Exploring the story of Mr Holdaway of Lewisham

Now here is a double mystery and a celebration of a fine ghost sign.

Myrom Place, Belmont Hill, 2017

Ghost signs are the names of businesses and products which long ago vanished.

They were painted directly onto the walls of buildings and sometimes even on to the roof of a property.

This one is courtesy of my friend Ryan and is on the gable end of what is now Cafe Delight on the corner of Belmont Hill and Myrom Place just off Lewisham High Street.

In time I will go looking for Mr C. Holdaway to solve the mystery of when he was in business and maybe I will also get an answer to what a crainer was.

I can only suppose it was linked to the profession of painting and decorating, but a search has not revealed an answer.

I have found a reference to a Mr Callum C Holdaway who was married in Lewisham in 1958 and other people with the same surname in and around the area from the beginning of the last century into the 1960s.

And here in advance of posting the story I discover that a crainer was a grainer, ...... all to do with how you read the sign.

It was my friend Bill Sumner who told me that he "used to admire that graining or scumbling as we called it.

A  local landlord in Gorse Hill did the fronts of a whole block of houses with it and they were the smartest houses in the district for many years. It was possible to choose any type of timber and have your windows and doors painted and grained to suit. 

I still have a set of the steel combs that were used, and somewhere have my brothers books that he showed to customers so they could make their choice. He became a master decorator after doing National Service"

Well that saves me from looking a twerp and makes perfect sense.

Leaving me to ponder on whether the bubble writing at the bottom of the wall will still be there in a decade.

Location; Lewisham

Picture; ghost sign, Myrom Place, 2017 courtesy of Ryan Ginn

Lewisham and Chorlton-cum-Hardy ……two places …. two homes

So it is pushing it because I concede I never lived in Lewisham but Eltham is close, and so I was drawn to this picture post postcard which was sent from Chorlton-cum-Hardy in 1926 to 24 Brandram Road, south east London.

The image on the front is not much to shout about and I have seen better quality ones of the same spot which is at a crossing of the River Mersey.

The caption just says Jacksons Bridge which was just 42 years old when Mrs. Gardner sent it to Lewisham in the April of that year.

And like so many commercial picture postcards the description is a tad inaccurate.  The bridge replaced an earlier wooden one which was constructed around 1816 by a Samuel Wilton when he ran the pub over the water, which today is known as Jackson’s Boat but back into the 19th century was variously called the Greyhound, the Old Greyhound or the Boat House.

The boat refers to the right of landlords of the pub to ferry people across the river for a fee, and when Samuel Wilton built that first bridge he exacted a toll for crossing over it.

And when the new one replaced the old one in the 1880s the charge remained and did so until the late 1940s.

In time I will go looking for Mrs Gardner but for now I am more interested in its arrival at Brandram Road which is still there but alas the present address is one of a line of new build, and I had to walk up and down the road to find properties which might mirror number 24.

There are some very impressive houses which look to be early to mid-19th century and are complimented by the Merchant Taylor’s Alms Houses which stand behind a tall wall and dates from 1826.

Merchant Taylor's Alms Houses, 1872

And that takes me to the family who received the card.  The message they received was fairly run of the mill, but Mrs Gardner’s handwriting isn’t the best and the name of her friends is unclear.

And that is a shame because I can locate the families who were there three years earlier and in 1939, but at present not in 1926.

Ah well sometimes you just bump into a brick wall!.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Lewisham

Picture; Picture postcard, circa 1926 from the collection of David Harrop, and and detail of  Brandram Road, from the OS map of London, 1862-72, courtesy of Digital Archives Association http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

"We shall be pleased to see you” ……. stories and mysteries from Lewisham

Now I know I will find answers to the mysteries behind this picture post card, but not just yet.

It was sent in the June of 1916 to Miss E. Hibberd who was a nurse at Lewisham Military Hospital.

And by the time it was sent it was already a historical anachronism, because some of the faces of those “Commanders of the Allied Armies, 1914" will have changed by the time it was posted.

Finding their identity will be easy, less easy has been the search for Miss E. Hibbert who has proved illusory in the census record.

Equally the Charity I. S. & S. H. S., at 122 Brompton Road, still sits in the shadows, but it’s success in helping over 200,000 deserving cases as witnessed by its record posted on the reverse of the card should make it easy to track down.

The one certainty is the Lewisham Military Hospital which provided 24 beds for officers and 838 for service men including 190 for prisoners of war.  Before the war this had been the Lewisham Union Workhouse and was situated at 390 High Street in Lewisham.

In 1929 the building became the Lewisham Hospital.  The hospital has been largely rebuilt, though some original buildings are still in use”. *

And despite living my entire childhood close to Lewisham, I never knew of its existence.  But given that Peckham where I spent the early years, and Well Hall where we moved to, were both served by excellent hospitals, there is no reason why I should.

Added to which the hospital is not in that bit of Lewisham I would pass through on the bus from Eltham.

Its existence as a war time hospital is a reminder of just how many official buildings along with church halls and private residences were handed over to the war effort.

The card was been acquired by my old friend David Harrop who has managed to source a wartime picture of the hospital, which will be a nice contrast to its appearance today, leaving me just to appeal for any contemporary copyright free image of the building today, along with any photographs of a memorial to its time caring for the servicemen of the Great War.

Location; Lewisham

Picture; postcard, 1916, from the collection of David Harrop

*Wartime Memories Project, Lewisham Military
Hospital,  https://wartimememoriesproject.com/greatwar/hospitals/hospital.php?pid=13732

Looking for great grandfather .............. new online records available

Southern Cemetery, Manchester, 2015

Now I spend my time searching for relatives and many others whose stories have been forgotten or never told, so I am pleased that more cemetery records from south east London will now be available online.

They can be found at Deceased Online, span the period 1858-1999 and cover details of people interred at Brockley Ladywell, Grove Park and Hither Green cemeteries as well as those cremated at Lewisham Crematorium.

And according to WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? magazine,  “although the level of detail may vary, each entry is accompanied by a scan of the page on which it originally appears [and] for around 90% of the graves users can access a map showing exactly where the final resting place of their forbearers is located.”**

Nunhead Cemetery, 2015

Deceased Online now have eight million records with 14 councils represented and they expect to add another two London councils, as well as many other councils across the UK over the next six months.

Now I have never used the site mainly because as a first generation Londoner all our lot are scattered across the country but there will be plenty who may want to go and look at the site.

“Searching is FREE, and can be restricted as required to country, region, county, or individual burial authority or crematorium. If you register with Deceased Online here, you will be able to purchase vouchers online, which you can spend to access further information associated with any of the found records.”**

And there is now a facility to subscribe for £89.

For those wanting to access the records for Manchester there is  Manchester Burial Records which is also an  the online service run by of Manchester City Council,.***

It is an excellent site and covers the city.

Pictures Southern Cemetery, 2014, from the collection of Andrew Simpson; and Nunhead Cemetery, July 2015, from the collection of Sue Simpson

* Deceased Online, deceasedonline.com

**South London Burials go online, WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? magazine, Issue 107, December 2015, www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com

***Manchester Burial Records, http://www.burialrecords.manchester.gov.uk/

Down in Lewisham with an old telephone kiosk, Lewisham Micro Library and reflections on all those private lending libraries

Now I like the way you start a story and it takes off in a direction all of its own.

We were talking about those old iconic red telephone kiosks and what would we do with one of those that are up for sale.

The mobile revolution has pretty much done for them which is a shame because if you are of a certain age they were as much a part of the street furniture as the pillar box or Belisha Beacon.

There was that brief spat of competition between Mercury and BT in the 1980s which seemed to lead to shedloads of telephone boxes appearing all over the place but now it is increasingly difficult to find one at all.

So I was fascinated by this one sent up to me by Adam who came across it in Lewisham along with the advert that announced that this was The Lewisham Micro Library, a free service for everyone and predicated on that simple and appealing idea that “when you take a book to read replace it with an unwanted book of your own” the service is open 24 hours a day and is a neat idea.

Of course it will never take the place of public libraries but as they are increasingly under threat from budget cuts it reaffirms that important idea that not every service has to be profit making.

And follows in that strong tradition ranging from the free libraries set up by wealthy benefactors in the 19th century, to those offered up by Mr Carnegie in the 20th as well as the Worker’s Institutes all of which sat beside or were part of the drive by local councils to provide a place of learning and enlightenment in every district.

True there were also those private lending libraries which were situated in bookshops and newsagents which for a small charge offered up a host of books.

I can still remember the one opposite New Cross Library and have come across plenty more.

Despite the smallness of many of the shops this was a big business with the Allied Library here in Manchester hiring out 362, 000 books through 1,489 bookshop at its peak in March 1962.

Now I have never quite understood why business disappeared and really disappeared in less than a decade but I suppose the cheap paperback had something to do with it.

So perhaps there is something of an irony in that it will mainly be paperbacks which stock the old telephone kiosk of Lewisham Micro Library, and there is nothing wrong in that.


Pictures; Lewisham Micro Library, Lewisham, 2015, from the collection of Adam Burgess