No.1 – The Early Days – from Hill End Farm to Hill End ‘Camp’

Did you know that Hill End was once a farm?

And would you fancy macaroni cheese for your breakfast?

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We were delighted recently to meet Alan and Margaret Trinder, both now in their 90s, to hear their memories of Hill End.

And in our 100th year, it was a particularly wonderful to hear of the links between the Trinder family and Hill End before the 1920s – as Alan’s grandfather was born at Hill End farm, long before it became the outdoor education centre we know and love today.

His grandfather Matthew was quite the character, a reformed poacher who later became a lay preacher – but with ten children to feed, perhaps we can understand his hunting motivations. He later returned to Hill End Farm to work on the land with his uncle, a farm laborer.

Alan’s father was brought up in a two-up, two-down cottage in Old Botley. With so many people in the house it must have been a squash, and his father slept in a lean-to in the garden. His father literally married the girl next door and later moved to Cowley – bringing up young Alan as an only child in contrast to his own crowded upbringing.

Alan only discovered the Hill End Farm connection while researching his family history – and that piqued his interest, given his own personal experiences of visiting Hill End, starting back during the last years of the war in 1944 when he was 11 years old.

That first visit was with the scouts, spending a week camping in bell tents with another group from the North of England. Alan remembers never having heard a northern accent before and finding that very strange.

The unheated outdoor swimming pool was certainly an interesting experience. Alan recalls:

“..the dark green colour …. you couldn’t see the bottom or anything, and it was rough concrete all around it, no tiles or anything like that, it was very basic… but we were used to swimming in the river anyway when we were youngsters”

The trip was in August, but Alan still recalls that the nights were very cold:

“we’d never been camping before, so we followed the instructions in the Scouts’ handbook where you took two blankets with you and you folded them in a special way that made it into a sleeping bag… But it was cold, I remember that, you needed at least three… during the war you couldn’t get really thick blankets, and mother would’ve been a bit wary of letting us use the best blankets anyway”

Following the trip, Alan’s parents bought him a down sleeping bag, that he still has to this day, but it’s a bit too small for him now.

The food was also rather peculiar, and one enduring memory was of the rather odd breakfast:

“both my friend and I took our breakfast and tipped it into the ditch… it was macaroni cheese or something ridiculous like that we had never had… it may be what they were used to in the northern parts of the country, well this being wartime you ate what was available!”

Rationing was still in operation at the time, and he’d given up pages of stamps to cover his food while at camp. Over the week he wrote two letters to his mother – one when some homesickness had set in, asking to be fetched home! But this passed, and he remembers the trip fondly.

The activities Alan most remembers enjoying at Hill End with the scouts haven’t changed all that much in 100 years, whittling wood, using a compass and singing around the campfire.

Alan’s second visit was in his late teens in around 1950 with the Civil Defence Youth Club, and this was even more exciting, because:

“I mean, you had girls, didn’t you … We were teenagers!”

Activities at the youth camp were more informal and social. One memorable bit of fun that sticks in Alan’s mind was cutting hazel sticks to make ‘javelins’, tying string on the ends and using that to fling them high across Hill End:

“…it would go a terrific distance… I don’t know who it was who had the idea, but ‘let’s see if we can get them to go over the top of the dormitories’ … some did, some didn’t. The ones that didn’t, we were rather startled to realise, that the tiles on the roof were not tiles – they were wooden sheets. Some of these javelins with a pointed end ended up stuck in the wooden tiles on the roof!”

The High Dormitory was then, as now, divided into two rooms for the boys and girls – but in 1950 this didn’t extend quite up to the ceiling. The gap between the rooms was, very surprisingly, filled with barbed wire! The war to keep them apart was apparently not always completely successful…

Alan’s wife Margaret also visited Hill End as a teenager with a Headington Youth Club, All Saints Highfield YPF in around 1952 (as pictured in the restored photo below, Margaret is 2nd on the left of the 2nd row down with a coat).

She recalls also staying in the High Dormitory for a long weekend, and that there were German boys there during her visit, unusually exotic just after the end of WW2.

Transport to Hill End in the 1950’s was rather more basic that the school coaches of today, without seatbelts:

“We came on a lorry of some sort… I remember I got bitten by some creature when I was here, so I had a bit of a bump on my head … when I got home my mother thought I’d fallen off the lorry!”

It was so wonderful to hear Alan and Margaret’s stories – many thanks go to them for taking the time to share these with us as we celebrate 100 years of Hill End.

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If you have your own memories of Hill End, no matter how old or how recent, please let us know in our new Memory Bank – it only takes a moment, and we’d love to hear from you!

You can read more about our rich heritage on our history pages and our 100 year celebration page.

Join us to celebrate and help ensure the next 100 years are even stronger.