In 1947 Pam Ayres MBE, poet, comedian, songwriter and presenter of radio and television programmes was born at No.2 Campdene on Upper Green Stanford in the Vale. She rose to fame after winning ‘Opportunity Knocks’ in 1975 and by 2020 was the bestselling UK female poet since records began. She was the youngest of six children and in her autobiography ‘The Necessary Aptitude’ she recounts growing up as a child in a large, noisy and boisterous household in the council houses at the end of the village.
Every family in that row of semi-detached houses kept poultry for eggs in their back gardens, and Pam describes the view of their accommodation as ‘a collapsing horizon of ramshackle constructions.’ Their own hen house was heavily creosoted with a corrugated iron roof. Nearby were father’s ferrets, her brothers fantailed pigeons, various rabbits and laying hens including Rhode Island Reds, Light Sussex and a crossbreed known by all as RIRxLS. Hens were a big part of Pam’s early childhood although her invention of a stagecoach drawn by chickens was a dismal failure. One year she received a yellow toy lorry for Christmas which she would fill with wheat and use to deliver their food. One of her early popular poems is called ‘The Battery Hen’.
Poem written by Pam Ayres for the opening of The Wayfinder Trail:
