The names recorded on Elsenham’s Roll of Honour are more than a list of those who served during the First World War. Together they provide a record of a village whose people answered the call to serve between 1914 and 1919, and of the families whose lives were permanently changed by the conflict.
Look up at an old thatched cottage, and there is every chance the finest piece of craftsmanship is not the roof itself, but the small ornament standing proudly along its ridge.
At the start of the millennium, Elsenham was a village of around 2,500 people. Surrounded by farmland and characterised by its railway station, historic core and close proximity to Stansted Airport, it occupied a distinctive position between rural Essex and a rapidly changing regional economy.
“The Robin Hood” Public House in, surprise, surprise, Robin Hood Road is sadly no longer an Inn, once the spiritual home of the also-gone, but never-forgotten Elsenham Football Club. Sorry to say, the demise of the Village’s Eleven contributed to its demise. Our own “Footy” boys drank the Pub dry at least once. Their disbanding was a great loss to Ernie & Rennee Atkinson’s income.
A long view of Elsenham’s landscape can be traced through memory as much as through maps. One resident’s recollection of the late Alan Bennett and his family offers a detailed account of how the village once functioned, and how those systems appear to have shifted over time.
