1900s-1945
When David Phipps came back to Leigh in 2005, he was returning to a village his family had left long before, but one he remembered vividly from his childhood. His parents had made their home in Leigh between 1927 and 1939, and those twelve years shaped the lives of everyone in the household. David, born in 1929, grew up here as one of eight children — four boys and four girls — in a family whose daily rhythm revolved around bread, flour and the chapel.
The story of the family's connection to Leigh begins with David's father, Robert Phipps. Robert's early life had taken several turns before he ever set foot in the village. He left school at just fourteen, and when the First World War came he volunteered for service, joining the Royal Horse Artillery as an observer. It was not an obvious background for a baker, and indeed baking was not his first trade. His first job was as a bookkeeper, working for an uncle who ran a bakery business in Dartford. That position gave him his introduction to the trade, and he clearly learned it well: by the time he came to Kent in a professional capacity he had risen to become General Manager of Wallaces bakery in Lewisham. At that stage the family were living at Wembley, a long way from the lanes of Leigh.
In 1927 Robert purchased Leigh Bakery, and the Phipps family moved in. For the next twelve years he ran the business, and he became such a familiar figure in the village that everyone simply called him 'Mr Phipps'. Baking was demanding work, with unsociable hours and long days, but it placed the family at the heart of village life. The arrangement came to an end in 1939, when Robert sold the business to Mr Lakeman. The Phipps household then moved away to run their other bakery, which was at Downe.
School days formed a large part of David's memories of the village. He and his brother Robert were pupils at Malvern School for Boys, which stood on Quarry Hill in Tonbridge. Getting there from Leigh involved a train journey, and the children made their way to school by way of Leigh Halt, the small local stop on the line. The journey had its small pleasures. On Tonbridge station there was a man who sold sweets to the waiting schoolchildren — sherbet dabs and penny Milky Ways — and these little treats were clearly memorable enough to survive in David's recollections more than sixty years later.
The other great pillar of family life was the Plymouth Brethren Chapel, of which Robert was an Elder. The chapel stood at the centre of the family's week, and its congregation drew people not only from Leigh itself but also from Penshurst and Hildenborough. Among the families who worshipped there were the Wellses, the Lucases and the Lamberts, names that will still be recognised by many in the district.
A Sunday at the chapel was a full day's commitment. It began with Sunday School at half past nine in the morning, held in the tin chapel — the corrugated building that served the congregation. The morning service followed, and it was no brief affair: it ran for an hour and a half. There was no musical accompaniment of any kind; the singing was entirely unaccompanied. David remembered that the congregation sang about fifteen hymns over the course of their worship, but that these were set to only five tunes, a repetition that must have made the music deeply familiar to everyone present. The day was not over after the morning meeting, because a second Sunday School session took place at half past three in the afternoon, and then the Evening Service followed at around six o'clock.
Weekdays brought their own gatherings too. On Wednesday evenings the Brethren held Cottage Meetings in one another's houses, keeping the fellowship going through the week. Once a year, in the summer, the Plymouth Brethren Mission came to the village. This event was known as 'The Young Life Campaign', and it took place in a large tent erected in a meadow. The spot where those summer meetings were held is now occupied by houses — it is where Well Close begins today — so the meadow that once hosted the tent has long since disappeared under modern development.
The graveyard beside the chapel holds the memory of two of the family's children. Hilda Rose Phipps is buried there, and next to her lies Pat Phipps, who died of meningitis when only two years old. For the family, the chapel ground was not only a place of worship but a place of remembrance and grief.
Not every memory of chapel life was solemn. One incident in particular stayed with David and his brother Robert. Mr Mitchell, who came over from Hildenborough to administer Communion, was the unwitting target of a prank: the two boys dropped a flour sack, filled with water, on top of him. The consequences were severe. Robert received the biggest hiding of his life for the escapade, a punishment that evidently made as lasting an impression as the prank itself.
David's visit in 2005 allowed him to look again at the places that had filled his childhood: the bakery his father ran, the tin chapel where the family worshipped, the meadow that had once hosted the summer Mission, and the graveyard where his siblings lie. The Leigh of 1927 to 1939 that he described — a village of early trains to Tonbridge, penny sweets on the platform, unaccompanied hymn singing and cottage meetings — belongs to a way of life that has now passed. Recording his memories ensures that the years of the Phipps family at Leigh Bakery, and the chapel community that surrounded them, remain part of the village's story.