Directors Vicky and Ian Trumper were recently invited to Leagrave Primary School’s 75th anniversary celebrations. They had a wonderful tour of the school which, while now extended and altered, is still the original building built by T&E Neville (now Neville Special Projects) in 1949.
Michael Henman, a 4th generation family member, was asked to share some memories of the school building, which was being built by his father when he was still at school. He said: “I remember the first job was to get into the site from what was the Leagrave Estate. They had to put a temporary bridge over the ditch that ran along the side of the river - part of a tributary of the river Lea. It was all quite undeveloped before the M1, so it was green fields and farmland on the edge of Luton.
“The team of labourers and scaffolders that Neville’s employed, were largely Irish and Polish service men from the war. They were a team that were still with us when I started working for the firm in 1956. Everyone was directly employed then and Neville paid them by the hour. It was a five-and-a-half-day week. A team of bricklayers were employed, and the building came up out of the ground.”
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