A labour of love but richly rewarding - that's our new book on the 60s and 70s

Apart from a distinct dislike of heights, there are numerous other reasons why I would not choose to spend my time climbing mountains, battling against oxygen deficiencies and the extreme cold in addition to undertaking all this in an outfit which some would disdain nowadays as being barely suitable for a hike across the Lake District.

Mallory gave us the famous reply “Because it's there” in answer to the question as to why people climb mountains.

While of much less significance, I have been climbing my own mountains of late, in the shape of the latest in the series Watford in the 20th Century, featuring the locality of SW Herts during the 60s and 70s.

Through the latter half of the 90s and the early years of this century, I researched and wrote a number of studies on the locality featuring the period from 1900 to 1979. They appeared in eight booklets over a number of years, illustrates by pictures that had been donated for posterity by individuals to various local museums and libraries.

Four years ago, it was decided to gather these old copies together, scan them in and reproduce them in book form. Each of the eight booklets had constituted some two month's full time work, which had to be fitted in around my day job but I enjoyed doing them so much, it became almost addictive.

I have often said that local journalism has been a lifetime of work which, if given the independent finance, I would have undertaken for free.

So when it was decided to re-jig those supplements into book-form, I was offered a sum to check the scanning. The original glossy pages were placed under a scanner which then read each page and transferred it into type.

This is a marvellous invention although prone to the odd error, particularly when it involves figures. I was emailed the copy and Ellie and I spent a number of hours reading the new copy out loud while the other checked the original. There were four supplements involved in the first book; one very large supplement and two more in the second book, so it took some time for each book.

That done, I had completed the assignments.

However, I could not leave it just like that. Since their original publication, I had learnt things through research and from launching the Nostalgia Page, so the books needed updating. There was more to add, but the economics of such productions meant that no one could be employed to undertake this. It would not and could never be cost-effective.

There was not any debate in my mind. In the first place the information had been crammed into the narrative so as to register as many facts as possible. I went through, putting a little air in it, instead of hitting the reader with a machine-gun approach of facts. I had the basic supplements – around 15,000 words each and a few other items such as Movers and Shakers scanned from our Millennium supplements and a couple of Homages to the High Street which we had produced in a Past and Present supplement back in 1995.

The first book started out with some 60,000 words which grew with a degree of rewriting and additional material. The second book had a similar number of words but each of those books finished with 110,000 after I had rewritten some of it and introduced new facts and anecdotes, plus a few features.

For the third book, we only had to check the scanned type for errors from two supplements, amounting to some 43,000 words. Clearly a few additional items were needed, some old features resurrected and there were a lot more anecdotes, facts and readers’ anecdotes.

Before long I was engrossed and I could see potential for expanding the coverage. I checked a few items when I was back in the UK at Christmas and even undertook a couple more walks through local high streets to provide more substance to the High Street Homage section.

The wordage increased from 42,000 to 110,000. I should stress no one asked me to do it, I just presented the finished draft.

I then sourced more photographs to enable us to reflect what was lost during those two decades and, with the help of others, the Editor was presented with some 400 photographs from which he chose to illustrate the book.

I am not alone in donating labour and time. Grelle White updated her Movers and Shakers section, reflecting on those in the locality who made things happen during the decades, and the Editor, who already has enough on his plate, took to checking my work, selecting pictures and editing the entire book over and above an exacting day job.

People have asked me how many holidays I have been able to pay for with the revenue from the books. I have tried smiling dismissively but to further questioning I have had to admit I did it for the love. We had to do it, no matter the loss of spare time and a fair amount of pulled hair and ground teeth, because, when we looked at the work, we undertook it “because it is there”.

Now it is here, out now, priced £12.99: Watford in the 20th Century focusing on the 60s and 70s, covering the area encompassed by the line from Harefield to Chipperfield, Bovingdon and Kings Langley to Aldenham, on round to Bushey and Northwood.

Hope you enjoy it – I certainly did.

Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here