When Peckham had a Health Centre …… and we lived on Lausanne Road

Now if I am accurate, by the time this picture was taken it had ceased to be the Health Centre and was run by Southwark Council as a leisure centre.

Me and Bobby Potts, 1953

And it was there that I went for swimming lessons during my first year at Samuel Pepys in 1961, and where our Elizabeth and Stella went to nursery.

The picture is not the best, but then it is 69 years old and was taken on a camera which long ago qualified as a museum piece.

And that is about it other than to say its story has been told on various sites,* but back in 1954 I doubt me and Bobby Potts had any idea of its existence even though it was there in the top corner of the photograph.

Location; Lausanne Road 

Picture; garden of 26 Lausanne Road, circa 1953, from the Simpson collection

*THE PIONEER HEALTH CENTRE, SOUTH LONDON GALLERY, HTTPS://WWW.SOUTHLONDONGALLERY.ORG/HISTORY-COLLECTIONS/SLG-ARCHIVE/THE-PIONEER-HEALTH-CENTRE/

What price child care? ……….. Peckham 1959

I can’t be sure just when mum and dad used the P.H.C. Kindergarten, but it will have been sometime in the late 1950s.*

The cost of childcare, circa 1959

We lived on Lausanne Road and my four sisters were all born in quick succession from 1955 through to 1959, and we left Peckham in the spring of 1964.

So, the window will have been short, if that is they ever did use the place.

I have no memory of it, and at one point our Stella and Elizabeth spent afternoons at the nursery in the Peckham Heath Centre on St Mary’s Road.

This I know because it was my job to collect them after school, an onerous task, partly because it deprived me of hanging around with friends  in the playground of Edmund Waller, and also because I had to push the double pram home.

A chore which culminated in me forgetting one day and getting stick from mum

All of which is an introduction to a flier for the “P.H.C. KINDERGARTEN”, which operated from Norfolk House on Queens Road.

It is a fascinating little document, which details the fees charged, the requirements expected of parents, as well as the children, who “must be between the ages of 2½ and 5 years….. the Kindergarten runs from Monday to Friday each week starting at 9.30 a.m. until 12.30 p.m. [and] the cost is 5/6 per week or 6/6 for two children, [which] must be paid each Monday morning, or by the term if preferred. 

Where a child is absent for a complete week fees will be reduced to 3/- per week (4/-)".  

Our Stella, Elizabeth and Jill, circa 1962

An additional charge of "3d per week for Biscuits. Plimsoles or soft shoes must be won, parents are welcome to participate in the kindergarten, and infectious illness must be notified”.

And as you do I went looking for Norfolk House which is still there just two doors down from the corner of Lausanne Road.

It was there by 1872, and maybe before that, and in its 147 years it has been many things, from a residential property to a social club.

I know that just before the Great War, it was empty, and on the outbreak of the next world war, it was occupied by the Brown family.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown recorded their occupations as "Stewards at the Conservative Club and their son was a compositor".

They already had some experience of running a club, having managed the Earl Cowper public house on Ipswich Road in Colchester, where they were pulling pints in 1911.

Just as now working in the licensing trade could be precarious and Mr. Brown described himself as “Publican and Hay Trusser”.

Norfolk House, 2022

There may well be people out there who also used the Kindergarten or will know just what happened to Norfolk House since the last war and when it became a social club.

I searched for the club, found a telephone number and endeavoured to find out its history.

But despite explaining who I was, and what I was trying to do, the chap on the other end of the line put the phone down on me.

I did come across an article in the Peckham Peculiar but alas there was no reference to the Kindergarten and so I will plod on looking for clues.**

Leaving me just to comment that Dad never one to waste paper did a series of sums on the back and down the side of the flier.  

A list of sums, circa 1964

There are few clues as to what the calculations were about other than a reference to"Furniture removal", "Curtains" and "Odds and ends" which came to £544 -14-0, which may be linked to when we left Peckham for Eltham. 

But that is a story for another time.

Location; Queens Road, Peckham

Pictures;  the flier from P.H.C. Kindergarten, date unknown, our Stella, Elizabeth, and Jillian, 1962, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Norfolk House, 2022, courtesy of Google Maps

*Searching for the story of Norfolk House on Queens Road ………. stories from the 1950s and 60s, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2019/03/searching-for-story-of-norfolk-house-on.html

**Welcome to the Club, Peckham Peculiar, July 2nd, 2015, https://peckhampeculiar.tumblr.com/post/123016271414/welcome-to-the-club

The story of one house in Lausanne Road .... number 52 ..... the neighbours

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

Our house and the one the Pott's lived in, 2017

Now even though we left Peckham almost 60 years ago, I can still remember our neighbours.

Some I admit are now shadowy figures, whose names I had completely forgotten until recently, while others like those who lived in the police flats do occasionally pop back into my memory.

Of all of them it is the Potts family who lived next door who still invade my thoughts from time to time, and that is mainly because three of the children were just a few years younger than me, and in those long hot summers which seemed to stretch on for ever we played together.

They were triplets and if I have got this right were called Susan, Brian, and Robert. There was an older sister, Helen who already was too old to mix with us, although I guess she will have not been more than five years older than me.

I have a few pictures of us together and can remember that they kept chickens and finally moved out to run The Earl of Derby on Dennett’s Road sometime in the late 1950s.

And then a couple of days ago someone posted on social media a picture of the triplets from the Associated Newspapers with the caption, “Circa 1952: Four-year-old Potts Triplets - Robert Susan And Brian - receiving their birthday mail from the postman at their Peckham London home”.** 

Me and two of the triplets circa mid 1950s

It was of course my friends, and it set me off looking for them.  

At first this was only to establish that the date was correct which seemed a little too early, given that I had been born three years earlier, and in 1952 I would only have been three.

So far, I haven’t been able to find a record of when they were born, but the search did lead me to their mum and dad who were married in 1934 in Lewisham.  For a while they lived in Lewisham before settling in Orpington sometime around 1939.

By 1947 they were in Mr. Pott’s old family home on Lausanne Road where he had lived in the early 1930s.

This I now know because he and then later his wife Ellen appear on the Electoral Registers which were compiled every year which allowed me to track them around southeast London.

Added to this there is the 1939 Register which was a mini census, carried out at the beginning of the Second World War.  It remains an invaluable document given that the 1931 census was destroyed and the first post-war one cannot be accessed for another 30 years.

Along with information on dates of birth and occupations it also offers up information on the voluntary activities of people, including their participation in Civil Defence roles.  

Mr Pott’s gave his occupation as a “Bus Driver for London Transport”, and along with Ellen and Ellen’s sister three others are registered.  But these three have been redacted which I suspect means that they were children who might still have been alive when the Register first went live earlier this century.

One of these may have been Margaret Potts who shows up on the 1957 electoral register and may have been one of their older children.  I vaguely remember her in their kitchen from sometime in the mid 1950s.

Me and Helen, circa 1953

All of which is fascinating and has brought me closer to our neighbours.

But the electoral registers also throws light on the dire housing conditions in the immediate post way years.  The houses on Lausanne Road were big and many appear to have had their share of lodgers.  

Our house did, with at least two couples sharing the property at certain periods. Likewise number 28 also had what appear to be non-family members, and while this isn’t the case with the Pott’s house I assume that is because of their larger family.

And that is it ….. I would like to have included the photograph which set me off on the journey but alas I don’t hold the copyright.

Leaving me just one slight niggle, which is that the photograph doesn't quite match with those houses on Lausanne Road, ..... a mystery which someone will offer an explanation

Location; Peckham

Pictures; me, the Pott’s children circa 1950s and our house on Lausanne Road, 2017 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

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

**I grew up in Peckham, https://www.facebook.com/groups/49819382463

The story of one house in Lausanne Road ............... number 2 a coal hole, a big garden, and that shed

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

Mine was one of those idyllic 1950s childhoods.

We were free to roam where we wanted, benefited from the growing prosperity all around us and were pretty much left to grow up slowly and naturally.

But looking back I never took to our house.

Not that the house over troubled me at the time.

It was built sometime after 1874, and was one of those tall Victorian terrace houses which this part of south east London did.**

It had eight rooms along with a  bathroom and a small kitchen spread out over three floors with extensive cellars and a long garden which must have once been part of an orchard because we had inherited six pear trees a very tired apple tree and equally unfruitful vine.  But the pear trees produced abundantly and it was not unknown for a branch to snap off with the weight of the pears.

Perhaps it was the fact that the place was so full of rooms and that they were stacked on three storeys up which was unnerving.  After all when you are nine and your bedroom is at the top of the house it can seem along way down to the comfort of mum and dad on the ground floor.

We went back to the house recently.  It was 56 years since I had last stood outside and in one of those wonderful acts of generosity the present owners invited us in.

Nothing quite prepared me for the way the memories came flooding back mixed with the observations on how the place had changed.  But that is for another time.

As a historian what fascinates me more about the place is the description of what it was like in 1951.
My father was a practical man and before buying Lausanne Road he had commissioned a surveyors report.  It is a document that we still have.  Now I grant you it is not the Doomsday Book or an intimate set of letters from one family member to another but in its way it is a priceless piece of history.

Here laid out in the dry language of property is a picture of a house some eighty years after it had been built.

It had, in the language favoured by estate agents many period features, including original plaster decorations on the ceilings, marble fireplaces, sash windows and the old wooden shutters at ground level which could be pulled up from the cellar, along with the wooden venetian blinds and the coal hole which we continued to use until we left.

And here too tucked away is a little of the history of which our house was part of.  According to the report

“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.”

Which I guess is the closest I will get to track the bomb damage on Lausanne Road which had taken out a row of houses directly opposite.  I always took for granted that the high walls surrounding the brick lined water pit had always been there but it was one of a number of tanks for emergency water supplies which had been made by clearing out the debris from the cellars of the bombed out houses and filling the space with water so if the water mains were cut during a raid there would be supplies to fight any fires.

And digging through the same old family documents I came across the selling price of Lausanne Road in 1964 which was £4,500.  A price which might well seem a snip when four doors down an adjoining property went for a shed load of money recently.

But all is relative.  I suspect back in the 1960s that was pretty much what you would have had to pay.

We moved to a smaller property which I have always been more comfortable living in.

And looking through the report on Well Hall Road in Eltham I note that the surveyor pointed out that “We understand that the house is likely to be included in a Smokeless Zone under the Clean Air Act of 1956 and approved appliances must be fitted in the open fireplaces in the lower rooms by October next year.”

This as I pointed out to my sons who looked baffled when they read the report had nothing to do with a drive against cigarettes but was part of that public health move to banish our cities of the smoke from thousands of household chimneys.

Such are the little clues to how we lived revealed in the oddest of ways.***

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

**Peckham, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Peckham

*** London, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/London

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Millie the Mole, Boy Boy Jones and a garden shed, ............ London in the 1950s

Millie the Mole lived in our house in the 1950s and she lived with Boy Boy Jones who according to cousin Mary, drove the getaway car for a smash and grab gang.

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

I was too young to remember them but they were just some of the people who rented rooms in my parent’s house on Lausanne Road.**

Now this was the period just after the last world war and housing was still in short supply, and most people lived in rented accommodation.

It was the age of the private landlord and “living in rooms” was commonplace.

We were I think unique in owning our own house and most of my friends lived in grand old Victorian houses which long ago had been sub divided in to flats.

One family lived in the basement of a row of terraced houses near the old fire station, and another in one of those prefabs which had been put up to meet post war housing needs and which over 60 years later are still going strong.

Ours was a tall terraced house built sometime in the last quarter of the 19th century. It had nine rooms spread out over three floors, with cellars and a long garden.

The land must have once been an orchard because our garden and the surrounding ones were full of fruit trees. In our case we had collard the corner on pear trees, of which there were at least five, along with a worn out apple tree and a tired vine which clung to the back of the house but to my knowledge never produced any grapes.

I don’t know how many lodgers we had at any one time, but until the arrival of my twin sisters in 1955, there was just mum dad and me. So after accounting for the three downstairs rooms and the bath room, this still left enough for a collection of paying customers.

True to the period each upstairs room had a coin operated gas fire and father had fitted radio outlets around the house. I remember them well. By turning the switch you could tune into the Home Service or the Light Programme. My early years were radio years and listening to the wireless remains one of the joys of my life.

But back dear reader to Millie the Mole and Boy Boy Jones. Now smash and grab raids were at the cutting edge of big time crime.

The gang would choose a suitable jewellers and using a brick and pick axe handle smash the window, grab the loot and escape in the waiting car. Boy Boy Jones was the driver.

A career which came to an abrupt end when he drove off during a raid, leaving the gang to struggle along a crowded Peckham High Street, with assorted diamond rings, a necklace and several watches.

Needless to say their progress was somewhat hampered by the loot and the Saturday shoppers and they were caught.

Boy Boy Jones remained free which was not necessarily a good thing for Millie, who cousin Mary told me had a  relationship with him which was tempestuous at the best of times and led on "one occasion to Boy Boy arousing the street as he dangled her out of one of the upstairs windows by her wrists".

Then there was Flo and Les who ran an antique shop which wasn’t making enough so they had to work three days in the timber yards.

I say an antique shop but I suspect it was really a second had shop with pretentions.

This was Peckham in the early 1950s and however genteel Lausanne Road had once been I don’t recall there being much call for posh stuff when I was growing up.

Many of the houses still had a faded glow about them but six years of war; bombing and neglect had rather taken the shine off the area. A trend best reflected by some of the other lodgers we had staying with us.

In particular I remember a young outgoing chap who worked delivering sweets but turned out to be a bigamist which was still a serious offence if you were caught.

This was after all a time when divorce was not an easy thing to do, especially amongst the working class.

Nor was just living with someone easily tolerated and so in his case he just moved across London and married again. Mother trusted him enough to allow me to accompany him to the swimming baths and on one occasion to drive us to see my grandparents in Derby.

The last of our lodgers were a couple who met in Lausanne Road. She was single and German and he was Polish. Their romance began with midnight trysts and ended with the two getting married.

To me they were something different. Occasionally I would be invited to share a cup of real coffee and some Polish biscuits which arrived from the “homeland”.

Like so many of the stories I have posted their experiences reflect the awful events of the century they lived in. Theirs were “little lives lived out in a big century.” Both had been victims of the displacement of millions of ordinary people who had been in the wrong place when the war broke out and found themselves part of that tide of homeless refugees in 1945.

I don’t know their stories and like many of their generation they didn’t talk about the past. But he was Polish and may have spent time as a Soviet prisoner, which begs the question had he been on the wrong side in the conflict, or just a causality of the Cold War?

Either way there is a lasting testimony to their stay in the house, because the garden shed he built in the late 1950s is still there. I had almost completely forgotten about it. And then on an impulse while on a visit to London for a family wedding we visited the old house.

It is almost 50 years since we left but there is much about the place that I remember. I am grateful to Rachel and David the new owners who did not mind that we had invaded their Sunday and were happy to show us around.

The garden seemed smaller and more alive with plants than I remember it. The trees had gone but the shed remained.

I rather liked the fact that something from all those people who had passed through had survived.***

Picture; Lausanne Road today, & the long back garden with the shed, Lausanne Road circa 1957 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

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

**Peckham, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Peckham

***London,  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/London

Sitting at the edge of the pavement playing with the melted tar ........ Lausanne Road in 1959 .....during the heatwave

Memories can be deceptive, but sometime in the summer of 1959 on a very hot day with little to do me and a mate sat on the pavement in front of the Swiss tavern playing with the meting tar.

The Swiss Tavern, Lausanne Road, 2007

Now I fully accept that this will not rank with the great moments in history, but on an equally hot day I think I am allowed to share it.

I can’t be sure of the year but I know 1959 was a hot one, so much so that some Londoners took to sleeping in the parks.

But it could have been another summer, what is important is that I remember just what I was doing.

I suppose it was too hot to want to stray far from the house but by the same token I didn’t fancy being indoors.

Our house on Lausanne Road, 2017

So there we were idly playing with the melting tar using old discarded lolly sticks to draw the stuff back and forth.

And of course on that heavy hot day there was little in the way of traffic to worry us, thinking back there was not much else.

The day if it was just the one I remember as very hot, and very quiet with nothing to disturb the stillness.

What puzzles me is why today, the same doesn’t happen on very hot days.

Do the authorities use different tar?  Or is it that we just don’t get as many hot days?  Which given the current heat wave seems odd.

Or at 67 am I just too old to sit at the pavements edge with a lolly stick and some melting tar?

Location; Lausanne Road circa 1959

Pictures; our house on Lausanne Road and  the Swiss Tavern, 2017, from the collection of Elizabth and Colin Fitzpatrick