Chipperfield Within Living Memory

PLEASE – we need your help to locate the exact site of the pits used for cock        fighting in the village.  Did your parents or grandparents tell you anything about them? Do we have a site of historical importance in Chipperfield which merits recognition? If you do have any information, please reply now as we may have a golden opportunity to do something about it!
On page 13 of her book about Chipperfield, Miss Liddle in her reminiscent walk from the Windmill to the Two Brewers, says that in the days before the church was built (1837/38), there used to be a well used cockpit on either side of the track on this lonely piece of the common. Long standing residents of the village say that the area was called Two Dells because there was a pit on either side of the road just about where it floods today. Many say that they were cock fighting pits, but was this known before Miss Liddle’s book was published around 1945? We must acknowledge the fact that she interviewed many people to find her information.
Chris Saunders recalls that the dell on the church side was 8 to 10 yards across and 10 to 12 feet deep and that he used to run up and down there with his playmate, George Durrant. The pit on the allotment side was not so deep. Chris estimates that it would have taken 100 tons of soil to fill them up (5 x 20 ton lorry loads.). He says that they would have had to go down to 30 feet to find chalk and sizeable flints, so they could not have been dug for this purpose.. He is not aware that they were ever used as cock pits. Remarkably, Chris has a very clear memory of being shown a cock fighting pit by his father in about 1922. It was in the Two Brewers meadow behind the clubroom used by the boxers, just beyond the bottom of the gardens of the flint cottages and adjacent to the burnt down Two Brewers Barn near the Old Post Office. It consisted of 3 sides of a wooden framework with an indentation in the middle of it.
Cock fighting was particularly popular on Shrove Tuesday and the stakes, which were often quite high, could be not only for money but also for a fat pig or a sheep. The 2 year old fighting cocks were given a special diet, had their skin toughened with massages of ammonia or alcohol, their feathers trimmed and their combs cropped to prevent injury. By 1849 anyone found keeping a fighting cock or letting a pit could be fined £5, so the once popular sport died out, but there were still illegal fights taking place.
Mary Nobbs
01923 269480: davidmarynobbs@waitrose.co.uk