To all those who possess a television set or study pickle advertisements, the name of Philip Harben is already a household word. But on Tuesday, local TV enthusiasts, not to mention the advertisement students and several hundred other curious housewives, were able to see the “master cook” in person, at Watford Town Hall.

Mr Harben appeared on the stage amid all the most up-to-date kitchen utensils, supplied by the Eastern Electricity Board, complete with beard, shirt sleeves and blue apron.

“French cooks are not better than English ones,” he declared. “They just spend more money, more time and more trouble on cooking.”

[From the Watford Observer of October 15, 1953]

 

Patrolling policemen found a car stopped in the central reservation of the Hertfordshire section of the M1, and inside were an elderly couple calmly eating sandwiches.

This was just one of a number of crazy incidents reported by north Watford motorway patrol policemen for an article in the autumn issue of the Automobile Association magazine Drive.

With the fog and snow of winter almost upon us, Drive asked the men from north Watford to tabulate the incidents they saw on the M1 during the round-the-clock patrols in the patrol vehicle codenamed Tango 6.

One police patrolman told Drive about how he had stopped a man walking up the central reservation.

“Am I right for Edinburgh?” the man had asked.

A sergeant told how a man left his Mini on the hard shoulder and went to telephone the AA. When he returned, all four wheels were gone.

But perhaps the craziest of all happened before Drive carried out its survey. A north Watford patrolman described the incident: “A soldier pulled up in the fast lane of the motorway and went to sleep. When we woke him, he said: ‘I thought it was a nice quiet place to have a kip’.”

[From the Watford Observer of October 16, 1970]

 

A telephone message received at Rickmansworth Police Station to the effect that a bomb had been placed on the railway line led to excitement in the town late on Sunday evening.

The message came from a woman resident on the Cedars Estate who, in great alarm, averred she had seen suspicious characters placing what appeared to be a bomb on the railway line near the old cattle bridge.

Sergeant Perkins, accompanied by six constables, immediately rushed to the spot but an extensive and prolonged search proved fruitless. No bomb was found nor any suspicious characters.

A few days previously another scare was caused when it was reported that a bomb had been found in Rectory Road, Rickmansworth, over which the railway line passes.

It proved to be an old German hand grenade, a harmless relic of the last war, which someone had evidently thrown away as being so much junk. It is now used at the police station as a paperweight.

[From the Watford Observer of October 27, 1939]