Dr Jonathan Oates - Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths Around Uxbridge

I t is impossible to offer anything resembling a complete history of Uxbridge and its environs in a few pages and the interested reader will note a number of books for further reading in the bibliography. What shall be attempted here is a very brief introduction to a few salient facts about the districts past. The places to be briefly described here are those within the modern borough of Hillingdon, notably Uxbridge, Ruislip, Northwood, West Drayton, Yiewsley, Hayes and Harefield.

For most of its history, the district was rural and by twenty-first-century standards, very sparsely populated. At the time of the Domesday survey in 1086, there were a number of small hamlets here. There was the manor of West Drayton, with a population of about 100. The manor of Ruislip was also in existence. During the Middle Ages, however, Uxbridge became the foremost settlement in the area, though it was part of the manor of Colham and a chapelry of Hillingdon, with St Johns as its parish church. This was partly because of its location; being by the river Colne, it was along the main road from London to Oxford, the Oxford Road, later the Uxbridge Road. It also became a market town by virtue of a royal charter, and the centre of manorial administration in the thirteenth century. Flour milling and brewing became Uxbridges major industries. In Tudor times, West Drayton was the home of courtiers such as William Paget. The Revd Henry Gold of Hayes involved himself in the dangerous game of religious controversy in this period, too, though to tragic effects, as noted in Chapter 3.

In the seventeenth century, national events affected Uxbridge. There were a number of outbreaks of plague; in 1603, 176 people died of it and in 1625, there were another 136 fatalities. But the great plague of 1665 only killed 40 inhabitants. Most in these localities seemed to be sympathetic to the Parliamentary cause in the Civil Wars, at least judging by the protestation rolls, where men attested their loyalty. In 1645, the two sides in the Civil War tried to make a peace treaty here, at a house later known as the Treaty House, though without success. In 1688, there was panic in Uxbridge caused by Irish soldiers deserting James IIs army as the invading William of Orange advanced towards London. It was feared that these desperate men would attack the town, though happily this was not the case. Uxbridges local prominence was noted by Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century, thus: a pleasant large market town, famous in particular, for having abundance of noble seats of gentlemen and persons of quality in the neighbourhood. John Loveday, an eighteenth-century antiquarian, noted the Crown as Uxbridges premier inn.

Most in the district were employed in agriculture, until the early twentieth century. But many worked in the brickfields in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, too. Giles Hutson recalled that these itinerant workers were rough and troublesome, especially when drunk. In 1861, 175 men in Yiewsley and West Drayton were brickies and 238 worked in farming. By the 1930s, the brickfields were coming to the end of their existence, but farms persisted throughout this period. The completion of the Grand Junction Canal in 1805 facilitated the brick industry as it meant the finished article could be cheaply and easily sent to London to be used in the building trade; and rubbish, including manure, was sent back, thus fertilizing the cultivated land.