A Sentry Box on Tawney Common

Travelling up from Theydon Mount or Epping, just after you’ve turned the sharp left-hand bend on to Tawney Common, there is a sentry box. It is set approximately one hundred yards along on the left-hand side of the road a few feet back from the road. The box measures approximately 3 ft by 2 ft and is made out of half-inch thick iron sheets riveted onto the frame.

Dora Fathers can remember the box being there in the 1920s and she and other children used to play around it. It was also used as a sentry box in the Second World War when two British Marauder aircraft collided over the common a hundred or so yards in front of the box, killing all the occupants of the aircraft. At the time Dora was on leave for a few days at home and the explosion blew out the windows in both her and her mother’s house and shrapnel set fire to the sofa in her front living room.

A few weeks later the game keeper within the nearby Beech Wood found what he thought was a glove but on picking it up he discovered that it was a glove that also contained the hand of one of the aircrew, after which incident he stopped picking up further pieces of clothing.

It was obvious that the sentry box was erected well before the 1920s and probably during the First World War. Nobody knew or could suggest why it was there until I spoke to Arthur Galloway. Arthur lives at Mount Farm on the common. He remembers being told that the box was erected during the First World War to stop people travelling along the road past it when practice firing was occurring on the other side of Mount Wood near North Weald. At the time the forest was far less developed and practice rifle bullets used to come through the woods and on to the common. Now the purpose of the sentry was to divert people around the common via the Mole Trap to avoid any risk. What would happen if you were travelling from Toot Hill? I wouldn’t say since there isn’t an equivalent box at the other end? Therefore the mystery continues!