Spondon Village

A Village Remembered

Wars and Tumults

By good fortune, Derbyshire, Derby and Spondon were never of great strategic importance in the military plans of armies and revolutions. The Roman garrisons needed to guard the mineral ore traffic from the north were fairly small. The Saxons and Danes periodically fought over possession of the Trent and Derwent valleys, and the marauding Vikings had to penetrate beyond river waterfalls or dense forest undergrowth to reach it. Derby was one of the five boroughs of North Mercia and money was minted there. In 940 an English moneyer, Rathulf, was brought from York to mint coins when the borough fell to the Vikings and came under the Danelaw. There were however few great castles, abbeys or cathedral treasures to plunder. The farmlands were not as rich and productive as those further south and only minor barons of the Norman conquest were given awards here. The county was peripheral to the quarrels of the great dynasties of York and Lancaster, and Elizabethan manors here were small and unimposing.
The Civil War between the Royalist and Parliamentary forces began in August 1642 when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham before riding to Derby to join with his nephew Prince Rupert there. His route probably led via Spondon where the Gilberts of Locko remained loyal to the King. There is some evidence of local fighting from a cannon ball that was found in Leas Brook near Longley Lane. It was dated 1646 and weighed over four pounds. Derby was held by Parliamentary forces, and fortunately most larger battles were fought around Nottingham or further to the east and south in Leicestershire. After eighteen years under Cromwell, the restoration of the monarchy came with Charles II in 1660.

In the Jacobean rebellion, opposing the rule of George II, on the 4th of December 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie" entered Derby with his army of 7,000 Scots, and some of the clansmen camped in Spondon. The Gilberts were counted as supporters of the Stuarts, but the affections of the villagers, male or female, were not recorded. This was the Young Pretender's army's furthest penetration south, and two days later he began his disastrous retreat to Scotland. A reconstruction of the room in Babington House used by the Prince is in the Derby Museum. The only remembrance of this Jacobite episode in Spondon is "Royal Hills Road", a name used afterwards that has recently been restored from the "Windmill Lane" I knew in boyhood.

The threat of a Napoleonic invasion in 1803 found the village ready to play its part and a company of 140 volunteers was formed, including two named Porter. Spondonians fought in the Derbyshire Yeomanry and in the Sherwood Foresters in all the far-off campaigns of Empire-building that characterised the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Boer War and the Great War were memorialised in the parish church, and regimental flags and banners bore a fading testimony to famous battles and campaigns fought by men of Spondon.

The next localised military presence came with the advent of the second World War. War preparations began early in 1939, including a distribution of gas-masks at The Old Farm on Church Hill to all Spondonians. Even babies were provided with an ominous rubber enclosure with a large window, and a hand pump for an operator. After my sister Janet was born in 1940 we got one for her. I became an Air Raid Precautions messenger boy, and one of the Spondon House school buildings was used as an ARP Post. From there we were expected to take written messages to other posts, using our bicycles if the telephone system was destroyed. A Royal Air Force Balloon Barrage hangar was built alongside the Raynesway arterial road, and anti-aircraft gun emplacements were prepared in our village fields to protect the approaches to Derby from bombing raids.

The Royal Artillery stationed heavy anti-aircraft artillery batteries on Longley Lane and Dale Road. A Bofors light anti-aircraft battery was placed on the allotments on Gravel Pit Lane. With the crisis and the feeling of an impending war came the beginning of National Service Registration for everyone. The carrying of identity cards was made compulsory and I still remember my personal number RCYW-103-4 that was given to me. My brother Stan enlisted in the Territorial Army and attended drills in Derby. In our home, khaki, brass buttons and equipment webbing became familiar sights. The chance to hoist Stan's rifle, to sight down it, and hear the click of the trigger was a thrill to a thirteen-year old boy.

Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and the war began. After the dispatch of the British Expeditionary Force to France a kind of phony war ensued, ending with the German blitzkrieg attack on Belgium in 1940. After the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk, a unit of Local Defence Volunteers was formed and these were based at Locko Park where they occupied the West Lodge. Eventually they were incorporated into the Home Guard.

Everyone was united in a spirit of patriotism and grim determination that we would eventually prevail against the evils of Nazism and Fascism. Every human activity seemed to be part of a huge war machine and arsenal. Teenagers too young to enlist in the regular forces joined the Air Training Corps and the Army Cadets or the Sea Cadets and spent evenings and weekends in military pursuits. The reality of what might happen to us came home as we paraded to the church, and joined in memorial services for young Spondonians killed in the battles of the newest and greatest war the world had ever seen. Other villagers were captured by the enemy in the fall of France and at Singapore, and Italian prisoners of war in chocolate brown uniforms were seen working on Spondon farms.

Following the Allied victory in 1945, our own prisoners of war came home from Germany and the Far East, and the veterans gradually returned. Demobilization of the armed forces was stretched out over the next three years of uneasy peace. Wars of independence for former colonies involved some of Spondon's soldiers but life began to brighten greatly as rationing and other hardships were ended. When my wife and I emigrated with our young family from Liverpool to Canada in 1956, the Middle East war between Israel and Egypt had erupted, and Britain and France were preparing to intervene to capture the Suez Canal. Sand-coloured trucks and tanks were being moved to the docks as we left. Wars and rumours of war never end.

---The Village of Spondon in Derbyshire ---Saint Werburgh's Church ---Wars and Tumults ---The Derwent and the Canals ---The Farmers ---Victorian Spondon ---The Willowcroft ---The Schools ---The Inns and Public Houses ---Spondon Voices ---A Spondon Family ---A Child's Christmas in Spondon, 1935 ---Epilogue ---Images of Spondon ---