EDWARD OAKLEY MIZEN (1894-1985) & IDA MARY MIZEN (1904-1997)
Edward Mizen’s family farmed large areas of land in Mitcham and Cobham as well as Fetcham and Leatherhead from the 19th century onwards. Once the country’s largest watercress growers, they also supplied Covent Garden and other outlets with produce of all kinds. He retired in 1960 and sold the last of his lands to the local water board.
Interview date: 1 June 1981
Location: Watersmead, Fetcham
Interviewer: Edwina Vardey
Family background
Ida Mizen: A history of the family, going back to when they farmed Battersea Park.
Edward Mizen: That was my grandfather. He was Edward Mizen. He came from Essex originally. He had a market garden. He was the last one I think, before it was opened to the public as a public park.
Your father lived in Mitcham and his brothers.
The three brothers, the Mizen brothers. They all had lots of children but I was the only one in my family. We used to grow all sorts of things under glass as much as outside. Apart from the ordinary plant crops, the market garden crops we used to grow immense amounts of ornamental ferns and all that sort of thing. Acres of them under glass. In Mitcham.
You [also] had a place in Cobham.
Yes. We had quite a bit of land in Cobham, some was glass – cucumbers, tomatoes and that sort of thing – but most of it was open land which was used for growing, we went in for Victoria plums a lot. We had 3000 trees at Cobham. All Victoria plums and in between there would be ordinary market garden crops, potatoes, cabbages, anything.
Did you market these at Covent Garden?
Some yes. Quite big local trades. We used to have lorries going to Kingston from Cobham of course. It was very handy there. But most of the stuff went to Covent Garden. At Mitcham we were only eight miles away. There was only horse transport in those days. Two-horse wagons. They used to leave Mitcham at midnight in order to get to Covent Garden by four o’clock in the morning.
Were you personally involved?
We all did it ourselves. Our own employees. We employed about 250 people roughly.
Horses to Covent Garden
So you learned your skill as a market gardener from your father?
Yes I was put into school at a very early age. I don’t think I was 16 barely. I was sent up to go to Covent Garden about three days a week. To do that I had to ride a bicycle from Mitcham to Tooting Broadway and then get on an all-night tram. I had to be there at four o’clock in the morning or there was trouble. In those days the market was opened very early. It was all two-horse wagons. They would start at 12[pm], plod along, then they would stop at Clapham I think. The drivers would have their cup of coffee or whatever. Then they would go on to Covent Garden. The horses knew the route so well that the drivers always used to be asleep all the time. I met a policeman once there who had a pub. He said, oh I know your lot. He said I was a policeman at Lambeth. He said your drivers would always go to sleep. We never bothered. If we wanted to wake them, up we would just lead the horse round into a side street and then the horse would stop automatically because he knew he was on the wrong road. It’s a perfectly true story. They knew it so well.
Have you been to the new Covent Garden?
No, I haven’t been able to walk sufficiently well unfortunately. Of course, I’d like to. I had some odd times there. I had to go up there until the first war started.
World War One
Did you become a soldier in the First World War?
Yes. I joined up when it started. I was 20 then. That’s why I’ve got a bad leg now.
Did you go to France?
Yes, twice. When I joined up I joined as a motorcycle despatch rider because the War Office advertised. They wanted men, despatch riders with their own motorbikes. They bought them from us. They never expected me to pay for them. We were paid in golden sovereigns. I remember it so well. September 14, about a month after the war started, and I had a crash. I bust up my leg a bit. I was in Brighton Hospital the first Christmas of the war. Four or five weeks. After a period of sick leave I rejoined again. I was in the ranks for three years and a half. As soon as the tank war started we were transferred. I was in the original first lot of tanks.
Did you get silted up with mud?
Yes, it was terrible because we were in the heat salient all the time. Paschendale and that. It wasn’t suitable. We got stuck. It was a very good thing to be in of course because it saved one from being in the trenches which was the worst job of the lot. We felt very safe inside but all too often you would get stuck and have to leave the thing. When I came back for the latter part of the war I had a commission. When I went back to France again the war was just finished then, the second time I went there.
Marriage
When did you marry Mrs Mizen?
Not till 1945.
Mrs Mizen doesn’t come from Leatherhead. She is a Londoner.
No.
What was your name before you married, Mrs Mizen?
Ida Mizen: Steel. My father was a Scot. I don’t know whether that was fortunate or not.
Edward Mizen: When we came down here of course my wife would say this was quite a country place, Leatherhead. There weren’t may cars then although it was 1921.
How old were you when you came here? You were a young man?
Yes. I’m 87 at the end of this month if I pass that but I’d rather have my other leg though.
Well it hasn’t done you badly considering you injured it in the First World War.
Ida Mizen: Not really no. Not like sitting in an office all day.
Edward Mizen: It has gradually caught up with one. All these years.
Irrigation and Cultivation
When your father bought Watersmead he bought it primarily to grow watercress.
Yes that’s why they came there because there was a wonderful supply of spring water.
Seven springs.
Yes. An output of three million gallons a day from there. Coming out quite naturally. No pumping or anything. The time I was disposing of the place the water company, they did many tests a year actually. The general manager said to me once you know the water in these springs is better than anything we’ve got after treating it. He said we don’t have to do anything with it. I drank gallons when I used to work in the fields and then go and lie down and lap it up.
Did you grow solely watercress?
Oh no. A bit of glass here and also cultivated the fields. All sorts of market garden crops.
Your father sold the land to make the bus garage – to London Transport.
Yes.
The rest of the land now belongs to the Water Board.
Yes. They haven’t done anything with it. It’s all wilderness out there in front. They never cultivated it properly at all.
They could let it to someone to cultivate it.
No, they wouldn’t do that. They used to try to cultivate it but the ground hasn’t been ploughed now for a year. They never ploughed it. They tried to grow some barley there every year since. No farmer grows the same crop for 20 years. That’s one thing you never do. They did and it gradually got worse and worse. When I disposed of the land I left a crop of barley there, at least that was the last crop. Something that could be cleared up. Leave the land vacant whereas before we had all sorts of things out there. Artichokes, celery – everything you can think of really. 24 acres there.
The Mizen name
Do you grow things in your garden now?
Edward Mizen: I used to but I can’t do anything now unfortunately.
EV: Are you interested in gardening Mrs Mizen?
Ida Mizen: I’d love it if I had time, yes. But we’ve got rather too much of it now. The paddock in the front and a lot of garden in the back. I used to grow a tremendous lot of mustard and cress, the biggest growers in England.
Edward Mizen: Yes a great thing.
Did you ever have a plant named after you?
Edward Mizen: No I don’t think so.
Or an apple or a plant?
Ida Mizen: Only roads in Cobham. I don’t know if they are named after you. Mizen Way.
Edward Mizen: Yes, there’s a road in Cobham. I never knew why. Nothing to do with us. A road that was built between the wars. Very expensive property. We were on a ship once on the way to Australia….
Ida Mizen: We used to go every year, you see, South America, Australia.
Edward Mizen: There were some passengers on board they said your name’s Mizen. Been living in a road called Mizen Way. Stayed with some friends in Mizen Cottage. I’ve no idea at all to this day why the place was named like that. We had property in the neighbourhood but it wasn’t anything to do with us at all.
Archaeological finds
When you were gardening this land did you find anything of great interest?
We found a graveyard out there where the fire station is now. We found a lot of weapons. We were building some glasshouses in 1928 or so I think. Building some glasshouses and kept digging up bits of iron. My father, he was alive then, he said I think these are old spearheads. So he called in a friend of his who was then the clerk of the Epsom District Council, a great antiquarian. He got most excited. He said I’m going to collect some of these and send them up to the British Museum. We were very careful how we dug after that. They were only about three feet down. But in every place there was a saw and two or three spearheads. They are now up at the Museum in Church Street.
What dating would they have been?
Edward Mizen: Anglo-Saxon of the 6th century.
Ida Mizen: There was a bronze bracelet.
Edward Mizen: Yes, the Museum wrote a little brochure about it which I also [have]. Excellent Museum. The British Museum were very interested because this food bucket which was apparently buried with the local chief, food to take him through the Styx, they hadn’t found one with so much remaining. A bronze handle and everything. Ornamental things that were stuck on them, on the woodwork. Even little tiny texts. Bronze feet to it, weren’t there.
A marvellous find. Anything else?
Edward Mizen: No
When you found the graveyard?
Edward Mizen: Well these were all obvious things. It was a row of graves because at that period the river……..that was the hypothesis that we had…… the river would just have been a swampy sort of fall. There was an Anglo-Saxon encampment on Hawks Hill as you probably know. So any fighting used to be there and then they would bury them on the first bit of dry land. Which at the moment is underneath the fire station. I know there’s a lot more there obviously because they were in a row. When we were digging it was gravel. That’s why they were preserved I suppose. Gravel soil and just found them on a bit of high ground. Planted once with celery in that field. I had to arrange for the water to flow through it to irrigate it. That was the year before the bus company built the thing.
Precious water
You also found wooden tree trunk drainage.
Edward Mizen: Yes because the water for Badingham Hall all came from the mill pond and it was pumped there by what is known as a ram which is just a….well there’s no trace of it now. It was just across the road there opposite behind a cottage which we built, the foreman’s cottage. That was pumping gradually all the time. The water went right along in a pipe near to the mill pond and it crossed the road, under the Cobham Road, just at the foot of The Mount, just about there. Went across there and into Badingham Park into the hall. That was their entire water supply.
Very delicious water.
Ida Mizen: Absolutely delicious. Icy cold in the summer and warm in the winter. Quite extraordinary but it was quite buoyant, wasn’t it.
Bachelor life in a rural village
Edward Mizen: There were no houses out this way at all. Early 1920s.
Was it a nice place to live when you were a young man?
Edward Mizen: Oh very yes.
A lot happening for you? Was it jolly?
Edward Mizen: Yes I lived here as bachelor for many years in this house.
Ida Mizen: Had a batman to look after him and clean his boots.
Edward Mizen: If I’d had a recorder in those days they would have been very valuable records now.
So your batman looked after you?
Edward Mizen: Yes I always had a man for some years.
Ida Mizen: I used to be invited down to the [?] – beautiful carnivals in Leatherhead, really lovely didn’t we, Edward, do you remember?
Edward Mizen: Yes it was quite a nice village at one time. We even had a ten-mile speed limit and a police trap working. Right in the High Street too. One man used to stand outside The Swan on the crossroads. Two others further up. A real old fashioned police trap in regular use. There was a ten-mile limit in Ashtead too at that time which a lot of people I think don’t believe now.
Did you socialise? The big houses – did you meet?
Edward Mizen: No I didn’t know anybody in those days because I used to go to London for my amusements.
Did you know the Beaverbrooks?
Edward Mizen: Not personally no.
Or Marie Stopes at Norbury?
Edward Mizen: Only by repute…..This used to be a very nice place but I didn’t really know any local people very much at all until the war – the last war- when we started Dad’s Army here. Of course I met quite a lot of people then.
A long lost shop and horse-drawn coaches
Ida Mizen: The houses were fairly big. The children grew up obviously and just left home or they have died off. The cocktail parties they used to go to on The Mount. I don’t think there are hardly any really old people left on The Mount.
Statistically they say a place changes every 30 years nearly out of recognition.
Ida Mizen: We had a shop in Leatherhead. It was perfectly round. Fine Fare is on the site now. (In 1986, Fine Fare was sold to what became Somerfield. Its stores were rebranded as Gateway. The Fine Fare name disappeared by the end of the 1980s.) They have photographs that have been in the [?] family. There’s still the alley, big alley. An old lady in a crinoline outside, do you remember, and it was a miniature Fortnum & Mason. It was a beautiful little shop and they pulled it down. It was a grocers shop. Been there, big family, very big family. In the family for generations. There’s nothing like that left now.
Edward Mizen: Another local thing which hasn’t occurred for many years, in the summer they used to run a horse-coach from Hyde Park Corner to Burford Bridge. A four-horse, real old fashioned coach. It was practically all Americans used to use that of course. Used to run it during the summer months.
Daily?
Edward Mizen: About three times a week. Changed horses several times because the last change of horses used to take place on the crossroads, the Swan crossroads outside The Swan. The horses were all kept in there. They would bring them out. From The Swan to the Burford Bridge it used to be a gallop all the time….there wasn’t much traffic about. That would be in the late 1920s I would say. Not a lot of traffic then. But the fare – it sounds very cheap now – was 12s/6d. I had never been on it because I never had occasion to but 12s/6d from Hyde Park Corner and that included lunch at the Burford. Lunch at the Burford used to be very good and all the meals they did. The Burford was expensive compared with other local inns at the time. I have seen those horses changing many a time out there. I think they had about four changes of horses between London and there. That wasn’t bad for just over 20 miles. So the horses of course were fresh each time.
Many horses, few houses
Did you know Emily Moore then who ran The Swan?
Edward Mizen: No not personally.
Ida Mizen: Sidney Burley [?] would remember.
Edward Mizen: Who was the one I used to know?
Ida Mizen: Gilbert.
Edward Mizen: Gilbert, that’s right. He was the last landlord there. There was a Moore that had the mill pond.
That was the same family was it?
Edward Mizen: I should think they were probably related. They had cattle of course. Cattle turned out where the watercress beds were.
Did you have any cattle? You had horses.
Edward Mizen: Oh yes, a lot of horses. We never had a motor lorry until 1921. Seems odd but nobody did much, you know. Well you did have solid tyres. I was a motorcyclist in the army. After that I drove a tank. But there weren’t any lorries about much until after the first war and most of those were solid tyres….There was no unemployment.
Did it seem a country place?
Edward Mizen: Yes there were no houses much between Mitcham and Epsom. They’d start, the route we used to come before I came to live here. Out the other way, Kingston Road. There was nothing at all there. A self-contained little place. I think the population was only about 7000 or 8000 when I knew it first. That included Fetcham because there was nothing in Fetcham at all.
A curious cousin
Are your cousins alive?
Edward Mizen: No, only one.
There are a lot of Mizens in Australia. It’s a fairly unusual name.
Edward Mizen: Yes we only came across it once in England. That was an army man, he was a brigadier. He came from a Gloucestershire family.
Your family came originally from?
Edward Mizen: Essex really. No, this brigadier. It was rather odd. A friend of ours in New Zealand – that was before we had ever been there, we’ve been there many times since then – they sent a photograph of an army officer who had visited there. The friend that wrote said we sent you this because he looked so much like Edward – that’s me.
Ida Mizen: Almost identical, they could have been brothers.
Edward Mizen: The name was Mizen. Well I only met him once and that was, how many years ago? Ten or more than that? Yes he was still in the army then down at Salisbury. We went to see him, or we were invited to. Another cousin of mine was there. The resemblance was really extraordinary but none of us could trace why he should live in…he was born in Gloucestershire and all our lot were up this way. He was almost a double of mine, wasn’t he?
Parents’ deaths
Where did your mother come from?
Shropshire. She was dead not many years before my father. She was killed in a motor accident actually in 1923.
Was she killed in Leatherhead?
No they lived at Mitcham then. My father was taking the local vicar out for a drive with my mother and they had a crash at a crossroads. My father lived about ten years and died in 1933.
Is he buried in the churchyard here?
No at Mitcham.
So all the land you owned no longer belongs to the Mizen family?
No we disposed of it all. In some cases it was acquired by the local authorities for building you know. We lost quite a bit that way, especially in the Mitcham area. Then gradually we disposed of the rest. I retired in 1960.
Life at sea
Have you enjoyed your retirement?
Edward Mizen: I enjoyed it because I was walking.
Ida Mizen: Four months of the year we were going away.
Edward Mizen: We always used to go on a passenger cargo ship. 12 people. You never knew how long you were going to be away. Sometimes you were on a ship for four months. It didn’t make any difference to the cost because they didn’t know when they started.
Ida Mizen: You had to be retired of course for a cargo ship in those days.
Edward Mizen: It was the most pleasant way of travelling I know. Far better than the Queen Elizabeth from my point of view because there were so few of you, you lived with the officers all the time and you got to odd places. On one occasion, we had been to South America two or three times and on one occasion we were in Buenos Aires, went right up the river into the Pampas up to Santa Fe. Still on the ship going all through the forests and all that. The captain had only been there once before I think.
Ida Mizen: Among other places, Fiji. We were there for ten days. Odd islands. A beautiful way to travel.
Edward Mizen: Very often forgetting to take a camera even.
Ida Mizen: I did take a camera. We went to Rhodes’ memorial in Cape Town and my scarf blew away. I put my camera down and used the last film. I jumped over the wall to retrieve my scarf, put the camera down and that was it. Gone. I got in touch with the police and they said quite impossible. It would go in actual minutes.
Employees and pumpkins
Were there characters working here?
Edward Mizen: I suppose you could call some of them characters. Our men used to work to a great age whenever we employed men. It was nothing to have a man of nearly 80 still at work.
That says a lot for the family doesn’t it?
Edward Mizen: Yes it was quite different in those days.
Paternal?
Edward Mizen: To some extent. Almost feudal in fact. If a man had a family my father would say when is your boy going to leave school, when is he coming round? It was sort of a recognised thing that they would come and work with their father.
Ida Mizen: Another thing …interesting was the growth of pumpkins up to a hundredweight. One pumpkin could weigh up to a hundredweight.
Did you win prizes?
Edward Mizen: No we grew them commercially. At that time when the American ships were going across the Atlantic quite a bit, most Americans were mad on pumpkin. I remember delivering perhaps four tons of pumpkins to Southampton for one of the liners. They used to eat tons of them, literally tons.
Did having the springs make the land very easy to work?
Edward Mizen: Here? Yes it’s fairly light soil.
The Mizen family supplied pumpkin to Grosvenor House for Halloween.
Ida Mizen: It was for six chorus girls to stand on back to back as the table revolved at midnight on Halloween night. I think it was only the one year that happened.
Edward Mizen: Yes it was a perfectly flat one about that width you see, standing back to back.
Growing for the costers
What were you most famous for as a family?
Edward Mizen: I should say mustard and cress was a great item. We grew more than anybody else in the country. Also ferns, ornamental ferns, indoor ferns.
Did you introduce any plants to this country?
Edward Mizen: No I don’t think so. We just used our own seed every time. The fern trade was quite a thing. You don’t see many now.
Ida Mizen: You don’t see barrows with costers selling bunches of flowers like you used to. Do you remember every back street in the West End had a whole barrow load. We miss that more than anything in London now.
Edward Mizen: Yes we used to bring a very big tray of cut flowers. That’s why my family had the farm at Cobham originally to get better air, no smoke. Acres and acres of chrysanthemums, asters – all that sort of thing. Mainly picked bunches – two or three lorry loads every night going up to Covent Garden to sell in the streets for costers. Big trade in that.
Ida Mizen: Remember the sweet peas? I thought I had never in my life seen anything like it. Rows and rows and rows going away into the distance like railway lines. Sweet peas of every colour. To me it was …..all these colours. A field would be an acre of nothing but asters in full bloom. The colouring, you know the colour of asters.
Edward Mizen: The sweet peas we used to sow in the open in October. That was at Cobham. There would be several acres of them. They would stand the winter all right provided they had the pea sticks over them. We used to sow them in October and we put the pea sticks in in December, long before they began to grow up anything. That would protect them for the rest of the winter. You would get the blooms probably two or three weeks before I would get them in my garden. We had an old foreman there, I’m not sure how he measured it, but he always used to reckon he had at least three miles of sweet peas in rows.
Ida Mizen: You know the colours – lovely mauves and pinks.
Early flying
You said you were very fond of flying. You flew for the first time in 1928.
Ida Mizen: Do you remember the first time we flew in a flying boat? We went to Jersey for lunch. They rowed the petrol out in cans.
Edward Mizen: There was rather more to it than that. Somebody started a flying service for Jersey.There was no airport or anything there, nothing. From Southampton there was a little tiny hover-plane, single engine. There was room for three people to sit on the floor behind the pilot. We went to Jersey and the pilot said now I’ve got to fly round a bit to try to see a fishing boat rowing out. Sure enough a little boat came out. You probably know there are so many rocks there a long way out from the shore. We went out miles.
Ida Mizen: We had to wait until the tide went out to see the rocks.
Edward Mizen: He rode out, threw out a little rope, pitched it on to our hover-plane and rode us into the docks into the harbour. The same for returning.
Ida Mizen: He used to be a very enterprising young man.
Edward Mizen: Yes the first time I flew was 1923. I remember it very well because it was only about a fortnight before my mother was killed. She knew I had gone to Paris with two friends of mine but she didn’t know I was flying. When I got back she said you are back early. I said yes I was in Paris four hours ago. What! Paris impossible. I said well I flew. She said I’m glad I didn’t know you were going to. Quite a thing you know in those days really.
Adventures in the air
You weren’t really inside.
Edward Mizen: We were inside a cabin. Of course it was all canvas wings and everything. We had a certain amount of adventure in our craft. We were in one once and it caught fire in Scotland.
Ida Mizen: We had quite some adventures in the air one way and the other.
Edward Mizen: Yes this was 1936.
Ida Mizen: They say when you are old you live on your memories and it is perfectly true. …One remembers far more a long time ago.
Edward Mizen: The service was run curiously enough by British rail. Must be about 1936.
Ida Mizen: We saw the Queen Mary, she was laid down in the Clyde.
Edward Mizen: That’s right. They were building her. This little aircraft flew from London via Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow. You don’t think of a British railway running an airline. They were four-engine planes carrying about 20 people as far as I can remember.
Ida Mizen: It was a shocking flight. The only time I have ever been airsick. We went probably ten miles forward and were thrown back six in the most appalling gale.
You must have been very nervous.
Ida Mizen: No I felt too ill to be nervous. My husband was the only one. There was only a pilot. Not even a wireless man because they dropped the aerial down….It was very early in those flying days.
Edward Mizen: I had been on part of the route only a fortnight before to the Isle of Man. That was in a local flight starting from London I think. We joined it at Birmingham and the pilot said you in a hurry? I said no, why? He said there’s a chap here who wants to go somewhere near Nottingham. Do you mind if we go round that way? I said no that’s all right. The longer the better. So the chap got on. There was only the three of us. Flew out inland to some little flying club, got out and had a beer. Then we went on to Manchester. He said I shall be here about 20 minutes. He said you’ll have time for a quick one in that pub. There’s a pub just outside the gate of the airport. Which I did. Then we went on to the Isle of Man where the plane descended in a field miles from anywhere. Nobody else. Only the two of us and the pilot. I said how do we get into Douglas. He said wait a bit. There’ll be a bus come along. So we sat at the side of the road and got back but a fortnight later on the same route with my wife it was so rough I said I’m going to have a brandy in Manchester. Which I did. I think that saved me actually.
Ida Mizen: There was one poor little girl at the back of me with beautiful ginger hair. I was feeling ill and all I could see was this beautiful ginger hair being awfully ill, almost unconscious really. Stopped the plane in Belfast. The plane landed all right then we went on to Glasgow and on the way back the wing caught fire and we had to come out early, all the passengers.
Edward Mizen: Yes we had only been up about five minutes. The mechanic started to wind up the aerial which dangled under me. I said what are you doing that for and he said we had better come down for temporary repair. As I looked out I could see a little flame on the starboard engine, gradually burning up. Anyway we got down, they hurried us out and chucked our suitcases out and put the fire extinguishers on. But before they put it out it burned the length of the wing. The wing you see was canvas in those days. It wasn’t metal. They said if you want to get back to London we will put you on the Royal Scot or if you would like to wait till tomorrow there will be another aircraft. We said we would wait so went back to the hotel for another night. Midday placards: “Airliner Catches Fire!”. Actually it might have been worse.
Ida Mizen: I think flying has advanced more than anything. I would love to go to New Zealand on Concorde.
Edward Oakley MIZEN, born 30 June 1894 in Croydon, Surrey. Died 23 July 1985 in Great Bookham. Married Ida M STEEL on the 28 December 1945 in Westminster, London. Ida Mary STEEL born 31 December 1904 in Islington, London. Died in the December quarter of 1997 in Mid Surrey.