Flowers to Forest Hill ………. from the Western Front

At first glance there is nothing unusual about Kemble Road, in Forest Hill.

The houses have that distinctive soft yellow colour which will be familiar to anyone who grew up in south east London.

Our house on Lausanne Road was made of the same London stock brick with the addition of decades of sooty deposits but still recognizably yellow, which is in direct contrast to the red brick properties of the North where I long ago ended up.

And so, despite having lived in Manchester for over 50 years, that soft yellow brick makes me homesick, and of course is a signal that I have come home.

I guess the same feelings will have been present in the soldier who sent this card from the Western Front in the January of 1918.

It was addressed to a Mrs. E. Cooper who lived in a house on Kemble Road.

The property is still there and is one a handful of semi-detached houses which mark it of from the rest which are grouped in terraces.

Walk down the road today and you can see the work of several builders whose designs differ slightly from each other.

I don’t suppose the scene is that very different from what it would have looked like in the last year of the Great War.  

Each property had a small front garden and a bigger and longer garden to the rear.

Only today many of the fronts have lost their grass to accommodate off road car parking, while a few houses have added roof extensions, and of course the wheelie bin has replaced the round steel dustbin.

I went looking for Mrs. E Cooper but failed to find her.  

At the beginning of 1918 the house along with its neighbour is not listed in the Post Office Directory suggesting that both were unoccupied.

Nor could I find her in any other official listings for  Forest Hill.

But I will still go looking, if only to bring the two of them out of the shadows, and offer up a story on what happened to them before and after the Great War.

Location; Forest Hill

Pictures; Flowers of France, 1918, from the collection of David Harrop