Brookmans Park its transmitter station at Bell Bar. The war years resulted in many being evacuated to Brookmans Park from London, but the surrounding area was also hit. Brookmans School was built as the village grew. Local legend has it that Miss Muffet was Patience Moffat, daughter of entomologist Dr. Thomas Moffat (possibly Moffett or Moufet), who lived in the area from 1553 to 1604 on a farm. He had invited a poet over for Christmas. During his stay he overheard Miss Moffat tell her father of how she was eating her curds and whey when a spider came down from the
Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme) Marie Antoinette (who came tumbling after), a theory made difficult by the fact that the earliest printing of the rhyme pre-dates those events. However, as the previous paragraph refers to King Charles I being in conflict with Parliament, the phrase "broke his crown" could also refer to that King's beheading in 1649. There is also a local belief that the rhyme records events in the village of Kilmersdon in Somerset in 1697 when a local spinster became pregnant; the putative father is said to have died from a rock fall and the woman died in childbirth soon after. Jack and