yet it seems clear that, by the time of the launching of the Garden Suburb, there was some element of doubt about the pronunciation of the new housing project at Gidea Park (a name coined in 1910). The new version was almost certainly the brainchild of the wealthy local resident and community benefactor, Herbert Raphael, although identifying him as the probable source does not explain why his version caught on. Raphael was the heir to a wealthy Jewish banking family, who hoped throughout the eighteen-nineties to become MP for the Romford division of Essex, which stretched from East Ham to Upminster.[54] To show his commitment to the constituency, he settled in a small country house at Havering-atte-Bower, on the higher ground above Romford. In 1897, Herbert Raphael purchased Gidea Hall. It seems reasonable to assume that he planned to develop the property for housing, although he needed to tread carefully. His political ambitions meant that he had to consider public opinion, although this consideration became less important after 1900 when he switched his attentions to a Derbyshire constituency. He had purchased the Gidea Hall estate from a receiver charged with winding up the affairs of a property development company that had collapsed in a welter of criminality without building any houses. It was important that any plans Raphael put forward should avoid the taint of scandal and, indeed, he deserves the credit of believing that the involvement of architects could create more comfortable, convenient and attractive homes. But the type of house that he aimed to construct, cottage-style residences aimed at middle-class professional families, would be handicapped by a name that sounded like [giddy]. Hence it would have been tempting to encourage a three-syllable pronunciation of 'Gidea'. Herbert Raphael had received an elite education, culminating in studying for a degree at Cambridge. In the nineteenth century, the University subjected its students to a common foundation-year course, which included examination in Latin texts. Raphael then progressed to a degree in Law, qualified as a barrister and practised for a few years before switching to a full-time political career. Legal procedure used Latin phrases: for instance, mens rea, pronounced as three syllables [mens ray-uh] was an important concept describing motivation, and was invoked to establish that an accused had acted with evil intent and not broken the law by accident. Given his education and training, it is easy enough to imagine Raphael reading 'Gidea' as [Gid-ee-uh]. But it is doubtful if more than a few dozen people in contemporary Romford would have shared the same background and made the same connection.
The problem with this hypothesis is that, like almost everything relating to pronunciation, there is little or no written evidence in its support, and the reports that do exist were recorded in the robustly unphonetic spelling of the modern English language. I have found just one intriguing episode, and even that is open to ambiguous interpretation. As was expected of a prospective parliamentary candidate in those days, Herbert Raphael was a generous supporter of the town's worthy causes. His chequebook certainly gave him a local following, but it seems that he was personally popular as well.[55] In November 1898, shortly after his purchase of Gidea Hall, he presided at the joint annual dinner of Romford's cricket and football clubs. Toasts were proposed, including one to their benefactor who, it was said, "intended shortly to descend from the giddy heights of Havering to Gidea Hall". To friendly laughter, Raphael replied: "I can assure you I shall never feel giddier or gayer than I have done among my friends to-night."[56] The context was convivial, the evidence fleeting and lacking in clarity. It is likely that the proposer pronounced 'Gidea' as 'giddy', although he might have engaged in a wordplay that contrasted the idea of descending with the outcome of becoming giddier. Raphael may simply have used the comparative form to emphasise his enjoyment of the evening, but it is also possible that he was giving a signal that he intended to change the way his new home was described. [57]
From two syllables to three That 1898 shred of evidence – two sentences reported from what was probably alcohol-fuelled oratory – is tantalising, elusive – and just about all we have on the subject of the pronunciation of Gidea Hall / Park. Had it not been for the disgruntled comment in the Daily Chronicle and Claude Greening's jaunty verse, there would be no record of any perplexity about voicing the name of the new housing development in 1911. As discussed below, I know only of one further comment, dating from a decade later, that deplored the shift in popular speech. But we may be in no doubt that a major change did take place, and by the nineteen-twenties, 'Gidea' was becoming [Gid-ee-uh], three syllables in place of two. It seems reasonable to conclude that the promoters of the new suburb, Herbert Raphael in particular, favoured the amended version: it was hard enough to persuade Londoners to move to the wilds of Romford before the First World War without burdening them with an embarrassing address. However, the challenge remains to explain how it caught on so widely and so fast. Here, of necessity, we move into the realms of speculation.
There are three areas of possible explanation for the apparently rapid shift in the pronunciation of 'Gidea' from two syllables to three: the Great Eastern Railway, the First World War and the influx of outsiders to an increasingly suburban Romford in the two decades after 1918. Of these, the influence of the railway company was probably the crucial driving force.
Often working in connection with developers who wished to sell mass-produced houses, the Great Eastern Railway [GER] had a history of ruthless toponymic manipulation, changing, discarding and inventing names to encourage favourable images of a locality. Low Leyton station dropped its negative-sounding adjective as early as 1868, although the parish was not officially renamed until 1921. When a station was opened on Gubbins Farm that year, the name Harold Wood was boldly shifted to the new location. Goodmayes was chosen from a selection of local properties because it sounded friendly. Little Ilford (which could be traced back eight centuries to Domesday Book) threatened to cause confusion with its larger neighbour, so it was obliterated by Manor Park. The GER had a close working relationship with Herbert Raphael, who paid for the construction of a new station at Squirrels Heath and was the principal guarantor that the company would receive a minimum income from ticket sales. He was well positioned both to dictate the name and to define its pronunciation. The new halt opened in 1910 as Squirrels Heath and Gidea Park. Three years later, the elements were reversed, almost certainly under pressure from Raphael (and his chequebook). It is likely that he also persuaded the company to adopt the amended pronunciation. The staff at the Squirrels Heath halt would have been too small to have played much part in the syllable shift, but GER employees along the line would probably have been ordered to use [Gid-ee-uh]. Loudspeaker announcements at major termini seem to date from the invention of the tannoy in the late nineteen-twenties, but delays and platform changes at Liverpool Street were probably communicated to passengers by megaphone, and ticket office staff would have been well placed to influence how travellers first heard the name.
Edwardian Romford was hardly the kind of community where one would expect to encounter many people who were familiar with Latin. Nonetheless, the subject bears some slight discussion. Raphael's Garden Suburb was aimed at middle-class families, headed by men who worked in business or the professions, some of whom would have received a classical education. Gidea Park pioneers may also have been enthusiastic gardeners, interested in botanical names and perhaps with a fondness for growing azaleas.[58] Such households would have felt comfortable with a latinised pronunciation of their new home (although, as noted below, two Garden Suburb residents who adopted Latin noms-de-plume were the last defenders of the older version). However, the problem with this line of argument was that Gidea Park was a very small-scale venture: the 1911 Exhibition featured just 140 homes.[59] Occupation of the properties was slow. Even if we imagine that half the households in the new suburb were classically minded, their numbers would hardly have dented Romford's bucolic addiction to [Gid-ee]. However, the First World War introduced a new and unforeseen element. About a mile east of Gidea Hall, stood a smaller country house, Hare Hall. In 1915, it was taken over by the Army and assigned to an unusual unit called the Artists' Rifles. Initially formed as a militia corps in 1860, it welcomed painters, sculptors, musicians, actors and literary figures in general. Many of them were educated men, who were natural candidates to be trained for commissions. During the First World War, the Artists' Rifles produced over ten thousand officers, most of whom transferred to other regiments. Many of them passed through Hare Hall Camp, and most would have arrived there by train through Herbert Raphael's wayside station. If there was any section of the British Army that would have interpreted 'Gidea' in a classical spirit, it was the Artists' Rifles, either because they were the recipients of privileged schooling, or because they had studied Roman and Renaissance art. Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the impact of their temporary influx into the district: I know of no sound recordings made by veterans reminiscing about their experience of Hare Hall. It may well be that, for each soldier who talked of his time at [Gid-ee-uh] Park, there were a dozen relatives or friends around the country who would have imbibed the trisyllabic pronunciation – but they would have been too scattered to affect the local speech of Romford. In 1921, Hare Hall became a secondary school for boys, and the first headmaster, an Oxford graduate in Classics, ensured that Latin was part of the curriculum.[60] Yet none of this could sustain any fantasy that Romford suddenly acquired an enclave in which discourse was carried on in a dead language. The most that can be argued is that the area acquired some residents, and even more transients, who might have read 'Gidea' as three syllables.[61] This alone would hardly be sufficient to bring about a large-scale and permanent change.
Demographic change always provides a seductively attractive explanation for any disruption of continuity. Certainly the one piece of specific evidence bearing on the shift in the pronunciation of 'Gidea' emphasised the role of incomers, but – as discussed below – that cannot tell the whole story. Christmas 1922 saw the appearance of a publication in Romford called Senex Annual, apparently a medley of local snippets and stories intended to raise money for a fund in support of local children whose fathers had been killed in the First World War. Text by the author, 'Senex' (old man), was supplemented by illustrations from the pen of his wife, 'Juvenca', a Latin word that could mean 'maiden' but was usually less felicitously translated as 'young cow'. Their identities were apparently well known in the district, and it was assumed that they were "Gideans", a term for Garden Suburb residents that I have not encountered elsewhere. Evidently, they bore out the suggestion advanced above that many of those who settled in Herbert Raphael's new sub-division were familiar with Latin. However, Senex urged his readers to apply the traditional Essex pronunciation of [Gid-ee] Hall to their new home. The suggestion seems to have struck one doubting reporter as a novelty: "'Giddy' as here used is said to represent the correct pronunciation of 'Gidea' in Gidea Park." However, the initiative was applauded by the Essex Review, a magazine run by a loose alliance of upper-middle-class Anglicans and Quakers who mostly resided in the Braintree-Chelmsford-Colchester triangle. The Essex Review sought to act as a journal of record for the county while celebrating its heritage. Unfortunately, it frequently combined these worthy objectives with expressions of disapproval which haughtily censured the alien masses who were moving into the mushrooming suburbs of south-west Essex and who seemed to show inadequate appreciation of its ancient traditions. The Senex Annual (whose author seems to have been an Essex native himself) met with its approval for taking a stand against linguistic change: "the note … giving the correct pronunciation of 'Giddy Park' is timely, for by London-bred residents in that delightful area, we have heard it called 'Gid-ear'." The note of distaste was palpable.[62]
The comment in the Essex Review pointing the finger at the "London-bred" is valuable, but merits interrogation. Could there have been enough of those deplorable newcomers by 1922 to bring about an overall shift in pronunciation? Romford's population had been growing, steadily but relatively slowly. From 13,656 in 1901, it had risen to 16,970 in 1911 and then to 19,442 in 1921. Thus by the time of the Senex Annual, around one-third of the inhabitants had roots outside the town. Romford was still essentially an Essex market town, where country accents mingled with more recent Cockney tones. For the Londoners, no doubt, [Gid-ee] was easily dismissed as bumpkin dialect, by implication mangled and incorrect. But not all the in-migrants were from the capital: those, like Senex, who had Essex roots, would have had no problem in assimilating to local speech. The pace of growth picked up throughout the interwar period: the twenty thousand of 1921 had become 36,000 in 1931 and would climb to 88,000 in 1951.[63] Yet its indigenous residents were not driven out, and many retained positions as community leaders: in 1932, the churchwarden at St Edward's in the Market Place, the amply proportioned J.S. Hammond, could proudly claim to have sung in the choir there since 1866.[64] Thus population influx helps to explain how [Gid-ee] became [Gid-ee-uh] but it cannot tell the whole story.[65]
The key element in the pronunciation shift was not simply the numerical influx of new residents, but their distribution. The station that Raphael had persuaded the Great Eastern Railway to open at Squirrels Heath was more than half a mile (about one kilometre) from the Garden Suburb. As housing engulfed the area, it naturally clustered around the station. The name 'Gidea Park' had acquired something of a cachet, and developers were keen to use it to promote their projects.[66] As a result, it came to describe not only the infill between the main road and the railway, but spread widely across the tracks to the south and east, in the process blanketing two local names of medieval origin, Hare Street and Squirrels Heath. Gidea Park, in fact, had no precise boundaries, but the name was given to a local government ward within the Romford Urban District. In 1931, this had a population of 6,619, barely ten percent of whom could have lived in the original subdivision .[67] As the new Gidea Park stretched further away from the original project, the Garden Suburb became marginalised and forgotten. It was not mentioned either in the original edition of 1954 of Nikolaus Pevsner's Essex volume in the Buildings of England series, nor even in the revised version of 1965. Its rediscovery would begin with the formation of a local Civic Society in 1967, by which time any battle over the pronunciation of Gidea Park was long over. Any connection between the newly regimented streets of bricks and mortar and the ancient mansion of Gidea Hall probably faded during the nineteen-twenties, when the Hall ceased to be tenanted and was used as a social club. It was broken altogether in 1930 with the demolition of the building that Sir John Eyles had erected two centuries earlier.[68] The emphasis placed upon this local population shift is of course founded on the assumption that the three-syllable pronunciation was endorsed by the GER, and its successor from 1922, the London and North-East Railway Company. I can only close by referring to my own childhood memories from the end of the nineteen-forties: the area called Gidea Park was centred on the station of that name, and it was invariably pronounced as [Gid-ee-uh]. Not until I became interested in local history, as a teenager, did I learn that it had once had only two syllables and not three.
Tailpiece enigma There is, however, one further – if unnoticed – mystery in the story. Essentially, the argument of this essay is that it was Herbert Raphael who rejected the traditional pronunciation of Giddy Hall, and who managed to impose a three-syllable alternative for the marketing of his Gidea Park project. But what of his own name? In European culture, 'Raphael' is invariably pronounced as three syllables. The founder of his family in England was a Dutchman called Raphael Raphael: the betting must be that the two names were identically voiced, with the probability inclining to six syllables in total. Yet, for the past eighty years at least, everyone associated with Romford has referred to the public amenity that he presented to the town as '[Ray-full] Park'. Did Giddy Hall take posthumous revenge upon the memory of its supplanter?
ENDNOTES I owe thanks to Helen Cooper, Simon Donoghue and Andrew Jones for information and comments. The story of Gidea Park is outlined in "Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/420-origins-of-gidea-park, and some of the houses in the new suburb are illustrated in "The idealised homes of Gidea Park: some images from the 1911 Exhibition":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/419-gidea-images. For a full list of material about Essex history on this website, see https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/411-essex-history-on-www-gedmartin-net.
[1] Daily Chronicle (London), n.d., quoted Chelmsford Chronicle, 7 July 1911. For the background and the 1911 exhibition, "Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/420-origins-of-gidea-park and "The idealised homes of Gidea Park: some images from the 1911 Exhibition": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/419-gidea-images.
[2] I use an amateur form of phonetics in square brackets to indicate pronunciations.
[3] Claude Greening attended Westminster School between 1884 and 1887. He later qualified as a solicitor. He submitted verse to Essex local newspapers from c.1902, some of it patriotic or religious, with light offerings on other topics. In 1905, he lived at Forest Gate; in 1911 near Southend, at Thorpe Bay (which he hailed in a poem). Greening published a three-act play, Wedded for Love, in 1896, and a book of verse, God's Beauty Scenes, in 1924. Morning Post, 25 April 1899; Chelmsford Chronicle, passim, esp. 5 August 1905, 18, 25 August 1911.
[4] Chelmsford Chronicle, 7 July 1911.
[5] Note by W.R. Powell, Victoria County History of Essex, vii (London, 1978), 67-9 [cited as VCH, vii].
[6] P.H. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex (Cambridge, 1935), 117-18.
[7] J.E.B. Gover et al., The Place-Names of Surrey (Cambridge, 1934), 259. The parallel with Abinger can only be a tentative identification, as the handful of Havering examples show some differences.
[8] VCH, vii, 67; H.F. Westlake (ed.), Hornchurch Priory: a Kalendar of Documents … (London, 1923), 123 (doc. 515). "Risebregge" was Risebridge, which is now a golf course. Members of the Abenhatch family frequently appear in Westlake. The seller of the estate is variously named as John of Abbenache and Walter de Habenhatche.
[9] E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (4th ed., Oxford, 1960), 545. The documentary source is calendared in Essex Archives Online (https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/).
[10] G. Terry, Memories of Old Romford… (Romford, 1880), 65n. As a Methodist minister, Terry was allergic to frivolity.
[11] The Clacton example was first recorded as Gyddyhall, an alternative name for Engaynehall in 1589. Another Essex property to have its origins in a nickname was Copped Hall at Epping, which took its name from small decorative pinnacles on the roofline. It is interesting to note that it was first recorded (as "Coppedehall") in 1258, at the same time as the earliest examples of Giddy Hall. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 118, 336, 24. There are also two examples of Shingle Hall, a nickname referring to wooden roof tiles (presumably a novelty in a county where thatch predominated). They are at Epping (Shinglede-halle, 1258) and Great Dunmow: Reaney, 24, 476-7.
[12] I owe these translations to Professor Helen Cooper of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
[13] In the 1980s, the term 'Crazy Gang' was applied to Wimbledon Football Club. The word 'crazy' did not appear in the English language until the 16th century. It originally meant 'broken' and could refer to illness and to the physical condition of deterioration in old age.
[14] M.K. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community: the Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500 (Cambridge, 1986), 116.
[15] McIntosh, Autonomy and Community: the Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500, 77. The existence of the central belt of heathland can be deduced from the Domesday Book entry for Havering. The total area of the manor (the subsequent parishes of Hornchurch and Romford) was 16,100 acres. In 1066, 43 ploughs had been at work. Assuming that each plough worked 120 acres (almost certainly an over-estimate, given Havering's heavy clay soils), the cleared area was just over 5,160 acres. To this we may add 1,060 acres in three commons (Collier Row, Harolds Wood and Noak Hill) which were enclosed c. 1814, each of them former woodland located on higher ground. In a survey of c. 1355, the royal park at Havering-atte-Bower included 1,154 acres of land. There was about a square mile of marshland beside the Thames, which may be estimated at about 600 acres. Between 1251 and the c.1355 survey, 1,748 acres were reckoned to have been enclosed, and this figure may not have included some specific grants, of which Giddy Hall could have been one. These categories total 9,722 acres, leaving 6,400 acres unaccounted for. Since heathland produced no revenue, it would not have been recorded in Domesday Book. Some invasions can be precisely dated, e,g. Redden Court, in the northern part of Hornchurch, was granted (originally as 100 acres) to a court official William the Fleming in 1212. (It was this kind of favouritism that King John was forced to promise to stop in Magna Carta.) The earliest detailed survey of Havering, the map made for James I in 1618, confirms that the fields that made up the Giddy Hall estate were relatively large and generally rectangular, which points to enclosure of heathland: fields hacked from forest were usually smaller and irregular in shape.
[16] McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 40, 216-17.
[17] Alexander Black purchased Gidea Hall in 1802. His name suggests that he was a Scot.
[18] VCH, vii, 12 has a sketch version of the 1618 map, and the Romford section is redrawn in more detail in B. Evans, Romford Heritage (Stroud, Gloucs, 2002), 25. The superb colouration of the 1618 map can be seen on https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/result_details.aspx?ThisRecordsOffSet=1&id=151946, but (even after enhancement) the detail is not easy to make out.
[19] VCH, vii, 33.
[20] Essex Archives Online. When Thomas Coke's enemies pillaged his Giddy Hall property in 1468, they destroyed "the deer in his park, his conies [rabbits] and fish" (italics added). This seems to confirm the existence of the lake. It is possible that the trashing of Coke's property inflicted irreparable damage on the watermill: it had certainly disappeared by 1618, although it was evidently still remembered. Equally, Coke, who had great pretensions, may not have welcomed an industrial enterprise so close to his home: he acquired Romford's windmill among his local purchases. Watermills continued to operate on the Chelmer and the Roding, but it is likely that so small a stream with a limited catchment area could not guarantee the head of water required for milling. Terry, Memories of Old Romford, 68; McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 226.
[21] VCH, vii, 67; McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 142, 226.
[22] VCH, vii, 82. Romford's chapel was subordinate to the parish church, St Andrew's in Hornchurch, where Romford people had to bury their dead. Arguing that there were "perils of the way, inundations and dangers between the two places", the Chichele brothers secured permission for Romford to have its own cemetery. The Bishop of St Davids was permitted to consecrate the new chapel in 1410. It became St Edward's church. Westlake (ed.), Hornchurch Priory: a Kalendar of Documents, 11 (doc. 6). In 1414, Henry Chichele became Archbishop of Canterbury: he is the prelate in Shakespeare's Henry V who urged the young king to invade France. Perhaps he felt guilty about this for, in 1438, he founded All Souls College, Oxford, as a memorial to those killed in the Hundred Years War.
[23] e.g. VCH, vii, 67,
[24] A.F. Sutton, "Cook, Sir Thomas (c. 1410–1478)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which revises the entry by C. Welch in the original Dictionary of National Biography, xii (1887), 94-5,where he was called Sir Thomas Cooke.
[25] VCH, vii, 38. The unusual use of 'Court' in this property, first recorded in 1413, suggests that it, too, was an unusually large edifice. Since no such building survived, it may be that Cook purchased it so that he could demolish the structure and use the materials for his own project at Giddy Hall.
[26] He held the offices of 'Farmer' (tax collector), 'Parker' and 'Keeper' (in charge of the King's estate at Havering-atte-Bower). McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 53, 269.
[27] The Cook / Cooke family remained at Giddy Hall until 1658, and usually held key offices in what became known as the Liberty of Havering. The manor was never officially styled a Liberty. In the subtitle to his 1880 Memories of Old Romford, Terry coined the phrase 'Royal Liberty', which was later used to name a local school. H. Smith, A History of the Parish of Havering-atte-Bower, Essex (Colchester, 1925), 265-88.
[28] VCH, vii, 68.
[29] J. Norden, Speculi Britanniae Pars … Essex (1594), (Camden Society, London, 1840), 31.
[30] His son, Sir Richard Cooke, used "Guidie Hall" in 1579. F.G. Emmison, ed., Elizabethan Life: Wills of Essex Gentry… (Chelmsford, 1978), 18, 69.
[31] In addition to the two examples from Emmison (above), I list the examples, followed by an explanation of the letter code that indicates the source. The first dates from 1549, within the ownership of Anthony Cooke: Guydyhall (and variants), 1549, R; Guydy-hall, 1580, M; Guydy Hall, 1590, E; Guidyhall 1598, McI; Guidihall, 1604, M; Guidyhall, 1613-4, E; Guydie Hall, 1637, T; Giddy alias Guiddy Hall Park, 1652, E; Guidie Hall, 1668, T; Guyddy Hall, 1668, T*; Guydy hall, 1675/8: O; Guyddy Hall, 1685, T; Guydy Hall, 1688, T; Guydy Hall, 1690, T; Guydy Hall, 1707. E. E= Essex Archives Online; McI= M.K. McIntosh, "The fall of a Tudor gentle family", Huntington Library Quarterly, xli (1978); M = P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex … (2 vols, London, 1768); O = John Ogilby's 1675 strip map of 'The Road from London to Harwich in Essex', and 'Map of Essex' by Ogilby and Morgan, 1678; R = Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex; T = Terry, Memories of Old Romford. The asterisked example from 1668 was quoted by Terry from Romford parish records. Ogilby's maps are widely illustrated on the Internet. Cartographers keen to sell their lavishly coloured maps would have felt some obligation to conform to the wishes of the Big House. The road map was reprinted and pirated into the 18th century, so that the spelling last recorded in 1707 probably remained in circulation much later. It is illustrated in Evans, Romford Heritage, 50.
[32] M.K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed… (Cambridge, 1991), 86, 236-7, 262, 265-8.
[33] VCH, vii, 12. The 1638 print is reproduced at VCH, vii, 65, but without the caption. McIntosh, "The fall of a Tudor gentle family", 291 quotes a "Gidde Hall" from 1579.
[34] EAO.
[35] "Sir John Eyles rebuilt this House in an elegant manner, and with plantations of trees, canals, and other improvements, rendered it one of the most compleat Seats in this County." Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 67.
[36] VCH, vii, 68.
[37] For what it is worth, Benyon was praised by a 1913 study of the East India Company in Madras (where he also served as Mayor): "No complaints were made against him in any quarter. He was a capable administrator who enjoyed the complete confidence of the Company throughout his long term of office." H.L. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras … (2 vols, London, 1913), ii, 272. Another source states: "Orphaned at birth, Richard Benyon was an interesting character. He was raised either by a godfather or a neighbour – no one quite knows – and at the age of nine or ten was given a one-way ticket to Chennai, which was then known by the British as Fort St George, then as Madras. A bright young man, Richard had a job as a scribe for the East India Company and later served as a colonial administrator and then as governor of Fort St George – a post he held for nine years." He returned to England with a fortune of £70,000: https://thebenyonestate.com/about/history/full-history. I have not traced any more recent evaluations of his career, which would probably be less laudatory. Other East India Company officials associated with Madras were controversial. Thomas 'Diamond' Pitt somehow acquired a valuable gemstone, the sale of which financed his descendants, two of whom became British Prime Ministers. Elihu Yale, born in Massachusetts but raised in England, was dismissed by the East India Company for questionable trading activities. He later used a small part of his wealth to help endow a college in Connecticut which became Yale University.
[38] On a return visit from India in the late seventeen-twenties, he had purchased an estate at Margaretting near Chelmsford. Documents on EAO refer to a lawyer and a landowner with the unusual surname of Benyon in the Coggeshall area a generation earlier.
[39] E.g. Morant, History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 19. At i, 67, he cited (and possibly invented) a 1668 reference to "Geddyng-hall": no source was cited, and I have not found it elsewhere.
[40] VCH, i, 445. It was probably a farm at Little Warley subsequently called [Old] Englands. VCH, vii, 99, 176n. In 1507, this property belonged to the Bishop of London.
[41] McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 145-6.
[42] The Cooke family used their pretended manor courts to impose entry fines, equal to twelve months' rent, when holdings passed to new occupiers. In 1590, there were 67 subunits associated with the Giddy Hall estate. McIntosh, A Community Transformed, 99.
[43] Morant, History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 63, 66.
[44] The name was revived for a modernist apartment block near the station, Geddy Court, in 1934. VCH, vii, 59.
[45] EAO calendars about two dozen documents relating to Gidea Hall or its owners c.1750-80 without commenting on any variations in spelling.
[46] https://map-of-essex.uk/. "Watermen's Bridge" was probably an echo of the medieval watermill. See also the first Ordnance Survey map, surveyed between 1798 and 1803: https://maps.nls.uk/view/257576456.
[47] The Times, 11 August 1787. The other references are Chelmsford Chronicle, 24 February 1786, 9 November 1787; Norfolk Chronicle, 7 October 1792; Times, 16 May 1792, 20 July 1797, 22 June 1801; Morning Chronicle, 22 June 1801. The 'Mr Benyon' referred to was the son of the original purchaser. He seems to have been in financial difficulty and made several attempts to sell the "very elegant and capital Mansion, called Gidea Hall": auction advertisements were repeated over several weeks. In 1797, sale particulars could be consulted at an inn called The Unicorn in nearby Hare Street.
[48] E. Ogborne, The History of Essex … (London, 1817), 130; T. Wright, The History and Topography of Essex… (2 vols, London, 1836), ii, 439.
[49] The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names … (2010), 531, argues that the –c– was inserted in the name to avoid confusion with 'silly'. It is also possible that the –x form in 'Manx' (which replaced 'Manks', possibly around 1800) was adopted to avoid association with the informal adjective 'manky', meaning inferior or dirty.
[50] Terry, Memories of Old Romford, 65n.
[51] J. Wright, ed., The English Dialect Dictionary … (6 vols, Oxford, 1898-1905), ii, 590. Edward Gepp's An Essex Dialect Dictionary was published in 1923, and reissued in 1969.
[52]J.E.B. Gover et al., The Place-Names of Middlesex… (Cambridge, 1942), 89 gives a slightly different interpretation.
[53] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages, Romford Garden Suburb, Gidea Park (Romford, 1911), 41. It is striking to encounter the term 'trolled': it was an angling term, unrelated to its 21st-century use to describe Internet abuse.
[54] The story is told in more detail in "Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/420-origins-of-gidea-park.
[55] The speech in his honour referred to below praised him as "a most liberal supporter and encourager of every kind of sport, social gathering, and deserving charity" in Romford, although the allusion to "his unfathomable pocket" was perhaps double-edged. Herbert Raphael could certainly afford his largesse.
[56] Chelmsford Chronicle, 11 November 1898. The toast was moved by Charles Fitch, the most prominent resident of the scattered district of Collier Row, where he had settled the previous year. Raphael belonged to the radical wing of the Liberal party; Fitch was an active Conservative. Chelmsford Chronicle, 2 July 1897, 5 October 1900. 'Gay' of course has acquired a wholly different meaning from its earlier association with 'merry'.
[57] The historian L.J. Leicester concluded that, despite expectations, Raphael did not move into Gidea Hall: https://gpadcs.org/?page_id=113.
[58] It is unlikely that azaleas were common in British gardens at that time. There is a fascinating article about the cultivation of grevillea in Britain, by Tony Cavanagh on https://anpsa.org.au/a-short-history-of-the-cultivation-of-grevillea-in-england/. Many species had been brought to Britain by 1900, but mostly by specialist horticulturalists. The Romford winter hardly encouraged bougainvillea.
[59] The Book of the Exhibition of Houses and Cottages, Romford Garden Suburb, Gidea Park (Romford, 1911), 59.
[60] This assessment falls far short of claiming that the school, Royal Liberty, was a classical academy. Personal observation and calculation of the years 1956-63 would suggest that, at most, one quarter of pupils studied Latin. The teaching was excellent but candour compels me to admit that little more than the outlines of the language took root.
[61] For completeness, the Australian word 'gidgee' [gi-jee] should be noted here. The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines it as "a small acacia (A. cambagei), yielding close-grained dark-red timber & emitting unpleasant odour at approach of rain (also called stinking wattle)". It formed scrub that was described by a 1901 traveller in the interior of South Australia as "monotonous, uninteresting, and depressing". Daily News (Perth), 11 July 1901, via the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive, Trove. Alternative spellings include, 'gidea', 'gidya' and 'giddea', the last also being used for a hunting spear. Unusually erudite doggerel in the Brisbane Worker, 2 September 1899, clarifies the pronunciation. It begins: "Far away in a land that is ridgy, / And stricken, and bare with the drought, / Where the asafoetida gidea / Breathes odours of upas about." Whilst it would be delightful to argue that the pronunciation of Gidea Park was influenced by a term believed to have been borrowed from Aboriginal languages from western New South Wales, the idea must be abandoned, if with regret.
[62] The article, called 'The Giddy Year', was written with "wit and sarcasm". Chelmsford Chronicle, 29 December 1922; Essex Review, xxxii (1923), 55. From time to time, the Essex Review published heart-searching articles expressing puzzlement that its circulation was very low. I do not know if the Senex Annual for 1922 has survived. The Local Studies section of Havering Libraries has no copy and it is not listed in the catalogues of either the British Library or Cambridge University Library.
[63] The exact figures were 35,918 in 1931 and 88,002 in 1951. (There was no census in 1941.) Romford Urban District (a borough from 1937) gained about 1,200 people by incorporating Havering-atte-Bower and Noak Hill in 1934.
[64] B. Evans, A Century of Romford (Stroud, Gloucs, 1999), 67.
[65] In general terms, the influence of population influx on pronunciation may be seen by comparing Witham with Walthamstow. The mid-Essex town doubled in population between 1881 (2,966) and 1931 (6,751), but many of the incomers probably originated in the nearby countryside and the overall numbers were small. It remained [Wit-um]. By contrast, Walthamstow grew from 21,715 in 1881 to 95,101 in 1901. The traditional pronunciations [Wor-tem-stoe or Wol-tum-stoe] were replaced by the elision of the letters –t– and –h– into a soft –th– form. By extension, the alteration was also imposed upon Waltham [formerly Wor-tem] Abbey, about 8 miles (3 kms) to the north. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex, 299, 103, 27; personal information).
[66] A local estate agent advertised downmarket terraced housing in Ardleigh Green c. 1930 as "Harwood Avenue & Stafford Avenue, Gidea Park". C. Saltmarsh and N. Jennings, Havering Village, Ardleigh Green… (Chichester, 2009), Illustration no. 182.
[67] Kelly's Directory of Essex, 1937, 409.
[68] It should be noted that much of the development of the district now known as Gidea Park took place from the late 1920s, so that many new residents would have had little or no awareness of Gidea Hall. Aerial photographs from 1927 show the beginnings of Fairholme Avenue, to the south of the station, but no housing west of Balgores Lane (e.g. Carlton Road) or east of Crossways (e.g. Castellan and Compton Avenue): https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/, especially EPW017565, EPW017571 (in which Gidea Hall can be seen in the top left) and EPW017573. Essex Archives Online has a sad photograph, from the National Monuments Record, of Gidea Hall in its last days. It was derelict when it was demolished in 1930, and had presumably been a ruin for some time – just as the suburban influx to the 'new' Gidea Park gathered momentum: https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/result_details.aspx?ThisRecordsOffSet=36&id=313939.