Waterford Village

To the passing motorist today the village appears to straggle along the A602 for just under half a mile, but this aspect is largely due to the development during the last hundred and twenty years. The main road along the valley of the Beane has been an important highway north from Hertford for many centuries and the hamlet of Waterford grew up near the ford. The latter was needed not for the high road, which continues on the same side of the river, but for a lane turning off to the east.

The first mention of the name Waterford was in the early 13th century. It is thought that the ford may have been so named because the water here was deeper than at Stapleford, a mile and a half upstream. A map printed as late as 1880 still marks the ford, although a bridge was shown as well. Some earlier maps also show bridges but the date when the river was first bridged is not known. Flimsy constructions would easily have been destroyed in floods such as those that have occurred in living memory.

Today, near the bridge, there are several groups of picturesque old cottages, together with the old public house, The Waterford Arms, now a cottage. On the other side of the bridge is a small green. Beside it are two Georgian houses, one named Waterford House which was renamed and called The Verney when the apprentice printers lived there from Goldings, now a residential home for the elderly and has reverted back to its original name Waterford House.  The house to the left is called Mill Cottage that in the 50s a Vet by the name of Mr Silcock and his family lived there.

In 1869 Robert Smith of Goldings decided to divert the high road from the vicinity of his house. He paid for the construction of nearly a mile of new road, which necessitated the building of three new bridges, three culverts and a cutting through Molewood. A new estate road was also built. Such construction work would probably cost well over a million pounds at today's prices. The present main road from the junction with Goldings Lane to Hertford follows the new alignment. The Hertfordshire Mercury of 1870 described the new road “a great public improvement”.

Robert Smith then built a church in 1871 and put everything of the best of its kind into it. The result is that St. Michael and All Angels is one of the most charming of small Victorian churches. Of particular interest is the stained glass by William Morris Company. The designs were by the different artists who worked for the firm, including Morris himself, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb, Waterford, previously part of the ancient Bengeo parish became an independent ecclesiastical parish in 1909.

After the consecration of the church in 1872, Robert Smith decided to rebuild Goldings on higher ground, further away from the river mists. Goldings MkIII was completed in 1877 a huge neo‑Jacobean mansion of red brick. Robert Smiths wife Isabel noted that it had turned out larger than they would have liked. For the next seventeen years Robert Smith took an active part in village life, until 21st Oct 1894 Robert passed away. Isabel passed away 16th Sept 1913.

Their son Major Reginald Abel Smith. J.P who had married Margaret Alice, Holland, on the 15th Oct 1885 had taken charge of Goldings. Then on 26th April 1902 Major Reginald Abel Smith. J.P died  of smallpox along with their son Cyril Ralph Abel Smith. This left Goldings to another Reginald Abel Smith, a Grandson of the original owner Robert Smith. Reginald married Myrtle and inherited Goldings in1913.

Most large private Houses were used as hospitals for the wounded of the Great War. Mrs Myrtle Abel Smith was reported in The Herts Advertiser of July 1916 to have 16 beds available for injured soldiers at Goldings to convalesce till after the war. Two years later in 1920 it was reported Myrtle had died.

The Abel Smith family sold Goldings in 1921 to Dr Barnardo Homes for £100,000 which had been set off in a loan, that by all accounts was never called in. Goldings became The William Baker Technical School, in honour of the late Honorary Director, Mr. William Baker, to commemorate the life‑work of a noble, unassuming Irish gentleman.

A great change occurred on April 19th 1922 when the first Barnardo's boys arrived. Two hundred and sixty from Stepney, led by their own band, marched along the road from the railway station at Hertford East and took up residence. Later that year the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) came for the official opening of the William Baker Technical School as it was called in memory of William Baker director of Dr. Barnardo's. The large stables of the mansion were ideal for workshops and in the fifty acres of grounds there was plenty of space for a swimming pool and other sports facilities. Two former Dr. Barnardo's Boys, Leslie Thomas and Frank Norman have written about their time at Goldings in their autobiographies.

Barnardo's closed Goldings on 26th July 1967 after 45 years but their apprentice printers continued to live in the Verney and continued at Goldings for a number of years. Goldings was sold to Herts County Council and was used as the headquarters of the Highways Department. In 1997 Herts County Council sold Goldings to Eugene Flannery of London-based Harinbrook properties, who is converting the buildings into private residential apartments.

http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/data/places/waterford.htm