The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 31 ............ a heap of electoral rolls and the lost houses of Lausanne Road

The back of our house circa 1954

The story of one house in Peckham over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

Miss Elsie Mabel Carly lived in our house on Lausanne Road for just under half a century.

The family were there sometime around 1904 and moved out in 1951 when my dad and mum bought the house.

I doubt that I would have found out that much about the Carly's had I not begun trawling the electoral registers to see where my parents lived before I was born.

And as I uncovered the different properties ending with Kender Street and Lausanne Road it occurred to  me that I should be able to use the same registers to find out who had lived in our house before us.

Now I knew the Carly’s were there in 1911, a piece of research that led me on to tell the story of young George Carly, who was born in 1894 and died on the Western Front during the Battle of the Somme on September 18 1916.**

At his death he was serving in B Company of the First Battalion Queen’s Westminster Rifles and if I have got this right the Queens’ Westminster Rifles had been formed in the August of 1914 at 58 Buckingham Gate and had been a Territorial Force and leaving for France in the November.

From the Thieupal Memorial

Sadly like so many of the men who served in the Great War George’s military records were destroyed which at present leaves us very little other than a reference on the Thieupal Memorial.

The family continued to live at Lausanne Road and it is those electoral rolls which allowed me to follow Miss Elsie from 1929 when she gained the first through the 1920s up to 1951 with that added bonus of a telephone directory which listed her as the subscriber in 1947.

Nor is that quite all because I she lived to see her 97th birthday dying in Hastings in 2000 which was where her father had been born.

The Swiss tavern, 2007

In time I think I shall go looking for her two sisters who she shared the house with until 1951.

Not that these were the only surprises that came out of those electoral registers.

Having found Miss Elsie I went looking for our news agents on Mona Road and found instead the house numbers of two of my friends.

I knew John Cox had lived on Dennett’s Road and Jimmy O’Donnell on Somerville Road, and there on the register I found their parents.

Not perhaps the greatest bit of detective work but one that took me back to my childhood.

And there were two final discoveries.  One was of a pub on Luggard Road which clearly has long gone and the other was the block of police flats which stood between number 28 and the wood yard which abutted the Swiss Tavern.

When I was growing up I just took the flats for granted.  Looking at them now they stand out as 1950s build and sure enough the prewar maps show eight houses identical to ours and from the electoral registers we can track who lived in numbers 30 through to 42.

The old police flats, 2007

And sometime between October 7 1940 and June 6 1941 they received a hit from a high explosive bomb and the rest as they say was a bomb site followed by post war reconstruction.***

All of which is confirmed by the surveyors report on the house from 1951 which commented on how
“The main roof is covered with concrete plain tiles (presumably done in recent years under war damage repairs) and appears to be in very good condition.”

Now I rather think there is a story here which if I had access to the local newspaper of the period I would be able to tease out but just maybe some stories are left unresearched and unwritten.

Pictures; our house, circa 1954, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and  the police flats, and the Swiss Tavern, 2007, from the collection of Colin Fitzpatrick

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road

** The story of one house in Peckham number 8 ........ George Carly of Lausanne Road, born in 1894 and died at the Somme in 1916, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-story-of-one-house-in-peckham_15.html

*** Bombsight, http://bombsight.org/#16/51.4708/-0.0539