Byfleet
Byfleet is a village in Surrey, England. It is located in the far east of the borough of Woking, around east of West Byfleet, from which it is separated by the M25 motorway and the Wey Navigation.
The village is of medieval origin. Its winding main street, High Road, contains old large public houses and several timber-framed houses, as well as other 16th and 17th century houses with listed status. The former Brooklands motor racing circuit is located just to the north, while to the east, across the River Wey, is the former Silvermere estate, now a golf club.
Byfleet is served by Byfleet & New Haw railway station, on the South West Main Line. In July 2012, its northern bypass hosted the long-distance cycling road races for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
History
The village was in the Godley hundred, a Saxon division for strategic and taxation purposes. Byfleet appears in Domesday Book as Byeflete. It was held by Ulwin from Chertsey Abbey. Its domesday assets were: cultivated hides; 1 church, 1 mill rendering 5 shillings per year, fisheries worth 325 eels, of meadow, woodland worth 10 hogs. It was taxed to render all in all £4 for the year to its overlords.Industrial history
Byfleet expanded considerably after the opening of the Brooklands motor circuit in 1907 and when major aircraft factories opened there during World War I. A large housing estate for Vickers aircraft workers was built between Chertsey Road and Oyster Lane in World War I and although sold off by the early sixties, these houses still exist today. The Tarrant Tabor bomber, the largest aeroplane built in Britain during World War I, was constructed in Byfleet by W G Tarrant Ltd but crashed fatally at Farnborough on 26 May 1919 on its first attempted take-off. Several other aeroplanes were built in Byfleet by Glenny & Henderson Ltd in the late 1920s.The influence of the aircraft industry on the village's development continued between the wars and during World War Two and most of the new aeroplanes built at Brooklands took off over the centre of Byfleet on their first flights – the most spectacular being the first flight of the pioneering Vickers VC10 in 1962. The urgent need to supply the Vickers Valiant V-bomber to the RAF led to the removal of the central section of the race track's Byfleet Banking when a new hard runway was built in 1951.
Various aircraft crashed in and around Byfleet during the first half of the last century; these include a Vickers Viking amphibian, the prototype Vickers Wibault, an RAF Taylorcraft Auster and an RAF North American P-51 Mustang III. On 2 January 1945 a Vickers Warwick GRV, s/n PN773, flown by test pilot Bob Handasyde crashed beside Rectory Lane in Three Acre Field close to St Mary's Church and just missed road-sweeper Jack Smith with a wing-tip. A single wooden propeller blade recovered from the scene in 1945 survives today in the Brooklands Museum collection.
World War II
Great effects also took place in this part of the county: evacuees, British and Canadian soldiers and German prisoners of war were all accommodated locally and the Vickers factory on the east side of Brooklands was bombed with heavy loss of life on 4 September 1940. By 2200hrs the following day, 21 barrage balloons with rope lines and other military defences were deployed locally including along the nearby Seven Hills Road. The Hawker aircraft factory on the Byfleet side of the aerodrome was targeted two days later resulting in major damage to certain buildings but with no loss of life nor any serious disruption to Hurricane production. The importance of Brooklands to the war effort was emphasised by the construction circa 1941 of a large anti-aircraft gun tower just east of the village at Manor Farm, together with two similar structures built on the north side of Brooklands. Gun crews on each of these 'flak' towers manned a 40mm Bofors gun against further enemy air attacks.A fatal accident in the centre of Byfleet on 24 September 1942 saw a Bren Gun Carrier operated by the Welsh Guards collide with the corner of The Plough pub killing a regular customer, Miss Edith Minnie Wyatt. She visited the pub regularly around midday and was co-owner of 'The Old Log Cabin'. She died outside the premises having been pinned against the pub's bay window. This part of the building was then shored up with timber for a considerable period of time afterwards.
In 1944 many troops stationed locally departed for France on D-Day and older residents still recall a column of Canadian tanks and other military vehicles which passed through the village at that time with a long tail-back running for two days along High Road between the War Memorial and The Clockhouse. Byfleet also came under attack from V-1 'Doodlebug' flying bombs – two fell beside Byfleet Road on 21 August and slightly injured two people. That same year a new Vickers flight test airfield opened just south of Byfleet at Wisley.
Motor racing
Brooklands' record-breaking racing driver J G Parry-Thomas and Bert Denly, motorcycle racer, lived in Byfleet in the 1920s and the renowned race-tuner Robin Jackson lived at St George's Hill and had an engineering works in Byfleet after World War II. Also post-war, Brooklands' engineer Francis Beart had a small workshop in High Road, from 1947 to 1956/57, specialising in tuning Norton motorcycles. Beart had also been a record-breaking motorcyclist at Brooklands, holding the Test Hill record on a Grindlay Peerless.After World War 2, the village became a greater centre for automotive-related businesses, garages, showrooms and workshops and these included post-war racing driver Duncan Hamilton's racing workshop and car showroom in the west end of High Road, the base for his successful C-type Jaguar victory at Le Mans in 1953.
Sporting venues
During July 2012 Byfleet became a host of the London 2012 Olympic Games when the road cycle races passed through the village. The races took place on 28th, and 29th, of July 2012. The route passed west along the A245, Parvis Road, from Weybridge towards West Byfleet. The route was lined with London 2012 Olympic banners, making the event a real spectacle as it passed through.Landmarks
Architectural history
Seven buildings are listed, its watermill and two of the churchyard tombs. St Mary's Church in the village centre dates back to at least the 14th century, and medieval elements are kept in the structure of Byfleet Manor, built in 1686 – these are listed at Grade I and Grade II* respectively.In 1895, 20-year-old Hampshire-born Walter George Tarrant started a new carpentry business, W G Tarrant Ltd, in Byfleet and later expanded into housebuilding. The company built extensively in Pyrford and West Byfleet in the early 1900s. By 1911 the Tarrant Works covered c. and included workshops for joinery, wrought iron and leaded lights, a stonemason's yard and a timber mill with drying sheds. The firm owned nurseries and brickfields elsewhere and was Byfleet's largest employer for many years.
In 1898, the village gained an impressive village hall and club, funded by Frederick C Stoop who lived at West Hall between Byfleet and West Byfleet.
In 1928 a new Wesleyan Chapel was built opposite St Mary's School on the junction of High Road and Rectory Lane and in 1939 an impressive new Byfleet Methodist Church designed by Woking architects Kenneth Wood and Charles Rose was completed on land immediately south of this. Built in typical Modernist style with a bright interior and stained glass windows designed and produced by the Thomas Camm Studio in Smethwick, this building survives in very original condition today.
In 1935, an existing vehicle garage and petrol station trading as "Byfleet Motors Ltd" in High Road was rebuilt in typical 'modern' style and featured an impressive white painted cement-rendered brick facade with a central clock tower, neon lighting and a well-equipped workshop at the rear. One of the Directors was C E C Martin who raced cars at nearby Brooklands and various racing and sports cars were serviced and repaired here for other owners and drivers too. These same premises still survive in the motor-trade today although the frontage has been modified and petrol sales ceased many years ago.
St. Mary's Church
The bellcote, nave and chancel were all rebuilt in the late 13th Century in a very simple Early English style. St Mary's Church interior features some very rare wooden crosses recovered from Europe shortly after World War I.Graves in the churchyard include those of:
- Brooklands-based racing driver J G Parry-Thomas who died aged 42 at Pendine Sands in 1927 while attacking the world Land Speed Record.
- Record-breaking motorcyclist Bert le Vack who was killed at the age of 44 while testing a new motorcycle in the Swiss Alps in 1931.
- Gerald Napier, the first pilot to be killed in a flying accident at Brooklands, who died on 1 August 1911, aged only 19.
- Scottish aviation pioneer and Vickers' first test pilot Harold Barnwell who was killed flying a new prototype fighter at Joyce Green Aerodrome near Dartford, Kent, in 1917.
- Ebeneezer Mears, local construction business founder.
- Margaret Honor Wellby, believed to be the first British woman pilot to die flying an aeroplane, who lived with her parents at nearby St George's Hill, crash-landed Avro 504 G-EBFM on take-off from Brooklands in 1928.
- Victims of the Luftwaffe's 1940 bombing of Brooklands including: 17-year-old Irene Coleman, 36-year-old Edward Eastwood and 21-year-old Gwendoline Goddard, who all worked for Vickers.
- Lt Arthur Doricourt Roberts, MC, RFC, who was killed in a flying training accident near Hanworth on 31 August 1917, aged 22.
- Captain Edward Arnold Jones, Director of Brooklands Aviation Ltd and a popular instructor at the Brooklands School of Flying, who was accidentally killed aged 34 at Hendon after a flight from Brooklands ended with his DH60M Moth G-AAVU hitting a windsock mast then crashing while landing on 8 November 1931.
- Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett KCVO PC JP DL FRS, an Anglo-Irish agricultural reformer, pioneer of agricultural cooperatives, Unionist MP, supporter of Home Rule, Irish Senator and author.