Wellington Road Crowthorne is a street named in honour of the 1st Duke of Wellington- Arthur Wellesley, the victor at the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon Boneparte was defeated in battle before being exiled to the isle of St.Helena . Wellesley’s imprint was spread across the town of Crowthorne, from Wellington Road to Waterloo Road and the Duke’s Ride.
As children, we had unsupervised free range wandering to and fro around the town, part of this was playing in the grounds of Wellington College, built in the Victorian era for children of officers killed in battle, named in Wellington’s honour.
There was always a sense of danger as ‘officially’ we were not meant to be there, but no-one ever ejected us. It was almost mystical, fronds and ferns tickled as we worked our way through undergrowth avoiding roughly dug drainage ditches (on the verge of becoming sewerage channels) filled with breast stroking tadpoles and frogs. A curiosity to behold.
As the township expanded with construction of nearby Broadmoor Hospital and the school, a public bar sprang up close to the edges of the college grounds – the Iron Duke. In the nearby military town of Sandhurst the Wellington Arms continued the tribute. To many of us children it seemed that World War 2 had only just ended, we were obsessed with war games and building scale models of WW II planes and tanks, with Sandhurst Military college nearby, Aldershot army base and Farnborough RAF base in the immediate vicinity, it always felt, along with the presence of the Duke that war was never far removed from this place.
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