A Valentine’s postcard of the 1920s, with Pond Cottage on the extreme left A few incidents may give a flavour of life here 100 years ago. The Cranleigh Women’s Institute was founded in 1921 under the direction of Mrs Eric Bonham of Knowle ‘for the Beneficial and Instructional advantage of the Women of the ...
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From the days of horse-drawn coaches: Mann’s in the late 19th century People of Cranleigh faced the unimaginable this autumn when David Mann & Sons department store announced that it was closing, with the retirement of the chairman, Richard Womack. For 134 years it had been at the heart of the village and was ...
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The Daily Telegraph's reporting of the wedding Cranleigh is not often able to enjoy a celebrity wedding. So it made the most of the marriage of England and Surrey cricket captain Peter May to local girl Virginia Gilligan in the parish church on Friday April 24th 1959. Virginia came from Shamley Green, and was a ...
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This book is not so much a historical evaluation, or analysis, as it is a personal perspective and recollection of village life during the war years in Cranleigh: its people, shops and businesses. In some ways, the book sets an everyday scene of a simpler way of life, maintained in the face of great hardship. In ...
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The Lusitania at New York in 1907 On May 17th 1915, The Times carried this death notice: ‘On the 7th May, by the sinking of the SS Lusitania, Frank Gustavus Naumann, of ‘Redhurst’, Cranleigh, aged 61 years. Burial service on Tuesday, 18th May, at St Nicholas Church, Cranleigh at 2.45. No flowers, by request.’ ...
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1170 was the year in which, on 29 December, Thomas Becket was killed in Canterbury Cathedral. This outrage led to a spate of church building in the country, and the year has been adopted as the time in which St. Nicolas Church was founded. Cranleigh was then a tiny hamlet in a clearing of the great forest of the ...
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The lines of neatly-laid coins 'Record Breakers’ was a popular BBC1 television programme from the 1970s to the turn of the century. The McWhirter twins, Norris and Ross, sports journalists with encyclopaedic memories, co-founded The Guinness Book of Records in 1955. It was a big success, and grew in size with ...
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The 1960s were the era of ‘the Beeching cuts’. The brilliant Dr Richard Beeching, physicist and engineer, was seconded from ICI to become chairman of the British Railways Board, with the government brief to increase the efficiency of the nationalised railway system in Great Britain. He produced a report, ‘The ...
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A postcard of the Cricket Ground, post-marked 1906 (courtesy of Roy Pobgee) Frank Swinnerton, novelist and literary critic of national standing who lived at Old Tokefield on the Common, declared Sunday June 24th 1956 ‘the greatest day the village has ever known’. It was the day Cranleigh Cricket Club celebrated ...
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Around 1900 the biggest employer in Cranleigh was Holden’s timber and building firm. It had been established about 1815, when a young carpenter called George Holden came here from Wisborough Green. By now, the third generation of Holdens, brothers James and Ebenezer, were in charge of the large yard (1¾ acres) in the ...
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