History comes in many shapes and sizes, from serious books on great events to the humble object which offers up an insight into how we lived.
So I am indebted to Lesley, who on the back of a recent tram story told me that she still had a collection of tram tickets her mum bought during the “Last Tram Week in July 1952”.
Now I always get excited about seeing and especially handling bits of our collective past.
Back in the late 1970s I walked away from the excavations at Viking York with a genuine Viking oyster shell. The archaeologists had unearthed so many that they were being sold in a barrel for 10p each.
On a more studious note, while writing the book on the Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy in the early 19th century I used the hand written minutes of the local Poor Law Committee.
The volume began in 1834 and ran through to 1852 and I think apart from the chap who wrote up the minutes and perhaps a few others I will have been the only person to turn the pages in almost 170 years.
So looking at Lesley’s tram tickets is a fascinating link with that last week that London Transport ran trams through the city.
I was just short of my third birthday and though there is a family story that Dad took me down to the New Cross Depot, I have no memory of the event.
But like so many people of my generation, those tall stately trams have a lasting romantic pull and have of course now been resurrected by by fleets of sleek new trams which have returned to many of our cities.
These are more comfortable, and faster but a bit of me would yearn to hop on one outside the old family home on Well Hall Road and rattle up to the High Street and north into Woolwich.
I can’t, so Lesley’s tickets will have to do.
Leaving me just to reiterate that old observation ...... be careful what you throw away for today’s rubbish will be someone’s priceless piece of history in the future.
Location; Eltham
Pictures; tram tickets from “The Last Tram Week”, July 1952, from the collection of Lesley Ross, 2018
Now I always get excited about seeing and especially handling bits of our collective past.
Back in the late 1970s I walked away from the excavations at Viking York with a genuine Viking oyster shell. The archaeologists had unearthed so many that they were being sold in a barrel for 10p each.
On a more studious note, while writing the book on the Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy in the early 19th century I used the hand written minutes of the local Poor Law Committee.
The volume began in 1834 and ran through to 1852 and I think apart from the chap who wrote up the minutes and perhaps a few others I will have been the only person to turn the pages in almost 170 years.
I was just short of my third birthday and though there is a family story that Dad took me down to the New Cross Depot, I have no memory of the event.
But like so many people of my generation, those tall stately trams have a lasting romantic pull and have of course now been resurrected by by fleets of sleek new trams which have returned to many of our cities.
I can’t, so Lesley’s tickets will have to do.
Leaving me just to reiterate that old observation ...... be careful what you throw away for today’s rubbish will be someone’s priceless piece of history in the future.
Location; Eltham
Pictures; tram tickets from “The Last Tram Week”, July 1952, from the collection of Lesley Ross, 2018
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