Joseph built a real plotland dynasty

They came from across the east and south-east of England, covered five generations, and embraced many different surnames.

But this diverse bunch all had one common link, a man. It was because of him they chose Pitsea in which to converge. It is where Joseph Bates lived, worked and raised his children.

Joseph built houses and he also built a dynasty.

Pitsea is where he laid the foundations of the clan assembled on the 50th anniversary of his death.

If you wanted a classic portrait of a plotlander, Joseph would be your man. He was one of the pioneers of the post First World War migration from the East End of London to the Essex fields.

Two of Joseph’s children were present at the gathering. Both still live locally. Hilda Arnold, 82, remains in Pitsea. Edgar Bates, 78, now lives in Stanford-le-Hope, near his old workplace.

Like all Joseph’s male children, he spent his working life “at the Shell” (the Shell petrol refinery at Coryton).

Between them, Hilda and Edgar were able to piece together the tale of Bates the builder.

Joseph was born and raised in Bow, the very heart of Cockney London. He came into the world with an impediment. One leg was shorter than the other.

While he remained in London he worked as a rent collector. Only in Pitsea did he discover his real calling.

In 1919, Joseph’s first wife died of the influenza that killed more people than the Great War.

For the sake of his health and sanity, doctors advised Joseph to move out of London.

“The first issue of Plotlands had just come up,” says Edgar.

So Joseph headed east, acquiring one of the one-acre sites for offer near Pitsea station.

The plot lay alongside a dirt track called Rectory Park Drive. The year was 1922. Joseph soon remarried. His new wife, Doris, was a widow whose husband had also perished in the flu epidemic.

Joseph, the supposed invalid, discovered he had a flair for constructing houses quickly, while still making them appealing.

“He built them of wood,” recalls Hilda.

“Then he Snowcemed the outside and painted them white. They all looked lovely, especially in the sunlight.”

He also encouraged his children to join him.

“We all had a hand, even the little ones,” Hilda recalls.

Joseph built the first of many bungalows for his own family. Later he added a much larger extension, and the original building became just the kitchen of Mark 2.

Everything Joseph touched with his hands seemed to grow. He was also a great gardener, who managed to keep his family well-nourished and healthy, thanks to food from his plotland.

Joseph never trained as a builder, but this didn’t inhibit him. Hilda recalls: “He was a very practical, hands-on person. He had great faith in himself, and he just got on and did things.”

He clearly did things well, to judge by the remarkable process that now began.

“People would see a property he had built and they would say, ‘I want one of those, please build me one too,’” says Hilda.

Eventually Joseph totted up 27 houses. Occasionally he would bring in a skilled tradesman, but he built most of the neighbourhood with his own hands.

Chief among those in the line-up for a Bates-built house were Joseph’s numerous brothers and sisters, back in Bow.

“They decided they all wanted a place like that,’ says Hilda.

“Our Dad would build them a home in Pitsea one at a time, and the whole family steadily drifted down from London.

“I grew up with uncles and aunts living all around us.”

Joseph and Doris were doing their bit to make the family even more extensive.

Eventually they came to produce 13 children. “They would have one child every two years, regular as clockwork,” says Hilda.

Joseph’s home building skills were really put to the test.

Anyone born post 1945 will ponder an obvious question. How did so many Bates all manage to live together in that one bungalow? But Hilda says: “We never seemed cramped or got on top of one another.”

As if that wasn’t enough, numbers were regularly swollen by in-laws.

When a Bates married, they and their new spouse would start their life as a couple living at the family home.

“We had a process that worked well,” Edgar says.

“There was just one young married couple at a time. Eventually they would move out to a place of their own. Then dad would say to the next couple, ‘OK, there’s a room for you, you can get married now’.”

Without exception, the younger Bates all wed in old Pitsea church.

Nobody ever seemed to have known the meaning of boredom.

“When we were children, Pitsea was still very rural,’ says Hilda.

“We used to go everywhere. My brothers had a barrel and they rolled it round the fields with me in it.”

The plotlanders took life in their stride, and they extended the same approach to death.

Hilda recalls the first time she visited her husband-to-be in his dad’s home, nearby. “He said ‘Come on in and I’ll show you something.’ He took me into the next room and it was his mum, lying there, dead, in a coffin. She’d only just died.”

Life was more down to earth. Few people had cars, although Joseph owned a motorbike he had used for his first trip to Pitsea.

Most journeys were still made on foot. Hilda’s father-in-law, a chimney sweep, roamed the unmade lanes between Pitsea and Vange with his brushes over his shoulder. Occasionally these conditions would catch people out.

“One night, Auntie Else didn’t come home,” Hilda recalls.

“She worked in service in Thorpe Bay, and she used to take the train from Pitsea. My brothers went to look for her and they found she was stuck in a snowdrift. ”

You will look in vain for any sign of Joseph Bates’ handiwork these days. All the houses he built were swept away by Basildon new town.

But blood endures longer than houses. The enduring legacy of the Bates of Bow and Pitsea was there in St Gabriel’s Church hall, just a few yards from where the great-great grandfather of the dynasty’s youngest members built his first house.

Our back garden bomb

THE Second World War was a time of thrills, spills and mortal danger for most people. Yet can there be a more extraordinary story of a close shave than Hilda and Edgar Bates’ account of the bomb that landed in their back garden at Rectory Park Drive?

“When the bomb fell, we were having our Sunday dinner,’ Hilda recalls.

“We’d had the first course, but not our afters. Dad had gone out into the garden with one of our brothers. Suddenly there was this huge bang and muck everywhere. We knew right away it was a bomb. We rushed out into the garden. We thought they’d both been killed.”

But the two men were very much alive. They had been walking along the two borders of the garden, one on each side. The bomb fell slap between them.

It failed to explode, and buried itself 24 ft below in an old well.

“There was just a huge mound of earth where the bomb had landed, and dad and my brother sprawled on either side,” says Hilda.

The family had to move out of the house for four days, while the bomb was removed and defused. “The soldiers said it was still ticking when they got it out,” says Edgar.

Ultimately, the bomb drama was responsible for just one group of casualties. “When we moved back, our rabbits had disappeared,” says Hilda. ‘They had survived the bomb. So we reckon the soldiers ate them.”