Lurgashall Archive

Greengate Farm within living memory

In the centre of our village sits Greengate Farm.  Now a farm in name only,  for almost 200 years up until the late 1970s it was a thriving small farm of about 50-60 acres running from the farm buildings at the junction between Mill Lane and High Hampstead Lane down to the Mill Pond.

Between 1926 and 1946, the farm was run by Herbert Mold and his sister Minna.  The W.I. history of Lurgashall, written in 1957, recalls Mr Mold kindly giving permission for the newly formed village stoolball team to practise in the meadow behind his farm in the late 1930s.In 1946 the Hampshire family arrived to take over the tenancy of Greengate Farm, and they stayed there for the next 30 years.  John Hampshire was a Yorkshireman, and in 1946 he brought his wife Mabel, their two-year-old young son Chris and John’s parents Frank and Isabel to start a new life in Lurgashall.

The Hampshires kept a herd of dairy cattle (to the right of the farmhouse) and a piggery (at the back).  Several villagers remember the farm when it was a working farm.

Michael Underwood (1936-2012) took his first full-time job at the farm after leaving school in 1951:  “The top part of the yard was full of pigs – literally – and Mr Hampshire used to go to London with his lorry twice a week to get the pig’s food – they used to call swill, and it was all the old stuff from the hotel dustbins in the back of the lorry.  When he came back with all these old dustbins on the lorry, I used to have the job of emptying them into this boiler – God, a reeking smell, it was terrible!

Otherwise I’d be cleaning out the cow shed, helping out with the cows. There were cow-sheds going up the Lickfold road. The cows used to come out onto the road; he’d drive them up the road towards Lickfold to the field on the left-hand side.”

Brenda Bartlett (born 1941) had some lovely memories of the Greengate Farm  cattle when she was a girl at Lurgashall School:  “About quarter past three, when we came out of school, Mr Hampshire or one of the workers would take the cows all up the road past what was Kath’s bungalow, to the top of the hill and take them back into the field.  I used to quite often walk with him, and I’d know all the cows’ names.

Most people in the village, including the school, used to get their milk from Greengate Farm.  Brenda again:  “They used big churns in the back of a big pick-up van or lorry thing, and you used to go out and they ladled it out from the churns into your milk jug.  I used to go in the school holidays up to the farm and watch the milking.”

The cattle continued to fascinate village kids through the 1960s:

Malcolm McLachlan:  “When we lived at Bishops Cottages I used to go over and “help” Mr Hampshire; always got a drink of milk straight out of the cow as my “pay”.”

Martin Dillon-Thiselton:  “I loved cows when I was a kid. I used to be in from school and straight up to Hampshire’s farm to help get the cows in for milking.”

By the mid 1970s, John Hampshire had to give up farming, so he and Mabel moved into Bishop’s Cottages, and the farmhouse and buildings were sold off by the Leconfield Estate, although the Estate has kept the land.  And that was the end of the working farm at Greengate Farm.

If you or anyone you know might have any photos, documents, stories or artefacts that you’d like to contribute to the Archive, please contact us at archive@lurgashallvillagehall.org