NEW YEAR'S EVE BONFIRE

(31st December 2000)

Some snow still lingered from the previous Thursday (see Snow in Hertford Heath) but during the day the weather was cold and dry.  Bob Akers had arranged for the bonfire materials to be stored on Peter Jollyman's farm and Peter brought them up to the Village Green in the morning.  Other residents contributed winter damage from trees, old doors and several unfitted fitted kitchens so that by early afternoon there was a mass of combustible material available.

Bob had clearly been on a bonfire building course somewhere, and knew exactly what he wanted, a wooden pyramid to support the structure with the base packed with easily combustible materials to start the fire off.

After a couple of hours work, about a third of the kindling had been built onto the foundation, the idea being that the rest would be added after the fire was alight, but it seemed a bit unlikely that it would all be burnt through in a reasonable time - as well as high density fibreboard from the kitchen units, there were some pretty sizeable trees.

During the afternoon the wind picked up and the weather started to deteriorate badly.  By lighting up time (20:00 hours in the year 2000) the wind was very strong and freezingly cold and combined with sleet and snow showers to make it as inhospitable night as could be thought of.  Anthony Oliver and Carolyn Morgan who had been tending the mulled wine heater (the Scouts barbecue) since six o'clock slowly soaked and froze.

On the bright side, the wind did make the fire catch.  Didn't it just.  The flames went from zero to fifty feet in about ten seconds.

To give an idea of the wind, I was giving out sparklers, lighting them at the barbecue stand on the Goat side of the green and intending to distribute them around the bonfire on the other side, maybe twenty yards away.  In that wind the sparklers burnt like an acetylene torch and instead of lasting a few minutes, often had burnt out by the time I had gone a few paces.

That's why nobody around the bonfire has sparklers.

With such a wind we were worried that sparks might fly and start fires off the green, but the other element of the weather - the rain and sleet - was a very effective extinguisher.  The original plan had been to have the fire burn for an hour or so and then start the fireworks, but in that weather nobody was going to hang around longer than they had to, and so Bob started the fireworks as soon as he saw people start to drift off toward shelter.

At the other end of the green, Anthony and Carolyn were having trouble keeping up with demand, for in spite of the truly horrible weather there must have been at least two hundred who had turned out for the last bonfire of the year.  Twenty five litres of mulled wine went very quickly, it probably saved a few cases of hypothermia.

In spite of our worries about all of the material being consumed, but by midnight there was very little left, just a pile of smouldering embers and by morning it was all gone.

In spite of the weather, the whole thing went very well and those who did the work are keen to do it on a regular basis, reasonably confident that the weather wont be too much worse.

The Parish Council, who organised and paid for the whole thing expresses its gratitude to the Councillors who worked and froze, and to the 'civilians'  Peter Jollyman, Harold Stainsby, David Morgan, Frank McAteer and Eddie McGinty