Cricket Hill Cottage

This house, known at first as St George’s Cottage, was built about 1880 and was a girls’ school for some years before Mrs F D M Brown brought her family to live here in the early twentieth century. Here she brought up her children and it was home for at least three of them until the Second World War. Mrs Brown’s step-grand-daughter, Claudia Russell-Brown (known professionally as Anna Russell, the musical parodist), described the house as being bitterly cold, crammed with Indian memorabilia and with no plumbing. (A former pupil from the school there in the 1890s when this quite substantial house was fairly new, also recalled that there was no bathroom and the only ‘sanitation’ was “a bucket earth closet opening out of the hall”.)

Mrs Brown - who always wore a hat indoors, perhaps it kept her warm - did not regard plumbing as of any importance, and it was in any case quite usual for water to be drawn daily from a well before mains water arrived. Towards the late thirties, however, her sons sent a sample of the water to be analysed, and the Analyst replied that it was the finest collection of flora and fauna that he had seen for many years. They persuaded their mother to “take the waters” at Llandrindod Wells and when she returned mains water and drainage (a septic tank) had been installed. But Mrs Brown continued to use the earth closet which she regarded as healthier.

One imagines a very lively household full of young Browns; they had a reputation for wildness as well as for charm. Claudia Russell-Brown, when visiting as a child, found her uncle Kit breeding setters and pointers, with eight full-grown dogs as well as puppies everywhere.  For the three youngest children, Jessie, Kit and Llewyn, Cricket Hill Cottage continued to be home until the Second World War, though their careers took them all over the world.

Claudia Russell-Brown was in Yateley again at the beginning of the Second World War and found the retired colonels, of which there were many, “setting up do-it-yourself booby traps in case of an invasion”. One “dug tremendous trenches at intervals across his lawns, then covered them with plywood and put the turf back on top.  Tank trap!  Another had electric wiring all over the property, which could be turned on by a switch in the house”.  Air raid shelters of various designs were being built. David Brown, then a small boy, remembers that Colonel Buck next door “had steps leading down to a slit trench over which there was a soil-covered, upturned bath.  Beneath the waste pipe, there was a candle on a fitment secured to the overflow. My grandmother, Mrs Coleridge, my motherand I were taking tea with Colonel and Mrs Buck when the warning went for one of the first air raids in the area. We were all led down to the shelter, my grandmother and mother getting suppressed giggles on seeing the siting of the lighted candle. Shortly afterwards, three German planes flew by in formation over Blackwater. Colonel Buck took me up to see them. I do not think the shelter was ever used again.”

A more substantial dugout, solid timber beams covered with earth, was built by Colonel V C Brown (Kit) near the back door of Cricket Hill Cottage. It was never used. Colonel Brown was killed in 1940 during the retreat to Dunkirk.

Cricket Hill Cottage was let during the war (“for the duration” was the phrase everyone used, expecting it to last a few months) to Colonel and Mrs J B L Stilwell, of the family from whom Mrs Brown had bought the house a few years earlier. Many houses changed hands temporarily or permanently as their occupants left to join the services or moved around the country for other war-connected purposes. David Brown went to boarding school and his holidays were spent wherever his mother was.

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