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road could join that road at Peckham Corner.4
The eastern sector of the parish was described as:
‘All that part of ... Ash lying
East of the road from Longfield to Stansted comprising Berrys Maple, the
Old Malt House, the Haven, Horns Lodge, Pettings Farm (upper]
Petting’s / lower) the Hamlet of Hodsol Street, and that part of
Culverstone Green lying in Ash parish’.
If justification was needed for the particularity of these
legends, it was provided in somewhat remarkable manner many years later.
After the census of 1931, the hamlet of Hodsoll Street, for perhaps the
only time in its history, achieved prominence in the national press. No
enumerator had been that way.
George Elcome’s young son, Alfred, could have had no
doubts as to his brief when, in 1851, he took his first census of the
easterly reaches of Ash. In later life Alfred became a bricklayer. A
teenage enumerator who was subsequently a bricklaying enumerator may
have some claim to fame. |
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Although the parish had been through
hard times in the eighteen-forties, its population had continued to grow
and by 1851 topped the seven hundred mark, a peak not reached
again for very many years to come. The named individuals present on the
census night numbered six hundred and eighty-eight, eighty-eight more
than the population recorded for Ash seventy years later, in 1921.
Some new building had taken place during the preceding
decade. There were now one hundred and thirty-seven inhabited and five
uninhabited houses, plus a house in course of erection at West Yoke. One
of the uninhabited houses was, in George Elcome’s opinion, ‘a House
Inhabited but the occupiers was not at home on the Night of the 30 of
March’. Higher authority demurred.
Ash remained a parish of the young. More than half of the
residents were aged under twenty-one, less than a third were aged
thirty-five or more. Only forty-five |