Profile - Joy Galley

Profile

Joy Galley

Joy Galley is a true Melbourn girl, born a Stockbridge, her roots reach back just about as far as records go! Her paternal grandparents had five children and they lived at the house called ‘Stockholm’ which stood where the forecourt of the garage in the High Street is now. Her father remembered standing on the stone front doorstep and watching the Zeppelins flying over the village. Later on in the early 50’s Joy and her parents were saddened when the entire side of the house fell away and the house had to be demolished. This happened from time to time to cottages made of clunch when frost and water had penetrated the walls. Retrieved from the wreckage of the house, Joy still has the stone front doorstep in her garden.

Grandfather Stockbridge was a painter and decorator but also had the contract to take the mail from Royston to Cambridge by horse and cart, but when motorcars became more common, he lost that job. He died at the young age of 52 but Grandma Stockbridge, who spent much of her time in the picking fields at The Bury, lived to be 99 ½ ! As Joy’s own father Maurice lived to be 93 you could say she comes from a long lived strain.

Maurice worked as a carpenter for Wards in the village and later moved to Pye in Cambridge, where amongst other things he learned how to make a television set. The result was that they were one of the first families in the village to have a TV set and were very popular when big events were televised. He also used to top up accumulators from a shed in the back garden, and Joy remembers people coming up the side of the house with an accumulator full of acid! No ‘elf and safety in those days! His technical skills also came in handy on VE Day in 1945 when The Rose Pub (on the corner of Rose Lane & the High Street) held a big celebratory party and there was dancing in the street. Joy’s father provided the music for that party and acted as what we would now call a DJ !

Maurice met and married Daphne Reed from Langley in Hertfordshire, she had been in service in Cambridge and they started their married life in a house on the corner of Rose Lane and Dolphin Lane where Joy was born. Joy has vivid memories of the notorious occasion when an aeroplane fell on a house in Rose Lane. However, home was a ‘tied cottage’ and the farmer who owned it wanted to put his cowman in there so the little family moved to no 78 Orchard Road, where later another daughter Anita was born, in a house with no running water – the water was drawn from a well in the front garden. Both girls were born at home, Joy was delivered by Nurse Cox (who later became Nurse Pennicott) and it was in fact she who gave Joy her pretty name. She said with a surname like Stockbridge, by the time a ‘Jacqueline’ had written her full name on an exam paper the test would be over !

Joy went to the primary school in Mortlock Street until she was 15 (the village College had not yet been built) when she won a place at the Technical College in Cambridge to do a secretarial course. However, her mother decided that having left school in July she should not waste the two months until the term started and she took a temporary job in the Government Offices in Brooklands Avenue. She did so well here, learning all the secretarial skills as she went along, that she never did leave to take up her college place but spent the next 40 years in the Civil Service, picking up a long service medal and an invitation to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party!

Joy has many happy memories of childhood in Melbourn, spending her pocket money at Elsie Dodkin’s sweet shop and playing tennis at the back of the old Congregational Church where the courts stood. Just behind that were the fields where Martin’s kept their dairy herd which produced milk for the whole village, Meg Martin took the churns round on a horse drawn cart and people went out with a jug to be filled with milk. Her sister Kate had a hairdressing shop where having a perm meant being wired up to the most fearsome looking machinery. Once a week Mr.

Brunsden came round to collect the ‘Christmas Club’ money – a small amount was regularly put away and then used at Christmas time for food and presents. Stockbridge’s (next to the old Post Office) sold just about everything you might need as did Chapmans in Station Road – you could buy sheets, towels, knitting wools, boots and fabrics in the village in those days..