THE END OF AN ERA

It was hardly surprising then that the now Temperance supporting Crabbe sisters, sold the brewery to the other Essex brewer, Grays. Grays kept the pubs and sold on the Brewery to Wrigleys who closed it down in 1928. Despite that, Great Baddow escaped much of the worse of the Great Depression because there was now the Marconi and Rothman factories.

Despite the UK’s increasingly frustrated labouring class, in the last twenty years of the 19th century the Great Baddow worker was getting a comparatively good deal. Farming might have lost its profitability in the face of Australian imports, so much so that farmers from Scotland and Devon bought up bargain basement land with better productivity than they were used to. So it was a win for them. While Great Baddow’s tight knit community in the years up to the first world war was paternalistic and relatively benign.
 
Back in 1883 the Essex Herald reported a sumptuous dinner provided at The White Horse Inn for the Brewery's employees.  It consisted of roast beef, mutton, ham, chicken, pastry and plenty of plum pudding, the whole served in Mr Sewell the publican's best style… I assume he was no relation to the murderous Mr Sewell of the 17th century?
 
Dessert was a pint of port for each man and a plentiful supply of cigars. Toasts were offered to The Queen, The Royal Family, The Army, Navy and the Essex Volunteers, and with hearty cheers they toasted the health of the firm Crabbe, Veley and Co.  It should be noted that Mr Velley was paying out of his own pocket.
 
If only Industrial relations could be carried out like that everywhere! Keeping one’s work force happy was relatively simple when it was a closely knit community but as industry flourished there was less of the old rural working class still with old feudal attitudes and more of the urban working class who had a copy of, and might even have read, Marx and Engels 1848 pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto”.

In the 1900s we now find there is a working man’s club, reading rooms for personal development, and a sick club insurance for sick day payments. Great Baddow’s Mutual Improvement Society was doing sterling work increasing the chances of a future Labour Government. The revolution though was not going to start in Great Baddow. Up the road in Chelmsford, who knows, but Great Baddow of the 1900’s was not that different from those on the 1880’s, except it now had the Reading Rooms, a corrugated iron shed that looks very temporary but is still with us over a hundred years later and proving to be a very useful facility.

The Reading Rooms, Great Baddow

Where we previously had wealthy financiers with fortunes from shipping and imperial trade, owning lands and exercising power, there was now a new breed of rich oligarchs on the scene. Since 1888 The Vines was owned by the Gibbs family. David Cecil Gibbs was head of the Gibbs Soap and Toothpaste company and by all accounts was a tough character who never quite understood his son, who was Armstrong Gibbs, born in 1889.  His mother died in 1891, which seems par for the course in Baddow! 

How much the father hung about Great Baddow after that is difficult to determine, for Armstrong was mostly brought up by David Gibbs’ two sisters.  There were quite a few maiden aunts of various kinds around the village, no doubt encouraged to stay that way by the high mortality rate of wives. If they had money, or at least reasonably generous relatives, they did charitable works.  If not, they were maids or schoolteachers. 

David Cecil Gibbs was a robust, sporty type who once threw young Armstrong in the Vines’ Pond to force him to swim.  He at least did not drown, but he was definitely not a sporty type.  Armstrong Gibbs instead became a very prolific and famous composer very much in the Vaughan Williams style.  Vaughan Williams and Adrian Bolt were his tutors at the Royal College of Music, so no surprises there.  He is definitely worth a listen though. He is full of that pastoral mystique that the wars of the twentieth century would sweep away.  He moved to Little Baddow after the Second World War, though we shouldn't hold that against him.  The Gibbs however are perhaps most famous for posting the very first advertisement on British TV, after which the Empire collapsed and the Americanisation of our culture went into overdrive. Rock On! Hurrah!