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THE VILLAGE INN
Roberts’ and Wilson’s unexcelled, ‘That’s brewed at Ivinghoe.’
There’s a clean and cosy Village Inn,
It’s always bright and gay,
Where old friends meet to have a chat,
You can see them everyday.

There they converse on different themes
That may come back to mind;
Their subjects with the seasons change -
Something they always find.

For months the war has been discussed,
Which is the topic still;
They curse the cause of all the strife -
The madman Kaiser Bill.

The shepherd’s son, wounded at Loos,
Is now at home on leave;
The shocking sights that he has seen
No one can scarce believe.

He tells them of whole towns destroyed,
The people’s wretched lot -
Women outraged, the children maimed,
And Red Cros Nurses shot.

Said Carter Jones, most careful man.
“We know that times are bad;
But when we hear such tales as these
It makes us all feel glad.

To know we have been spared such scenes,
Though everything’s so dear;
Our bacca’s a most dreadful price,
And so’s our drop o’ Beer.

There’s one thing in our favour here,
The beer is good, we know;
It’s ROBERTS’ and WILSON’S unexcelled -
That’s brewed at Ivinghoe.
W.D. July 1916.

There was a remarkable sight at Ivinghoe Beacon on Whit Monday 1917, when a motor car which had been left on the cart way at the top was started by a gust of wind. It set off down the steepest part of Beacon Hill at a great pace, and crossing the Gaddesden road completely looped the loop twice, to be finally wrecked in the hedge bounding the Ivinghoe road.

During the war, military tests were frequently carried out on Ivinghoe Beacon by an experimental party from Wembley, who used smoke bombs, hand flares and rockets. Then following a test made towards the end of September 1918, the officer in charge of the party notified the police that three dud bombs had been lost. It was thought they had fallen into a ploughed field at the bottom of the beacon, but the police were given to understand there would be little danger if they were turned up by the plough, since the explosive charge was not very powerful. With several empty cases being handed in, the village school children had been told to take any bombs they found to the police station, but on Friday afternoon, December 27th 1918 when five boys found a bomb in a small wood at the foot of the beacon they took it home. Looking like ‘a rusty salmon tin, but not so big,’ it had lain in a ditch at the entrance to the wood, and when the boys were unable to open it they hid the object in a hedge, and the next morning having forced off one end with a screw driver poured out a lot of red powder. The other end would not come off and so one boy took the device to his home in Church Road, Ivinghoe. His mother was out but in the kitchen the boy’s elder brother, a private of the Devon Regiment, was cleaning his buttons, and duly came into the yard to ask what they had found. The boy said he didn’t know, whereupon the private fetched a hammer and chisel and struck the tin. In the ensuing explosion he was seriously injured, as also to a lesser extent the boy and his sister, and all were taken to the Military Hospital at Aylesbury, where the private died from his injuries on Sunday.