I used to fish in those pits quite a lot and I think most of us did because there was some lovely fish in there, perch, bream and carp and you used to go “leisuring”?? for eels and there was even pike in there, and rudd and roach but I don’t remember ever drinking out of there because it was very deep water, I remember that.  You used to go to the edge of that pit and it wouldn’t go down on a gradual slope, it went straight down and if you fell in there and you weren’t a good swimmer you were in a bit of trouble.

What about your friends, were there any accidents while you were playing in the area? I can remember one of them, it was when I was at Ham primary school, probably the first or second year of schooling, I was probably only five or six years old and the guy who died, his name was Horace Talbot, and we were just coming into class one day and the teacher must have said, even though we were very young, she must have said we’ve got some very sad news to tell you that one of our pupils, Horace Talbot, was drowned in the gravel pits last night.  The story I heard was that he was playing on one of the barges, I don’t know if this exactly true, but there was a lot of old barges stored on the pits there just after the war and eventually they was blown up by the army, but I heard he was playing on one of the barges and fell in and someone ran into a house nearby and someone came out and I think they got their clothes off quick and jumped in the water but they couldn’t find him, obviously he was eventually found, but I don’t remember the name of the other boy but there was at least a couple did drown in that gravel it, probably more.

Do you remember the railway? I do remember something about it, I can’t remember who it was but as Chris mentioned there was a small railway that used to run around the perimeter of the pits, they used to load all the ballast and that and I think there was swivel type things and they used to tip the ballast out at various locations and then it would be picked up and put into the lorries and carted off to the builders’ merchants and so forth.  But Chris is a bit older than me, about 6 or 7 years, so he would probably know a little bit more about that side of it than me.  But the pits would have been the same for me as for Chris, I don’t know if he mentioned that there was a piggery over there, did he mention that?

Some resients have memories about the area being a bit smelly, do you remember this? The sewage farm was at the bottom of our road and every now and again it did use to kick up and it was awful when you was out in the garden but in some later years at the pits a chap kept pigs there down where Meadlands School is now, just adjacent to there at the back of the sewage farm there was a piggery and he kept pigs there for a good number of years, I don’t remember the chap’s name but I don’t know if it was the Council or whatever but he was moved away from there, maybe some of the neighbours might have complained about the smell and he was put right out into the centre part of Ham Lands and it was a bit of an old ramshackle sort of place he had, a bit of an eyesore really but it was well away from the houses. 

So was he moved when the new housing was going up? Yes he was moved on but I remember when he was in the middle of the pits he had two big Alsatian dogs and you just wouldn’t take no liberties if those dogs came out and a chap, an old Ham chap who I know very well, Brian Finch, he inherited one of those dogs from that chap he was telling me at some point, not the sort of place you’d take a chance when them dogs was out and about.