Will It Light?

In those days we had to do with lamps and candles until one day my husband found an advertisement for Willett lights, and we went to see them. It was really rather wonderful and we decided we would go in for it. It was simply a system of pulleys and weights. A boy came in the morning and pulled them up. We also had to have in the roof a sort of dovecote, and a boy came in to work at those pulleys. It took about a quarter of an hour to have the weights right at the top. Then you switched on, the weights came down and the lights came on. Indoors (at Le Carillon, now called Church Farm) there are the original brackets we put in, and these brackets now have electric light. Sometimes the system did not work very well, which made my husband say “Will it light?”

This account is from a memoir by Mrs M. Storr, a French lady who came to live in Harwell when she married, and stayed except for the period of the Second World War, until she died in 1982. When she came she wrote: “Harwell was still a very quiet place and I loved it. It was very picturesque for, from the top of the tower, one could see a complete circle of orchards around the Church.”