45 St Barnabas Road, Wingfield

History of 45 St Barnabas Road

1901

S F Legerton, fancy draper

A.E., wife

P F., daughter, 6,

In 2024 JL noted: After Samuel Martin Legerton‘s death his son Samuel Frank Legerton took over the business. Samuel Frank Legerton was born in 1865 in Halstead. He married Adelaide Elizabeth Gray in 1893.  They had 1 son and 1 daughter.

1911

Samuel Legerton, fancy draper

Adelaide, Leonard, son, 8

1913

Frank Legerton

1921

Samuel Frank Legerton, draper at 18 Market Street

Adelaide Elizabeth

Leonard Maurice, son, 18

By 1939 Samuel Frank Legerton was retired and living in St Albans; he died in 1946.

1940 – 1960

Howard and Elizabeth Diamond and family

1962

Oliver MacDonagh

In 2023 RD wrote:

From 1940 to 1960 the above address was home to my parents Howard and Elizabeth Diamond and home to myself and my two brothers when not away at boarding school or Liverpool University where my older brother, John, studied architecture.  As a recently qualified architect John contributed to the design of the Regatta Restaurant on the Thames South Bank site for the Festival of Britain in 1951.  He also designed many projects including one at the junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftsbury Avenue in London.  My younger brother, Paul, trained as an accountant in Hobson Street and eventually became head of all accounting activities for the United Nations in New York where he had an office on the top floor of the UN Building. He visited many sites for the UN, including places like Eritrea, and paid staff salaries in 140 currencies.  I myself read Natural Sciences, principally physics, here in Cambridge University and subsequently worked for over 30 years at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology on the new Addenbrookes site here in Cambridge, where my work was applied mathematics and software development. We were tenants, not owners, of No 45, the owner being a confectioner by name of S. A. Rolfe, if my memory is correct.