No 10 Station Road

Chris & Catey Bates Nov 2014

10 Station Road 2015
(Roadley)

Built in 1965

No 10 Station Road is opposite the Pemberton Arms pub. It was built in 1965 by Albert Hearn, who also built 6 and 8 fronting onto Station Road, together with Linden House behind in ten acres of surrounding land, where Albert Hearn and his wife Jean were to live. They used their 10 acres partly as a soft fruit farm, and partly to grow Christmas trees.

The Thompson family

Looking further back, from the deeds of the property, to 1961, all of this land seemed to have belonged to the Thompson family, originally C.T. Thompson (who died in 1948) . We believe this to have been Charles Thompson, the (bus) carrier from Harston to Cambridge during WW1. His brother Norman Pennell Thompson, after being demobbed from the Royal Navy, bought an old army lorry and fitted it with wooden benches to carry passengers, eventually founding a bus company called Harston and District Motor Services, operating, in the 1930s, from a garage at the junction of Station and Royston Roads opposite the Pemberton Arms pub. Norman’s cousin tells how he would take the benches out of his converted lorry, carry pigs and chickens to Royston market, put the benches back in and resume his passenger service! By 1936, the Company combined with others to become ‘Premier Travel’. We have a special interest in the Harston-based bus company and its garage because, at the end of the garden in Station Road, there is an area that seems once to have served as a hard standing and we strongly suspect that this was the site of the Harston and District Motor Services garage in the 1930s.

Manor of Shadworth

From the deeds we have learned that this land was, in medieval times, part of the Manor of ‘Harston Shadworth’ but was owned by Thomas Bridge Little by the 1799 Enclosures. He also owned Harston House and surrounding lands. In the deeds one of the earliest named owners around 1832 was Phoebe Bridge who had inherited it from Thomas, then around 1879-93, members of the Long family (who lived at Harston House) were named – William Long having married into the Bridge family.

This page was added on 14/11/2015.

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