Harold Morris of Eltham and Welling, a life lived out in service to the community.... part 1

This is the young Harold Morris sometime in the early 1920s.

It is a wonderful picture not least because it takes us into a lost world when milk was still marketed by small independent businesses and delivered by horse and cart.

In an age when much milk was not so clean, fresh or free from disease it was important always to reassure the public that the product on sale was safe, and so to the promise on the side of the cart, “WARRANTED PURE NEW MILK” with the added enticer that it came “WITH ALL ITS CREAM.”

Now the firm in question was P.W.Briggs of Belle Grove in Welling who were later to be taken over by
United Diaries.

But not long before this picture was taken young Harold had run his own milk business and this is his story, which was researched and written by his niece Jean Gammons.

"Harold was born in Eltham in 1902 - the firstborn of Maud and William George Morris and a grandson of John and Annie Morris of Eltham.

By 1906 the family had moved to Belle Grove, then a hamlet situated on Watling Street at the foot of Shooters Hill,  close to the village of Welling on the ancient road between London and Dover.

There was no milk delivery service  for the villagers then -  if they wanted milk then they had to take a  jug or container of some kind up the hill to the dairy farm on Shooters Hill.

Young Harold's father was a machinist in the Royal Arsenal - where many young men of the surrounding area, including Eltham, would easily have found work making "Implements of War".   

War did come in 1914, and in the following year Harold turned 13 and was free to leave school and perhaps join his peers and his father at the Arsenal.  

But Harold remained a country boy at heart, who loved horses, birds and gardening. So what could he do if he turned his back on the Arsenal?

He had an idea, and so he walked across the fields to Eltham to visit his grandparents, who lived in Courtyard.  Thomas Tillings, the omnibus company, had a yard full of horses, carriage and carts of all kinds just behind his grandparents' cottage.

Perhaps they would let him have the use of a horse and cart so that he could set up a milk delivery service to serve the villagers of Welling.

They did, and thus he began his long and happy career as a milkman. Soon, his little enterprise was taken over by a bigger local company:  P W Briggs; and later by the United Dairies.

Young Harold's first love broke his heart, but when he was 26 he married a Bexleyheath girl, Alma Minnie Shove. The bridesmaid was his youngest sister, Dorothy (Jean's mother), a self-willed child of whom there might be more later. 

Her dress had too many frills in her view and so, on the bus journey to Bexleyheath she took scissors with her and cut off as many as she could before her parents noticed.

Harold was a good husband and father, holidays being days at the seaside in the time before  Holidays Abroad became common.

Through two world wars he served his country in a quiet way, ensuring that none of his customers ever woke up without milk on their doostep for their first cup of tea of the day.  

He won Gold Stars from the UD for his high selling figures: his secret, he said, was to whistle, so that people knew he was around and would then come out to buy something extra.

By the time he retired in 1967 to concentrate on his birds and garden, he had been a milkman for nearly 50 years.”

And it says much for his hard work that when he retired “his customers loaded him with presents, a total of £100 in premium bonds, good luck cards and a poem.”*

*Dartford Times, 1967

Pictures; from the collection of Jean Gammons

Down on the Kent coast at the seaside in the 1930s

Now for reasons I won’t go into I never went on holiday to the seaside as a child.

Apart from one disastrous day at Dover waiting to meet my dad off the ferry with a coach load of returning tourists my summer holidays were spent with my grandparents in Derby.

Sand, sea under a Greek sun would be years away, but for those who could do the yearly break at a resort on the coast was a must.

So I am back with some old photographs of the way we used to do it during the middle decades of the last century.

The weekly paid holiday and relatively cheap train fares made the seaside holiday pretty standard.

In many parts of the country most of the factories would shut down for Wakes week and on mass it seemed large parts of our towns and cities exchanged grubby streets and noisy factories for the fresh sea air, fish and chips on the pier and the dreaded landlady.

Those who worked together, got on the same trains and went to the same holiday destinations. So much so that places like Blackpool talked of Glaswegian week and the beaches, trams and pubs would echo to the different accents of the different Lancashire mill towns throughout the summer.

All of which is a lead in to these two photographs of Harold and Alma Morris somewhere by the sea in Kent.

Both in their different way capture perfectly what those holidays were like.  Paddling in the water was just that with the trousers rolled up a smile for the camera and that knotted handkerchief, less a parody on more a reality.

And of course at some stage that pose on the shingles, prepared for a heat wave but mindful that even in June a British summer can prove a tad cold. Alma stares back at us with her towel over her legs, less a modest pose and more I suspect a necessity.

The other thing that strikes you are the cigarettes, this was after the period when most people smoked, when men’s fingers were stained yellow with nicotine and the upstairs on the bus offered up a dense cloud especially first thing in the morning.

I don’t pretend that these pictures are unique but these are less often seen than perhaps was once the case and they capture a way of leisure that has changed.

Many resorts couldn’t cope with the competition from cheap package holidays to destinations where the sun was guaranteed, and are now pale shadows of their former selves; others like Blackpool have reinvented themselves as the place you go for a weekend away or that all important stag or hen night.

So I am pleased Jean shared these pictures of her uncle Harold and aunt Alma doing the week by the sea.

Pictures; from the collection of Jean Gammons.

Harold Morris of Eltham and Welling, a life lived out in service to the community.... part 2

In that great sweep of history marked by revolutions, wars and natural disasters most of us will not even get a footnote in some long and detailed history of the 20th century.

Ours are “little lives lived out in a great century.”  That said it is the stories of the little people who fascinate me most whether they be the woman who cleaned up after Alfred burnt the cakes, the lonely herdsman who watched the passing of a Roman legion as it made its way westward to Maiden Castle or the family who didn’t watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on TV.

In an age all too ready to be impressed by celebrities and the autobiographies of people who have yet to reach their third decade I revel in the stories of men and women who quietly got on with life, providing for their families, looking to improve their communities, and leaving their mark in a far more positive way than a headline in a Sunday newspaper.

One such of these was Harold Morris, born in 1902, died in 1976 and a milkman for over 50 years.

Not perhaps the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster but nevertheless a story which spans the last century and pretty much reflects how that hundred years rolled out and the changes that it brought to people’s lives.

When Harold was born virtually all the technologies we take for granted had yet to be developed or were in their infancy, but in that span of 74 years he was a party to the age of cheap air travel, the first landings on the moon, along with television, and much more.

At the age of 13 he could have followed his father and school friends  into the Woolwich Arsenal, instead he set up his own business as a milkman.

“There was no milk delivery service for the villagers around Welling where he lived. If they wanted milk they had to take a  jug or container of some kind up the hill to the dairy farm on Shooters Hill.”*

And being an enterprising young lad he walked “across the fields to Eltham to visit his grandparents, who lived in Courtyard.  Thomas Tillings, the omnibus company, had a yard full of horses, carriage and carts of all kinds just behind his grandparents' cottage.  

And he persuaded them let him have the use of a horse and cart so that he could set up a milk delivery service to serve the villagers of Welling.”

It was a job he would continue to do for the rest of his working life during which time the horse and cart was replaced by an electric float.

Holidays as for so many people of his generation were spent beside the seaside, and like his northern counterparts who were drawn to Blackpool and the resorts of the east coast and north Wales, the Morris family would have had their week by the sea in Kent in a  B&B made easier by the introduction of a week’s paid holiday.

Cheap rail travel added to the opportunities for that break by the sea, and by the early 20th century places like Blackpool and the resorts south and east of London boomed in the summer months.

His niece Jean remembers a generous man who was a "very special brother to his young sisters, Hilda and Dorothy.  

On pay day he used to tell them that he had dropped some coins on his bedroom floor and that if they found any they could keep them. 

They never found less than 6d apiece.

It was at his home that the family's wakes were held, when all the aunts gathered in the front parlour drinking tea.

But never ever taking off their hats because of  the bother of hat pins.  

Since his passing in 1976,  there have been no family wakes and his death took with it the heart of the Morris family.”

Now I can’t think of a better tribute to a man’s life.

*Jean his niece

Pictures; courtesy of Jean Gammons

Pictures from a family album, Dartford 1928

I have to confess I am drawn to old family photographs.

Nor does it matter that they are not my family.

In fact very few of ours have survived.  Now this may be simply bad luck or a tendency that runs through the family to always be the person taking the pictures not the subject.

Added to that some of those that have not been lost or destroyed have no name, or date and so they remain a mystery.

Now that should be a lesson to all of us, and even more so in the digital age where while the opportunities to take pictures are boundless the chances are that even less will stay the course.

We photograph what takes our fancy in an instant with a camera phone, may send it to friends but rarely save them for long.

Even if we are more mindful of the future the likelihood is that they will be stored on a computer with no hard copy made of the image.

All of which has been prompted by these delightful photographs of Harold Morris, who was born in Eltham in 1902, grew up in Welling and died in 1976.

His was a full and productive life.  He married Alma Minnie Shrove in 1928 and these are some of their photographs, courtesy of his niece who has written

“Young Harold's first love broke his heart, but when he was 26 he married a Bexleyheath girl, Alma Minnie Shove. 

The bridesmaid was his youngest sister, Dorothy who was Jean’s mother, a self-willed child. 

Her dress had too many frills in her view and so, on the bus journey to Bexleyheath she took scissors with her and cut off as many as she could before her parents noticed.”

Such are the stories from family weddings.

Pictures’ courtesy of Jean Gammons

When Harold married Alma in the April of 1928 at Dartford

I am looking at two images which are now 90 years old.

This was the wedding celebrations of Harold Morris and Alma Minnie Shove in April 1928.

We all have pictures like this but many of them will be undated and long ago the identities of those staring back at us will have been forgotten as have the events surrounding the image.

Now even if I didn’t know some of the people and couldn’t place them in the first half of the last century they do have a fascination and an importance.

Part of this is because photographs like this so rarely see the light of day and if they do it is limited to a close set of family and friends.

What of course strikes you first off are the clothes including those above the knee dresses, soon to fall a few inches as the 1930s came along.

And then there is the half hidden garden and house a reminder that most weddings for people like Harold and Alma ended back at the house.

But even here there are questions that we might never know or have an answer to, like the name and age of the elderly woman in the corner of the second picture. I rather think she will be in her 70s or perhaps older, and so her presence takes us back to the late 1850s.

A time almost as remote from Harold and Alma’s experiences as 1928 is to us.

It is just possible that this lady may have walked to her wedding, that amongst the guests would have been those who could remember reading the stories of the old Queen’s wedding in 1840, and more than a few whose parents had talked of the rejoicing of the news of the allied victory at Waterloo and the shock they felt at hearing of the death of Lord Nelson.

And in the same way looking back at that April of 1928 is to see a totally different landscape. Alma might have been 23 years old but it would be another four months before Parliament voted to extend the franchise to her and a full year before she vote in a general election.

That general election in the May of 1929  was dubbed the flapper election marking as it did the first time that women of Alma’s age and class could help determine the next government of this country.

Nor is that all for if the newlyweds had wanted to dance to record music it would have been via a wind up gramophone, many of the films they might have watched would still have been silent ones and many such couples could only hope to aspire to one of those new and clean electric cooker.

So bring on these old family photographs.

Location; Eltham, London

Picture’s from the collection of Jean Gammons