Club Where Members Got The Bird (4 November 1977)

Many new organisations have arisen in Milton Keynes and some have arisen only to flop.  But have you heard of the Sparrow Club?  I confess I was totally ignorant about it until two or three weeks ago.  Which is not surprising, seeing that its period of greatest activity was the early part of this century and that it belonged to Milton Keynes Proper.  That is to say, not to Milton Keynes City, nor to Milton Keynes Borough, but to Milton Keynes Village.

The dickey bird who whispered in my ear, so to speak, was 72-year-old Mrs Edith Boxford, of Earls Willow, New Bradwell.  She had seen my piece about the extermination of pests down the ages.  The information in that piece came largely from the old churchwardens’ accounts of various local parishes.  For hundreds of years the duties of churchwardens included the extermination of pests and they did this by making payments for pests destroyed and brought to them.

“Sparrows were destroyed in very large numbers,” I wrote.  “At Milton Keynes sparrows were paid for right up to 1879, which was long after payments for other pests had ceased,” meaning payments made by the churchwardens as such.  It was about that time that such responsibilities passed from churchwardens to sanitary committees acting under boards of guardians.

Hence, we hear no more about them from churchwardens.

However, Mrs Boxford, who is a native of Milton Keynes village, told me at her bungalow home that payment for sparrows was made there into her own time.

“My maiden name was Kent,” she said.  “There were 11 children in our family and I remember my father and brothers all being paid for sparrows.  These were caught with nets hung round hedges and houses.  Then they took them to Mr Jack Meadows, who gave them the money – I think a penny for each sparrow and lesser amounts for sparrows’ heads and sparrows’ eggs.  Later Mr Joe Lovell took it over from Mr Meadows.  It was known as the Sparrow Club.

“One of the dishes my mother made to feed her own brood was sparrow pudding, but I never fancied it much because of the bones, which were as sharp and small as fish bones.

“We were not the only large family in Milton Keynes.  There was one with 12 children and another with 10.”  (Thirty-three children from just three couples in one tiny North Bucks village!)

She thought the Sparrow Club finished sometime after the first world war.  However, at this juncture Mr Boxford came in.

He is Mrs Boxford’s second husband and is about the same age.  He, too, is a native of Milton Keynes.  He lived at Broughton for a time, but returned to Milton Keynes in 1931 and he hold (sic) me that sparrow catching was still going on there at that time.

“Sparrows did a lot of damage to crops and gardens and to thatched roofs as well,” he said.  “We boys used to go sparrow-catching and birds-nesting at any time of day, but most of the sparrows were caught by the older boys and men.

They waited until the sparrows had gone to their nests in the evening.  They then spread the net over a hedge or round the creepers growing up house-walls and the like.  They then shook and banged the hedge and the sparrows flew out into the net, which was drawn together before they could get away.  You could catch up to 20 at a cast that way.”

They were also paid for starlings, he told me, and a penny each for rats’ tails.  The prices he quoted for sparrows, their heads and their eggs, varied from those quoted by Mrs Boxford, but no doubt the prices did in fact vary from time to time.  Neither he nor Mrs Boxford was sure who eventually paid the village collector.

“It could have been the farmers, or it could still have been the churchwardens.  After all, they were the same men,” he said.

Mr and Mrs Boxford moved to their bungalow home from the Railway Cottages at New Bradwell.  I liked the look of this council estate, which features flats, with carports directly underneath.  Unfortunately, it is built on the hillside that slopes down to the main road.  This raises problems for elderly people and especially those who, like Mrs Boxford, have locomotion difficulties.  In fact, from having been a live wire in the local community – for ‘teens of years she was secretary of the local Labour Party – she now finds herself practically housebound.  Fortunately Mr Boxford is fairly spry and can get up and down the hill to do the shopping.

Mrs Boxford has married children of her own besides Kent family relatives around the area, including Bletchley.

Only two or three days after visiting the Boxfords, I met Canon J F Cheyne, who was parish priest at Milton Keynes for a number of years, then left for London where he spent the next 17 years up to his official retirement.  He then came back to this district and lives in Shelley Drive, Bletchley.  I say “official retirement” because he tells me he is now working as hard as ever – standing-in for other clergymen and that sort of thing, I suppose.

But it is interesting that he came back to Milton Keynes city, if not to the village itself, for he is a Lancastrian.