11:00pm Thursday 9th July 2009
By Tom King
RON Chittock celebrated two birthdays this week. As well as turning 79, he also marked a 600th. But Ron obviously didn’t account for all those years himself.
The 600th birthday milestone, reached yesterday, was shared with his six sisters, as their combined age.
At 79, Ron is the baby of the family, while his sister Mag, aged 91, is the eldest.
Each of them has made a hefty contribution to their pool of longevity, and the clue to long life, Chittock-style, may well be location.
All seven siblings – six girls and Ron – were born in Basildon, and five of them still live in the town today.
“It’s lucky we didn’t move away,” says Joan Keeble, the fifth oldest, at 84. “There’s obviously something in the air that gives you long life.”
Unlike the majority of Basildon veterans, the Chittocks predate the arrival of Basildon New Town, in 1949.
Their parents, Bob and Clara, were married in Holy Cross Church, the parish church of the old Basildon village.
Bob and Clara married in 1915, in the middle of the First World War.
Maggie was born in 1918, and the rest of the family quickly followed.
“There was no telly or radio in the evenings back then,” says Ron. “You had to make your own entertainment.”
The couple’s little Chittocks turned out to be a succession of girls, until Ron arrived.
“They weren’t going to stop until they’d had a boy,” Mag says.
Bob and Clara met while they were both working at the munitions factory at Corringham, now the oil refinery site.
They set up home in a cottage, off Timberlog Lane. The site is now occupied by housing, but the Chittock name lives on in the street signs.
Chittock Gate and Chittock Mead are a tribute to Clara’s fame as a local character, always ready with her harmonica at any sort of get-together.
Between them, the Chittocks have seen a huge amount of change.
The rural Basildon of the family’s childhood has disappeared without trace. But, on the whole, the family don’t have many regrets.
“It was a very poor area, with very few resources,” says Doll, the fourth oldest, at 86. “We didn’t even have our own doctor. We had to go to Corringham if someone was sick.”
But families within the community helped each other, lending and borrowing whatever was needed.
As Mag recalls, when Ron was born: “He was blue in the face, and he needed to be kept warm. I had to take a bike and go across the fields as fast as I could to borrow a shawl and a hot water bottle. I’d never learnt to ride a bike, but I managed it somehow, because of the urgency. I saved Ron’s life.”
Ask the Chittocks to describe life in old Basildon, and they come up with a single word: “Happy.” Their childhood is an object lesson in how to enjoy life to the full without much money.
With seven children to support, there was certainly no cash to buy toys, but Bob fashioned wooden dolls for the girls, and the children made swings, which they slung from the high branches of the hedgerow elms.
In the summer, there was swimming in the creek at Pitsea.
“We couldn’t afford swimming costumes, so we just used to pin our vests down,” recalls Doll.
The legacy of childhood contentment has lasted for almost a century.
“We’ve got two things in common,” says Joan. “We talk a lot, and we’re a happy bunch.”
On the whole, the family feel the arrival of the new town improved local life. “It brought employment,” says Ron. “And it improved living standards so much.”
You understand what he means, when the ladies describe some of these living arrangements.
The six young females shared just one double bed. They had to sleep crossways in a row. And, as they grew older and taller, their feet stuck out the other side.
Joan recalls, in the early days, water had to be fetched from a well. On one occasion, she peered into the bucket, “and there was a great, long rat. But we still had to drink the water”.
Bathroom arrangements consisted of an outdoor toilet, though it had its charms. It was covered in hop plants which had been brought back from a hop-picking holiday in Kent.
The Chittocks may be able to count the years they share between them, but there is one sum total no one has yet tried to calculate – the number of descendants.
Maybe this is because it is growing so fast it’s hard to keep up.
Joan, alone, can boast three sons, 12 grandchildren, 23 great grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.
Nor has anyone attempted the feat of getting the entire clan under one roof.
But the Chittock generation, all 600 years of them, continue to remain close. The sisters meet every Monday afternoon to reminisce and play parlour games such as charades.
And what about a birthday party for Ron? No such luck. As after 600 birthdays, Mag says: “We’ve had enough of those.”
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