Enjoyed a pleasant pause on the new bench in the Recreation Ground, dedicated to my parents David and Chryssie. A quiet winter day, with just a few dogs out walking their owners. What a lovely place to sit and contemplate the world! Thank you to the Parish Council for arranging the purchase, the plaque, and the siting of this fine new bench.
It is almost 100 years since my great-grandfather Victor opened the Rec. The Hertfordshire Express of May 29th 1929 records that in a speech in front of a Bank Holiday crowd of over 2,000, he “hoped that the future of the ground would be as cloudless as the sky was that day.” The chairman of the Parish Council, Mr. T. Lester Sayer, “thanked Lord Lytton for his gift. It was (he said) one of the finest, if not the finest, recreation grounds in that party of the country.” I do hope ‘party of the country’ is not a newspaper misprint, and either the chairman’s Freudian slip that fete day, or otherwise a charming 1920s expression!
Mr. Sayer continued that he was “pleased to say that the school authorities had arranged to make full use of the ground for both boys and girls. One had (he said) only to look around the ground to realise the immense benefit it would at once be to Knebworth. Not many of them could wait to see what it would mean to Knebworth in 50 years’ time: but looking forward even ten years, and with a speck of imagination one must see that that day was a great day for Knebworth.” Hear, hear, I say… from a winter’s day almost 100 years on.
Henry Lytton Cobbold
@HenryCobboldKH