Blackmore, Hook End and Wyatts Green Parish Council

02/06/2026

TUESDAY PARISH CURIOSITY SERIES No. 9
Blackmore House (final part of 3)

The last civilian occupants of Blackmore House before the outbreak of WWll were the Rev. Francis Paynter (1866-1954), Canon of Chelmsford Cathedral, his wife Helen and two domestic staff. Ousted by the War Office to make way for the Royal Corps of Signals to establish a regional base, the Paynters retired to Cambridgeshire.

The old buildings and grounds were worse for wear after the Army decamped at the end of hostilities but were still capable of providing one last public service. Epping and Ongar Rural District Council took control of the property to convert to temporary accommodation for a dozen local families who had lost their homes.

Some were lodged in the main house sharing basic utilities while others were allotted sections of the military Nissen huts dotted around the grounds. Many spent several years waiting for social housing to become available or scrimped to save for a deposit on a home of their own. By late 1951, the Rural Council’s housing developments in Doddinghurst began to ease the problem. The Hough family were first to benefit. George, Lillian and their three sons were able to move from Hut 9, a wooden structure that previously served as the officers’ mess. Other families gradually transferred to council accommodation. One couple, Don and Elizabeth Paton, in Hut 7, were set on owning their own place. Each weekend they pedalled for hours on their tandem touring Essex searching for an affordable home. It turned out to be a bungalow newly built on an empty plot just two minutes walk from Blackmore House.

The old house was demolished in 1962 to make way for a replacement that by 1969 was owned by the British division of the Ford Motor Company for the use of its Chairman and Managing Director, Sir William ‘Bill’ Batty (1916-2003). By coincidence, the Ford headquarters were at Warley, the offices having been built over the site of the army barracks from where Lt. Colonel Wellesley Pigott moved to Blackmore House 75 years earlier.

In June 1971, Sir William and his wife Jean, asleep upstairs in separate rooms, were jolted from their beds at 2am by a bomb exploding in the ground floor study, wrecking the room and shattering doors and windows throughout the house. The couple escaped unhurt. The bomb was placed by a fanatical gang of anarchists and sociopaths, self-styled as The Angry Brigade. A few minutes later another blast hit a power plant attached to the Ford factory at Dagenham followed by a message relayed to the Press: “We got Fords and the bosses’.

Four of the Angry Brigade – two men and two women – were convicted in 1972 at the Old Bailey of conspiring to plant 25 bombs, 19 of which exploded, over a three year period. They were each jailed for 10 years.

After the drama of the bomb attack, the house reverted to private ownership and for a number of years was home to the Powell family, proprietors of a local builders merchants, who moved to Hook End from Blackmore village.

Next week... Blackmore's Bounty Hunters

01/06/2026

The sturdy oak fingerpost road signs maintained by the Parish Council are a visible link to our rural heritage. Their distinctive black and white striped uprights would have been familiar to generations of Essex folk before us yet still today have a practical purpose.

Unfortunately they can't survive a direct hit by a car leaving the road on its way to crashing through a front garden fence as happened to the newly renovated fingerpost at Park Farm Corner.

Police are aware.

30/05/2026

Heat exhaustion? It has served since the reign of King George Vl but possibly the last post has sounded for the old Royal Mail letter box in Wyatts Green. It was discovered flattened with its brickwork shattered today on the grass verge.

30/05/2026

Something is stirring at the village duck pond. The six resident drakes have been joined by a lady friend. Not only that but a pair of very shy moorhens have now set up home in the dense shelter of reeds in the middle of the pond.

Scenes from The Green today.

26/05/2026

THE TUESDAY PARISH CURIOSITY SERIES No 8 (Blackmore House, part 2)

The ‘Shrine’ outside their home erected by the Pigott family was not the only marker of tragic events of the First World War associated with Blackmore House in Hook End. In 1916, a year after 2nd Lt. Gerald Pigott was killed in action at Ypres, a German Zeppelin dropped its bombs over Essex, two of which left massive craters between the grounds of the House and nearby Mill House. The Zeppelin attack on the Parish will feature in a further episode of this Series. It is the bombs of a Second War enemy raider that are the subject of this week’s Curiosity.

By 1941 Blackmore House had been requisitioned by the War Office to serve as the regional headquarters for the Royal Corps of Signals. Officers moved into the house and the men were accommodated in Nissen Huts sited under the camouflage of trees in the grounds, alongside an air-raid shelter, searchlight, and two anti-aircraft guns. A short distance away were the chicken coops belonging to the Smith family of Mill House Poultry Farm and shop.

Len Bull whose Wyatts Green home looked directly across farmland to Blackmore House was to later recollect his family’s account of the night of the raid. Flying in low from the direction of Swallows Cross, the enemy plane mistook the rows of hen sheds for the actual target and released its cluster of incendiary bombs. In daylight the next day, Tony and Gerry Smith recovered over 400 tail fins from around their farm, all that was left of the incendiary bombs, none of which had achieved a direct hit – sparing both the poultry and the soldiers billeted nearby.

At the end of the War, the house and its abandoned Nissen huts were secured by Epping and Ongar Rural District Council to provide accommodation for families displaced by the conflict. What happened next, including the night on which after its history of two near misses, bombs actual struck home, follows in next week’s Curiosities.

23/05/2026

The Parish Beacon on The Green, erected in 2022 to commemorate the Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ll, has had a make-over. The metal fire brazier and oak post have been restored to pristine condition.

Unlike other modern bottled-gas fitted fake beacons, ours was hand-made by local craftsmen to a traditional design that enables an authentic controlled blaze to mark special celebrations in the national calendar.

22/05/2026

19/05/2026

TUESDAY PARISH CURIOSITY SERIES (No. 7)

Just the merest trace remains detectable on a Hook End roadside wall of the poignant ‘shrine’ that once commemorated the First World War death in action of a teenage parishioner. It was erected outside the lodge leading to his home by the parents of 2nd Lt. Gerald Pigott. Their only child was killed on the Western Front in 1915.

At the outbreak of war Gerald, as a newly commissioned officer, joined the Essex Regiment before transferring to the Royal Field Artillery and deployment to fight in Flanders. There amid the trenches at Ypres he was caught by the blast of an enemy shell exploding overhead, dying from his injuries the following day. Aged 18.

In a twist of fate, five months later his father, Major Wellesley George Pigott, was leading a battalion of the Rifle Brigade under heavy fire at the Somme when again a German shell burst overhead – this time killing his aide standing alongside and several other men. The Major escaped uninjured apart from temporary total deafness.

The Major received a commendation, promotion to Lt. Colonel, and a period of recuperation back home with his wife Helen at Blackmore House in Hook End Road. They moved to the parish after he was posted to the garrison at Warley in 1896. The couple were significant members of the community: he a Justice of the Peace at Ongar, Chaired our Parish Council; she an organist at All Saints, Doddinghurst, a Red Cross volunteer, and a co-founder of Blackmore’s WI.

Together, they hosted frequent events for local children in the grounds of Blackmore House (nine bedrooms, one bathroom, four live-in domestic servants quartered in the Lodge), were generous benefactors of local organisations and regularly produced and performed in amateur theatricals staged in the village.

In 1921 they retired to Brockenhurst in the New Forest after contributing towards the er****on of the War Memorial that stills stands today on The Green. 2nd Lt. Pigott’s name is inscribed on the plinth panel listing parishioners killed in the Great War. His father’s appears in one of the adjoining panels recording those who ‘also served.’

Please note these Tuesday Notes are summaries abridged from the original versions so as to fit a suitably reduced Facebook format. Blackmore House in Hook End will be featured again in this series.

18/05/2026

Tickets: https://www.ticketsource.com/blackmoreplayers/e-adeqbr

14/05/2026

Hey, our community 'library' has made it on to the latest update to Google Maps!

When BT wanted to scrap the public telephone box in Wyatts Green after it was decommissioned, the Parish Council acquired it -- for £1 -- as a community asset at the request of parishioners in the area. Residents were keen to preserve the kiosk as a local heritage landmark. It has since been transformed it into a DIY free book exchange, successfully operating over the years thanks to the good will of community volunteers.