(Racecourse Cottage, Surly Hall Road)
Published in Windlesora 34
©2018, WLHG
Reading about the new book, The History of Royal Windsor Racecourse by Jim Beavis (2016), prompted me to write about my grandfather Edward James Try. He was born in 1875 and moved to Windsor with his family around 1881. They were not on the 1881 census for Windsor. Edward’s father was a tailor, and it seems that he came for a job as resident tailor for Daniel Gooch of Clewer Park because they lived in one of the Gooch Cottages. The cottages have all been renumbered, but by deduction from the census, it was number 11 right next door to The Swan, a coaching inn on Mill Lane.
My grandfather was apprenticed to Browns of Eton at the age of 14 and became a journeyman tailor. He stayed with them until six months before his death in May 1965. He made ‘bum freezers’ and other jackets for Eton boys.
On his marriage he applied for the job as Gatekeeper for Windsor Racecourse, which came with the gatekeeper’s cottage. It was his job to open the gate on race days, and to keep track of the vehicles going in and out. He also charged 6d per person to park their bicycles in his garden. This was obviously a useful job as it gave him a home for his growing family, and supplemented his income as a tailor, as he was paid by the piece. His work was so much in demand that my grandmother would help by taking out the tacking threads, which increased his output.
The cottage had a small scullery kitchen with a shallow, cold water sink and a toilet cubicle. A door opened into the living room, and the parlour was across the passage from the front door. It had a pianola, a family Bible and their pride and joy, a large musical box. I only went in there as a treat to play the pianola. They spent all their time in the living room which had a day bed as a sofa and a table with a tablecloth. There was a rag rug in front of the fire and gas lighting. I sat on the sofa to have my meal. I only ever went through the door and up steep wooden stairs once when I visited my grandmother just before she went into a home, by which time I was married with children. She had married my grandfather at the age of 22, to take care of his motherless children. She went on to have two of her own.
On the kitchen side of the cottage, there was a greenhouse where tomatoes grew at one end. It also had a big tank of rainwater, so was always hot and steamy. My grandfather sat at the front end with his goose iron and sewing machine with its drawers of silk threads, pins, and so forth.
Behind the cottage was a large area known as Balloon Meadow. This is because a balloon landed there in July 1881, blown off course by a strong wind on its way from Crystal Palace to Malmesbury. The field was very boggy. To a child, it felt like an expedition to cross it and peer down at the racecourse some feet below, then over to the river. The original road, Surly Hall Road, went this way, but it always flooded. It was eventually moved to its present location and renamed Maidenhead Road.
The river flooded regularly, and so Racecourse Cottage was often surrounded by water. My father was born there, and he said that it was not unusual to hear the water sloshing under the floorboards. With the building of the Jubilee River and the improved weirs, it no longer floods, and there is a grand new entrance to the racecourse. The old gate is still over the old entrance, but there has not been a gatekeeper in the cottage since my grandfather died, and it was renovated and turned into a ‘Des Res‘.
Valerie Batt-Rawden
Notes
The story of how Balloon Meadow got its name is told by Gordon Cullingham in Windlesora No. 5.
Windsor Local History Group 