When a comic story holds more than a truth .............. stories from the Eagle

Now I have no recollection of post war rationing after all I was only four when it was finally abandoned.

But there will be plenty who not only remember it but will have stories of its impact on their daily lives.

Some of them will also have been regular readers of the Eagle comic which began in 1950 and continued into the following decade and here is the connection because running through several of the stories beginning with the first was how at a critical moment the Earth’s government was forced to introduce food rationing.*

Now even though I have read and re-read the stories countless times it never quite occurred to me that older readers of the Eagle would have vivid memories of both wartime and post war rationing.

That first Eagle story  was followed by the Red Moon Mystery when the planet was threatened by a rogue planet which had once destroyed all life on Mars and caused havoc before it was destroyed, which was repeated later by other stories which saw the earth’s population forced to be evacuated from their homes and ultimately  off the planet.

And when it wasn’t a natural disaster of sorts then there were always evil galactic nasties out on inter planetary domination of which the worst was the Mekon a not very nice dictator from Venus and his army of followers whose slavish devotion to their leader and ruthless behaviour would have been all too familiar to a generation that had been children during the last world war.

Of course such events are the stuff of good adventures and in slightly different forms will have appeared before and since but for those of us growing up in the 1950s they were pretty much a backdrop to the real thing.

Location; The 1950s

Pictures; from Eagle Comics in the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Venus Story, April 14, 1950 – September 28 1951

When a chunk of your history takes an unexpected turn ….. Glenton Tours

I have lived with the story of Glenton Tours for 75 years.*

Luggage label, undated

It was a coach company, offering tours of Britain and the Continent from the 1920s and was at the luxury end of the market.

They began when an estate agent in south east London settled a debt by accepting two coaches and entering the touring business.

Dad & Elizabeth, undated

It was the right thing to do at the right moment, as the growing middle class with money to spend sought holidays which combined a bit of culture, with a lot of sightseeing.

 Added to which Glenton’s promised to do the lot, and the lot included the itinerary, the hotels and meals with drivers and couriers who were pleasant, knowledgeable and always attentive.

In the age before cheap air travel and decades before the internet this was the way to see Britain and a host of European countries. 

Tours lasted between seven, twelve and fifteen days, with plenty to take in and free time built into the journey.

Brochure, 1951

And our dad drove their coaches across the UK and on to France, the Low Countries as far as Switzerland and Northern Italy.

He joined the firm sometime in the early 1930s and continued working for them until he retired in 1986.

Very early on in his career he was chosen as one of the two drivers to take coaches into Europe, and apart from a break during the last war, dad did the business and was highly thought of by the firm, his colleagues and the passengers.

And we grew up with that job, which from spring through to autumn would see him leave one morning to return seven, twelve or fifteen days later.

My treat when younger was to be picked up by him at the end of a tour and after the passengers had been dropped off Dad and I would go up to the garage in Nunhead where the coach would be serviced before starting all over again in the morning.

Now, while we had accumulated a lot of memorabilia from Dad what was missing was the detailed story of the firm itself.

And despite years of research, I had drawn almost a blank, until someone who worked with him got in touch. The message was simple enough with “I ran Glenton Tours until 1985. I am happy to supply information” and the promising news that “the archives are held in the Dover Transport Museum”.**

Dad,ready for the off, undated

So the next chapter is about to open up.

And like all such new twists, the story will offer up much about Glenton's along with how some of us spent our holidays during the last century, and maybe even something about our Dad.

We shall see.

And just before the story went live the museum got back to me with a picture of a vehicle Glenton's acquired in the 1960s. 

It is CC 9305 which Mr. Flood of the museum tells me "is a 1929 Dennis GL fitted with a 'toastrack' body by J.Roberts for Llandudno Urban District Council who used it for tours of the Great Orme until 1953. CC9305 was acquired in the 1960s by Glenton Tours of Peckham Rye and still carries the Glenton Livery".

Now l remember Dad talking about it and given that in the winter he worked in the paintshop of the garage he may well have worked on it.

CC 9305 which is a 1929 Dennis GL, bought by Glenton's in 1960

All of which adds to the excitement of the new chapter.

Pictures; Glenton Tours memorabilia from the Simpson collection, and the Glenton's coach, courtesy of Dover Transport Museum

* Glenton Tours, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Glenton%20Tours

**Dover Transport Museum, https://www.dovertransportmuseum.org.uk/

Travelling on LCC tram number 1622 with memories of the Old Kent Road and Well Hall

Now I missed travelling on a tram by just a matter of years, but had I been born a little earlier I might well have been on this one that rattled its way up from the Old Kent Road to Westminster.

And just possibly also taken the 44 and 46 which connected Eltham with Woolwich.

According to family legend I was actually there at New Cross when the last London tram took its last journey in the summer of 1952 but until yesterday I never thought I would come close to one.

Now I know I could visit the London Transport Museum where there is a fine 1910 tram from West Ham Tramways Corporation, but my number 40 which was the one my dad would have used is even closer to home.

It is in the collection of CRICH TRAMWAY VILLAGE just south of Matlock which is no distance for me but I accept is a long way from south east London.

But your loss is our gain and I have planned my visit.

In the meantime I have settled for a picture of LCC number 1622 which plied route 40 from New Cross.

It comes from my old friend Andy Robertson who has been recording the changes to the twin cities of Manchester and Salford and decided to take an afternoon off and visit the museum.

And there is plenty else to see from a Blackpool tram complete with its destination board announcing a Tour of the Illuminations to the Red Lion Hotel which was once in Stoke on Trent and facing demolition was rescued by the museum rebuilt and happily once again serves up a pint.

In his collection of pictures from the day is the sign on a Leeds tram informing passengers that “Spitting is Forbidden” which made sense in an age before antibiotics and the dangers from a range of infectious diseases was all too common.

It is I think Andy's favourite  while for me it will always be the number 40

Which just leaves me to mention Trams in Eltham by John Kennett** and The Campaign To Save The London Trams by Ann Watkins which includes a chapter on that last tram at New Cross.

Picture; trams at the Crich Tramway Village, 2015, from the collection of Andy Robertson, 

* Crich Tramway Village, http://www.tramway.co.uk/

** Trams in Eltham  by John Kennett, Eltham Society, http://www.theelthamsociety.org.uk/publications.php

*** The Campaign To Save The London Trams by Ann Watkins, http://www.kentarchaeology.ac/authors/019.pdf

An adventure, a fish market and the promise of some gruesome stories ..... Saturdays at the Tower of London part 1

Now the thing about adventures is that they are best done with friends.

It lessens the risks and more importantly offers up plenty of opportunities to relive the events which with the retelling become more exaggerated and all the more memorable.

That said there was always one place I did on my own and that was the Tower of London.

I may well have done the odd trip with Jimmy but I was best pleased when I did it alone which allowed me to explore the place for as long as I wanted, following  which ever guide took my fancy and above all just letting the walls, the stories and the exhibits work on my imagination.

And on a Saturday it was free to anyone under the age of 16 which meant that after buying the return ticket to London Bridge what was left of my pocket money could be spent on a packet of toffees and a couple of postcards of the Tower.

But as powerful an attraction as the place was it was just part of the day which began with the wait at Queens Road Station standing on the platform in the sky looking down between the gaps in the wooden floorboards at the ground below.

Once on the train there was the journey which got more exciting as the railway lines grew on either side offering up a shedload of other trains to stare at and making the arrival at London Bridge a pretty spectacular affair.

And there were all those flats, warehouses and factories to take in including the old Peak Frean biscuit plant which announced its presence by that thick sweet smell which lingered in the compartment long after the place had been passed.

But for me in anticipation of the Tower there was the walk across the old London Bridge with the warehouses fronting the south side of the river, each with their cranes and more often a ship lying alongside which was followed by the descent down a flight of dark steps to the Lower Road and the fish market

I usually got there around 10 on a Saturday by which time all the fish had been sold and apart from the odd porter there were just the men sweeping up.

That said there were still the odd bits of ice and discarded fish in the gutters and of course that all pervading smell.

A few hours earlier and the place would haven teeming with activity but even given the emptiness of the Lower Road there were those promising smaller roads including the one that led to the Monument which at the time had one of the best views across the City from its observational platform. And cost from memory 6d.

Not that I over dawdled around here for the prize was the Tower.

Pictures; The Tower of London , 2015 from the collection of Ryan Ginn and Billingsgate Fish Market, 1927, courtesy of MARK FLYNN POSTCARDS, http://www.markfynn.com/index.html

Waiting for the tally man

There is always a tally man.

The name may change, and so to the description of the business.

We knew it as “tally” but others will remember it as “the never never” or “HP” and today it’s simply  “credit.”

But the process was pretty much the same and consisted of the opportunity to buy goods in advance of the full payment up front.

Now I am not being sniffy about this.

For my family and for many others if we wanted to share in that new consumer boom of the 1950s and 60s, we pretty much were forced into putting down the deposit and paying monthly.

In our case it was a chap with a van who came round each week collected a small regular payment, brought back the shiny catalogue and if mother had decided on something he would bring it out of the said van.

I have completely forgotten the chap’s name which might have been Terry and until recently I had also forgotten the name of the firm which was John Blundell Ltd, but also seems to have traded as Edward Evans and maybe also the Hartlepools Mutual Trading Company Ltd.

But as you do in going through some old family stuff there, dating back to the 1960s were the payment cards.

There are no dates on any of the cards, but we were round 116 and our payment day was “day 6” which I suppose was a Friday and was always in the evening.

The weekly sums paid back range from 4 shillings up to a £1 and mother never seemed to miss a payment which given that a £ in 1964 was still a substantial amount of money was a serious commitment.

I have no idea when it began but Terry or his name sake was already a feature of the weekly routine in the late 1950s when were still in Lausanne Road and carried on when we moved to Well Hall.

From memory Dad always paid on the nail for the big domestic items like the washing machine, telly, and wireless and so the tally man was there for those items of clothes, bedding and shoes.

And these were always in demand given that there were five of us all at school.

The down side of the system was that it was no cheaper than credit today.

So the “Terms” on the card announce that “5p per week for every £1 in value or as arranged, Payments may be used as a deposit on a later purchase [and] Special terms arranged for Furniture and Cycles.”

Added to which of course many of the clothes items may well have been almost worn out before mother had finished paying for them.

But that was the price you paid, and while some more virtuous than me will mutter “we always saved up for and then bought” I have to point out that there was and still is not an option for many.
Not that this is a rant, or a reflection on the power of consumerism, just a reflection on how we lived prompted by the discovery of some old credit card payment books.

Location; Eltham, New Cross, Peckham and pretty much everywhere.

Pictures; tally Payments Cards circa 1964, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Birthdays, cook books and a television series .............. watching the years go by in Lausanne Road

Toys I knew ........... the Dinky petrol tanker, 1956

Today was  my birthday, not that there is anything particularly remarkable about that, after all they come round every year and at 75 there are fewer ahead of me than behind.

But surrounded by the cards and the texts and other electronic messages I got to thinking about birthdays I have known.

The first thing to say is that we didn't go in for parties back in the 1950s in Lausanne Road although I am not quite sure why.

Hornby Doublo railway carriages, 1958

My very earliest birthdays would have been during the last stages of rationing after the war.

So while bread and flour came off ration in 1948 followed by canned and dried fruit, chocolate, biscuits, treacle, syrup jellies and mincemeat the year after it would be 1953 before sugar was de-rationed.

But I suspect the truth is we just didn’t do birthday parties.

Instead you got your cards a few presents and that was it.  They were still magical and the run up to the day was exciting but there was none of the hype that surrounded the birthdays of my kids.

Toy boxes I received, 1958-60

They and their friends had themed parties which might have been football, swimming or an adventure playground followed by the meal which became more sophisticated as they grew older, until parties were something they did in a pub with friends usually after we had gone to bed.

In Lausanne Road the parties we did have were strictly family affairs and I can think of only one which involved having some friends around and that points up the simple fact that we rarely had anyone who wasn’t family in the house.

I am not sure how typical that was but I can’t remember my parents ever entertaining.

The St Michael All Colour Cookery Book, 1972

Meals were family affairs and if someone did call they never outstayed their welcome, restricting themselves to no more than two cups of tea and would be gone long before Dad came home from work.

The dinner party and the more casual impromptu fry up after a night in the pub would not come for me until I was in my twenties, married and a long way from home.

By then the height of a sophisticated evening would be the prawn cocktail, followed by the cheese fondue and black forest gateau accompanied by a bottle of Blue Nun or Black Tower.

And there was nothing wrong with that, they were fun evenings some of which were quite memorable and all the more because they were the first stab at being grown up.

I still have a few of the old cook books which have stayed the course and can still be guaranteed to offer up something interesting.

That said my copy of the Galloping Gourmet was lost a long time ago but by then it was much stained with food, had lost vital pages and was as much a history book as any of the comic annuals I got for my birthday.

The Complete Galloping Gourmet Cookbook, 1972

So much so that I have tracked a copy down and ordered it up from Texas.

Its arrival was a reminder of the disastrous baked salmon dish from 1974 which stands in my memory alongside the Dinky petrol tanker that I got as a present on the birth of my twin sisters.

I had just had my ninth birthday party and it seemed a pretty neat way of celebrating their arrival.

Nothing as momentous came my way today but I did call up some old clips of the Galloping Gourmet  demonstrating that cooking can be fun.

Pictures; Dinky petrol tanker and train carriages, courtesy of Ken Jaggers, http://www.jaggers-heritage.com/ cover of the St Michael All colour Cookery Book Jeni Wright, 1974 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and The complete galloping gourmet cookbook, Graham Kerr 1972 soon to arrive from Texas

What we did in October when we were still a farming community

Cows on the meadows by Chorlton Brook, 2003

An occasional series reflecting on what we did in the township when we were still a small rural community.

Now if I had been farming here in the 1850s I might well have turned to The Book of the Farm by Henry Stephens.*

It was written in 1844, and ran to countless editions. It was the manual for anyone wanting to be a farmer.

Everything is here from what crops to plant and when to how to make a well, as well as sound advice on hiring labourers, the construction of a water meadow, and the best location for the milk house and cheese room. I learned which materials were best for building a farm house and how much I could expect to pay for materials, as well as the most up to date scientific information on planting wurzels.

It was a practical book and so “the cost of digging a well in clay, eight feet in diameter and sixteen deep and building a ring three feet in diameter with dry rubble masonry is only L5 [£5] exclusive of carriage and the cost of pumps.”

He calculated that that two brood sows could produce 40 pigs between them and that retaining six for home use the remaining 34 could easily be sold at market.

So many of the smaller farmers and market gardeners in the township might well keep at least one sow and use it to supplement their income.

Nor should we forget that these animals were destined for the table and so the slaughter of pigs was best done around Martinmas in early November because “the flesh in the warm months is not sufficiently firm and is then liable to be fly born before it is cured” and doing so in early November had the added advantage that cured hams would be ready for Christmas.

But today and over the next few weeks I want to drop in to another farming book which is H Rider Haggard’s A Farmer’s Year, written in 1898 and published the following year.

Now he was farming in Norfolk a full half century later than Mr Stephens and of course Norfolk isn’t rural Chorlton or Eltham or anywhere in south east London..

Harrowing in Mustard on stubble

That said this is what he wrote for the beginning of October.

“Since harvest about 250 loads of manure have been carted from the yards direct to the various fields where they are to spread, and sundry dykes on the marshland have been drawn.  

Also a little thrashing has been done and we sold some barley at sixteen shillings and fifteen shillings according to its quality.

Today October 5th we are ploughing on the bean stubble but with the soil in its present condition it is dreadfully hard work for the horses.”


*Stephens Henry, The Book of the Farm, 1844

** Haggard, H Rider, A Farmer’s Year,  1899

Pictures; the Meadows, courtesy of David Bishop 2003, and Harrowing in Mustard on stubble from A Farmer’s Year, 1899

On being 10 and a bit in Edmund Waller School ........ still living with a humiliation

Some memories just do not go away despite the passage of a full half century.

Edmund Waller School, 2007

This one I have carried for 63 years and goes back to Edmund Waller School and Miss Reeves sometime in 1961.

I was the lad who had been promoted at the end of what now we would call Year 5 into the top class, which I greeted at the time as a mixed blessing.

4A was what passed in Edmund Waller as the top class from which the bright and gifted would have their chance at the 11 plus and all the promise that followed from a grammar school place.

Not that I was one of them, having attained a place in 4A, the following September I joined the lads from 3B along with various other schools in the neighbourhood and began five years at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern  School for Boys.

In the past I have been harsh about Samuel Pepys but on reflection given that they were afforded less cash than the grammar schools, I had an excellent education from teachers who were committed to giving us the best.

Me, 1961

None of which is relevant to the memory, which at the time confirmed by own low esteem.  Having not cut the muster with Miss Reeves I was made to feel even lower by a group exercise where working in teams of four we were tasked with a project.

I can’t now remember the topic, only the burning humiliation of being told by the other boy in the group that I shouldn’t make contribution.  I remember his name, and found him some years ago on a social networking site,  full of his achievements on this and the other side of the Atlantic.

I do remember one of the girls intervened on my behalf and I think I did add something, but my heart wasn’t in it.

Looking back almost sixty years I chide myself for continuing to harbour the memory, and reflect that many 11 year olds can be cruel, arrogant and self opinionated but even given those caveats, the humiliation burns deep, and will follow me to the grave.

Not that I wallow in that bitter moment, instead it is a permanent reminder that I went through an educational system predicated on the idea of failure, for with every 11 plus achiever there had to be a legion deemed second rate.

Detail of the school

The apologists for that system, then and now, will advance the fatuous argument that we were not failures just not suited for an academic career which is a falsehood, and a falsehood challenged by the many talented individuals who went on to achieve in a full range of activities despite having failed to make the grade at 11.

So I will continue to let that memory bubble to the surface from time to time.

I could have confronted the individual on his social media site, but I doubt that he would remember such a trivial incident, secure in his glittering achievements.

Nor will I name him.

Location; Edmund Waller School

Pictures; Edmund Waller School, 2007, courtesy of Liz &  Colin Fitzpatrick and me in 1961, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

On becoming your dad

I have become my dad which I suppose is not that surprising really.

It is less the physical appearance although that is clearly there it is instead all those little ways that creep up on you and take you back four decades.

So I caught myself sitting in an armchair recently talking to one of my son’s and all the speech rhythms, along with the words I used and even the hand movements were dad.

He retained his hair longer than I ever did and unlike him I am useless at making and repairing things but the rest could be him.

He was a calm gentle man who always put the five of us first even down to the nightly winter task of putting a hot water bottle  into each of our beds and today whenever our kids are sleeping over I will do the same, even given that the eldest is nearly 40 and the youngest just 28.

And it made me reflect on just how much we carry forward from the lives of our parents and pass on to our own children.

Now dad was born in 1906 and mum in 1920 which pitched their formative years in the first half of the last century and some at least of those experiences flowed into how they brought us up.

Our Christmases blended the growing consumerism of the late 1950s with older traditions which with just a little tweeking could even have come out of the novels of Dickens.

Of course much of it was down to that simple fact that so much of everyday life was still the same.

The coal, the milk and the papers were delivered to the door,  Sidney the knife sharperner made a regular appearance with his hand operated machine which he pushed around the streets and Sundays remained the day you endured with little to do and little on the television to watch.

That said there are clear differences between me and my dad.

I never shared his politics which were grounded on a belief in Empire and property or for that matter his preference for plain food which “was not mixed about.”

Instead I very early adopted  mother’s politics coloured as they were by the mass unemployment and Means Testing of the 1930s.

For her class politics remained at the bedrock of how she voted and how she saw the world.

But then mum died when I was 25 while I had my dad until 1994 which perhaps has something to do with that simple fact that I grew more like him with the passage of time.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

When Mrs. Jane Knapman of New Cross made the Manchester Guardian ……

Mrs Jane Knapman lived on Dennett’s Road, just off Queens Road at number 64.

Breaking news, 1885

I will have passed it most days during the 1950s and early 60s as I made my way from Lausanne Road down Mona Road, and on first to Edmund Waller School and then Samuel Pepys.

And it would have been on the route to call on John Cox who lived on the other side of Dennett’s Road.

All of which is an introduction to a story of a fire in 1885, which appeared in the Manchester Guardian later the same day.

I suppose some might murmur that it must have been a slow news day in Manchester for the paper to report the incident and even more so for people to read of a “Destructive Fire in London …. Narrow Escape”*

Equally there will be those in London who see the news story as confirmation that even a minor fire in a small road in southeast London proves the pre-eminence of the city.

The full story, 1885

But not so, this was still the first big period of mass news when papers across the country fell on stories and events from John O’Groats to Land End to feed the insatiable curiosity of the public.

Go back into the early decades of the 19^th century and murky stories of murders, sensational robberies and cases of infanticide were regularly picked up by all the regional press and passed on.

The Dennett’s Road fire was no different.  It had begun in the early hours of Tuesday was “an alarming and destructive character, by which two aged and infirm persons nearly lost their lives.”

And the story included great heroism as two policemen and a neighbour repeatedly went back into the blazing property to rescue two of the occupants.  “Constable Thursday rushed in through the suffocating smoke and found Mrs. Knapman in her bed almost unconscious … [and taking] her in his arms with some difficulty succeeded in carrying her safely into the street”

And while Constable Simpson tried to rescue Mrs. Mary Ann Saunders “who is almost bedridden” she was saved by a “neighbour James Jacobs of no.60 Dennett’s Road who twice ran into the burning building before successfully reaching Mrs. Saunders and carried the woman to the window where police constable Simpson received her”.

Dennett's Road, 1872

No sooner had Mr. Jacobs made his escape than the flames burst through the floor, and all seven rooms including the contents “were reduced to ashes”.

Along with the two elderly woman, Mr Knapman and a young woman Annie Cole escaped.

On the surface it is a pretty humdrum story despite the drama, but there is more.

I know that Mrs. Knapman who had been born in 1795 and her son were living in the house in 1881, and were still there a decade later, suggesting that despite the devastation to the house it was rebuilt.

In time I will go looking for the stories of all four, along with Albert Sanderson and his widowed mother who were lodgers in the house in 1881, and the five people who were squeezed into no. 64 a decade later.

Their occupations offer up a snapshot of the area in the 1890s.  So while John Knapman was a wheelwright working for the railways, two of the lodgers described themselves as “Railway Carriage cleaners”, Emily Hodge and her daughter were “needlewoman on shirts” and the youngest resident was a labourer.

And here there is the hint of tragedy, because Emily Hodge was a widow at 38, which replicated the story of Marian Sanderson who lived with the Knapman’s ten years earlier who was widowed by the age of 44.

Lausanne Road, 2007

Nor can I walk away without mentioning James Jacobs who was 30 years old, married to Sarah and worked as a “Leather Bag Maker”.

Together they had four children aged between 8 and just 6 months, and who had spent the early years of their marriage in the City of London and later in Surrey and had only recently settled in New Cross.

So it’s all a twisty turny story made more so because I had originally been trawling the Manchester Guardian for a piece on a Mrs. Wild who officiated at the introduction of street gas lamps in Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

What caught my eye was the breaking news that in 1885 the “Madras municipality in India had extended the suffrage to women”.  There was no more just the statement that the news had come from “Madras states by telegram”.

And below that was story of the destructive fire in Dennett’s Road.

Just shows what random history can throw up.  And yes in the absence of a picture of no.64 Dennett's Road which has vanished, I include our house on Lausanne Road .... because I can.

Location; New Cross & Manchester

Picture; the news story from the Manchester Guardian, 1885, Lausanne Road, 2007 from the collection of Liz and Colin Fitzpatrick, and Dennett’s Road in 1872, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, https://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*“Destructive Fire in London Narrow Escape”. Manchester Guardian, September 28^th, 1885 

Melting tar …… a busy butterfly ….. and a long lost adventure

Now the thing about getting old is that there seems to be heaps more time for the memories of the past to invade the doings of a busy day.

Shallow ponds and lazy streams, 2018 

And once that flight of nostalgic fancy starts to run its course it is easy to reflect on how your experiences of 60 odd years ago diverge from those of your kids or grandchildren.

I say that, but much of what our sons did when they were younger are only now being revealed as in their own bouts of nostalgia, they share stories of daring dos which they wouldn’t dare to have admitted to when they were 10.

Some of those stories do resonate.  Their adventures on the meadows on long summer days, chime in with my own, when armed with just a warm bottle of lemonade and a day stretching ahead of us, we wandered off in search of adventures in some faraway park, or along a stretch of the Thames.

Often it was at the end of a train journey or the limit of a Red Rover bus pass, and it usually involved a quiet suburban spot, unhindered by other people. 

One such place was at the end of a railway line, and rather than explore we just sat on the platform.  

There were no trains, no passengers and the only sound was that of a lazy insect collecting pollen, mixed with that distinctive smell of mown grass, which competed with the equally powerful smell of the oil-soaked wooden railway sleepers cooking in the sun.

We must have sat there for hours before boredom and the empty bottle of lemonade prompted us to move on.

The spot where we played  with the hot street tar in 1958

These of course can be replicated by our kids, but those of exploring bombsites have gone as is the simple pastime of watching the tar slowly melt on a hot summer’s day sitting on the side of the road and carefully making patterns of the black oozy stuff with a discarded lolly stick.  

Today the street surface doesn’t melt, and the lolly sticks are no longer there in abundance.

And in the same way those Clean Air Acts of the 1960s have happily done away with the heaps of polluted air which in turn gave us the smog’s which meant we got sent home early from school making our way along roads devoid of landmarks.

Nor today are there those thick sooty deposits on trees which when you climbed them left your hands and clothes grubby and grimy.

But enough of such nostalgic tosh.

Smog's and fogs, 1953

Our grandchildren I hope will never have to use bomb sites as playgrounds or come home with soot smeared clothes.

These they can leave to their imagination fed by granddad’s tales of aimless adventures on long ago summer holidays in that place called the 1950s.

I might try and pretend this is all about the historical context, but perhaps it is just a nostalgic wallow.

Location; nostalgia land

Pictures; Shallow ponds and lazy streams, 2018 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, the spot where me and Jimmy O' Donnel played in with the hot street tar in 1958, from the collection of Liz and Colin Fitzpatrick, 2015, and Nelson’s Column during the Great Smog of 1952, N T Stobbs, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 42 ............ the not so rosy glow of memories

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

It’s odd what you begin to remember and even more how once you start there seems to be no stopping the memories.

Added to which once they are published they bounce off the collective memory confirming some and bringing forth new ones.

And so it was with The Family of One End Street** which I pretty much devoured at one sitting back in the November of 1961.

It was the story of a dustman’s family set in the late 1930s and told the story of Mr and Mrs Ruggles and their seven children.

Rereading it today bits of it appear a tad sentimental but it struck a chord as a way of life I was familiar with and certainly one my parents would have recognised.

Not that the book or the story is really the point, it is more that this was the year which set me as a serious reader, falling on everything from history to science fiction and the books of Ian Fleming.

I have Mr Rhodes who was my form teacher in my first year at Samuel Pepys to thank for that.

He and later Mr Berry had a simple approach to literature which was let them read what they want and bit by bit they will either move on from science fiction to Shakespeare or they won’t but either way they will have read some books.

In the case of Mr Berry’s class it was a battered old bookshelf at that back of the room filled with whatever he could pick up from second hand book shops.

And in that fourth year of secondary school in Mr Berry's class I worked my way through a lot of science fiction, a couple of ghost’s novels and the odd master piece.

But then not all my reading was the stuff mother would have approved.

For a short while I became hooked by PARADE a magazine I have since seen described “a magazine for men” which at a shilling was a lot cheaper than Playboy but worked on the same principle, mixing pin ups, jokes and “serious” article.  Not that the articles or even the jokes were of much interest to me, nor I suspect to any other young 13 year old back in the 1960s.

Recently I came across some of them on line with their distinctive yellow or blue banner which ran along the top and down the left hand side.

Briefly they had pushed the Eagle comic into touch but it was a short love affair because by the spring of 1964 we were on the move and while some at least of the Eagle collection went with me, Parade with its pin ups and dashing titles like “June is bursting out all over” were not destined to make the journey.

Some ended up behind the garden shed and others were slowly slid one by one through a space into a locked cupboard the key of which I lost.

It is one of the few memories which has never left me and one that even now makes me a tad guilty.

But no one was hurt, and I appear to have got away with it, which is more than I can say for those memories of Edmund Waller School and the class of 4a run by Miss Reeves.

I doubt that either of us would have chosen the other as companion on a desert island and that year of unmitigated failure and humiliation was pretty much laid to rest till Robert posted his school report from 4a at Edmund Waller.

Robert had followed me the following year and like these things are Miss Reeves had taken up the mantle to see another top year 4 class through.

Her signature was there for all to see and for once I rather wish the memory of that year had laid quietly in the past.

Robert went through the year after me but there was that signature of Miss Reeves, which brought back the dismissive words to a mother that "Andrew was not academically minded" a sentence which carried a judgement which had been weighed and delivered but in the long run proved as worthless as those piles of Parade.

Pictures; cover from The Family One End Street, Puffin Edition, 1976, The Great Invasion, Leonard Cotterell, Pan edition 1961and detail from the Eagle Comic, 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

**The Family of One End Street, Eve Garnett, 1937

Stories of balaclavas and adventures .......... out on the edges of Peckham and New Cross

Now if you have never read The Balaclava Story, and the Christmas Party by George Layton then it’s time to do so.*

They are set in the north of England in the post war period and chronicle the all too funny and at times sad escapades of Norman and his school mates.

I first read them soon after they were published in 1975 and instantly saw a connection with my own childhood in south east London.

I identified then and still do with Norman and the opening lines of The Balaclava Story ..............

“Tony and Barry both had one.  I reckon half the kids in our class had one.  But I didn’t.  My mum wouldn’t even listen to me.

‘You’re not having a balaclava!  What do you want a balaclava for in the middle of summer?’

I must’ve told her about ten times why I wanted a balaclava.

‘I want one so’s I can join the Balaclava Boys ....’

‘Go and wash your hands for tea, and don’t be so silly.’ She turned away from me to lay the table, so I put the curse of the middle finger on her.  This was pointing both of your middle fingers at somebody when they weren’t looking.”*

And many of us growing up in the late 1940s into the 50s will have had similar experiences, although in my case I did get the balaclava.

In fact I pretty much got one every year from when I was four till vanity and the teenage years banished them to the back of the wardrobe.

They were essential wear not only because they kept you warm but once the thing was on your head, you could be Ivanhoe, Lancelot or the good knight who occasionally featured in Robin Hood.

That said sometimes the pattern or mother’s knitting did not deliver which usually meant they were tight to put on or just too loose.

Of the two I could put up with the struggle of pulling it over your head but the loose ones tended to mean that they sagged exposing your chin and made you look daft.

Mine were usually grey or brown wool and because the mail hoods worn by a knight were a metallic colour then grey was always the preferred choice, but never underestimate a mother’s quest for value and quality over historical accuracy.

But at a pinch even a brown one would pass muster on those cold Saturdays when you wandered off in search of adventure and a new park.

There were usually three of us although sometimes the lad that lived in one of the basement flats close to the fire station would join us.

Not that we ever called ourselves the Balaclava Boys, although I did once ask mother to help out with some badges which she did by cutting out round cardboard discs attached by cello tape to safety pins, but they never caught on I suspect because she chose to call us the “Slugs” and emblazoned them across each badge in different coloured ink.

Still the thought was there and unlike the tale of Norman’s balaclava there was a happy ending.

Pictures; cover from the Fib and other stories, George Layton and 'The balaclava helmet' Pattern for a balaclava helmet From Essentials for the Forces Jaeger Handknit 1940s With ear flaps to enable good hearing during telephone operations (or for use with a mobile phone). The Victoria & Albert Museum, circa 1940s, http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/14309

*The Fib and other stories, The Balaclava Boys George Layton, 1975

** The Balaclava Story

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 51 ............. watching the snow fall

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

Eagle Annual, 1963

Now most of us will be able to remember where we were when the news broke of some powerful event.

For my generation it will more than likely be the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963 or possibly the death of Otis Reading four years later.

For an older generation there is the funeral of Winston Churchill, the death of President Roosevelt or Neville Chamberlain announcing that Britain was at war with Germany while for a younger generation there is that awful car crash in Paris which ended the life of Princess Diana.

But alongside all these for me there is that that day the snow fell from the skies across south east London and ushered in the Great Freeze.

The snow had begun falling on Boxing Day which almost qualified it as a White Christmas, stopped I think the following day and then began tumbling out of the sky on December 29th locking us into nearly four months of ice and snow with the thaw only beginning in March.

Now when you are thirteen you take such events in your stride and after snow ball fights became boring there was always the game of pulling a wooden bench up the hill at Pepys Park and then descending down the slope.

All of which had the added thrill that we might get caught by the park keeper who probably had more sense and was keeping warm in his hut beside a paraffin stove.

Come to think of it I don’t recall ever being challenged by one of the keepers in their brown uniforms as we risked life and limb.

But all of that was in the future, on that day in December I barely gave much of a thought to the snow.
It was late on a Saturday afternoon and already dark which made that swirling storm of snow just that bit more magical.

This I know because I still have the Eagle Annual which I got as a Christmas present and which I was reading in our kitchen as the events unfurled.

Me in 1962

Ours was a big kitchen dominated by the stove in the corner which heated the water as well as the room.

I suspect it was almost as old as the house and had no thermostat which meant that when it had been on all day the water got so hot that dad had to draw some off.

That was a regular occurrence but more than that there was that sizzling noise made from the water in the tank which was one of those reassuring sounds that seemed to guarantee all was well in the house.

That sizzling noise vied with the sound of the wireless which dad would listen to and which marked him off from mum who preferred the front room and the television.

So on cold winter’s nights you could slide down the Arctic like hall into the kitchen and be met by a wall of heat and Dad, which is how I remember that day when the snow began to fall.

Pictures; Eagle Annual 1963 and me in 1962, 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

Who remembers those long coach journeys out to Ewell for an afternoon’s sport?

Now if like me you grew up in one of the inner London boroughs the chances are that one afternoon a week you were bused out to Ewell in Surrey during term time.

I did four years and may have done a fifth although I rather think by the time I was in year 11 we could opt out.

And it was a mammoth undertaking, involving transporting a whole year group by coach from New Cross to the leafy outer suburbs which for me also meant a Saturday morning during the winter to play in the school rugby team.

It was not for me the highlight of the week, in fact it was an ordeal brought on by my inability to travel on buses, coaches and cars without feeling ill.

It began with the smell of those green coaches which the school hired which even now brings on that same uneasy feeling.

I suppose they were the newest of models and were pretty much the workhorse of the company ferrying school children to Ewell, works parties down to the sea coast and hired out to other companies.

And then as the journey got underway the heat from the engine and the smell of the leather seats mixed with an overpowering scent was enough to set me off, made no easier by the knowledge that this was it for 40 minutes only to be repeated again later in the day.

I won’t have been alone in feeling like that and I guess it was a small price to pay to get us all out to participate in a range of sporting activities.

But it does point to that simple observation that if you went to an inner city secondary school there weren’t going to be acres of green fields surrounding the school.

Back on home base we had the asphalt playground and another on the roof of the new block and that was it.

It was another of those little things that marked secondary moderns off from grammar schools.

But in that brave post War era the LCC and the Inner London Education Authority set about offering us out at Ewell something others took for granted.

Looking back I can see the wisdom of their actions even if the experience was an ordeal.

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Wondering about Michael, Philip and the cocoa factory on Kender Street

I wonder what happened to Michael Tickner, Philip Broome and Paul Driver.

They along with Jimmy O’Donnell, and John Cox were part of the class of ‘61 which started at Samuel Pepys in the September of that year.

There were 180 of us, drawn from a selection of junior schools and despite the diversity of our back grounds we all failed the 11 plus, that gold standard of excellence which guaranteed some a grammar school education and the rest of us something else.

I have never quite lost that sense of being judged second best and when I began teaching in the mid 1970s I was the only one from a Secondary Modern.

And for a time I was very hard on Samuel Pepys judging it against Crown Woods in Eltham where I went at 16.

Looking back that was unfair because like many other Secondary Moderns it did its best to offer us as good an education as the grammar school next door putting some of us in for “O” levels while recognising that for some their interests, skills and aptitudes lay elsewhere.

So I do wonder what happened to that cohort of ’61 partly because I am curious but also to prove that the 11 plus gold standard was not the fine measure of who we were or what we could become.

But if I am honest it is also because I am curious.

Some took the option and left at the end of the 4^th year and more in the Christmas of my last year.

By then I think from memory the year group had shrunk from seven forms down to two and fewer still stayed on for the sixth form.

For me the die had been cast in the March of 1963 when we left Lausanne Road for Eltham and slowly the familiar ebbed away and sometime around the beginning of 1965 the place I had grown up in just became a place to visit for school.

I guess that is pretty much how it is for all of us who move away.  In most cases the decades roll by with little thought of where it all started and when you do finally go back the landscape has altered out of all recognition.  

At best a few familiar old places still exist but even these look smaller and less inviting.

All of which makes me think about the people I knew. 

Most of the adults I have long forgotten although Mr Rhodes, Mr Payne, Mr Vaughan and Mr Twigg from Samuel Pepys still surface from time to time, as does Miss Prentice and Miss Reeves from Edmund Waller.

But with that passage of time I now do wonder about the lads I sat in class with.  Lads like Phillip Broome the class joker and Paul Driver who fell in the pool after a swimming lesson fully dressed and was for ever known as “Dribble.”

And then there was Michael who for a while at least none of us were kind to and for which I remain ashamed.

Of my closest friends I did make contact with Jimmy a few years ago.  He did fine, got married, raised a family and retired to the West Country.

Others like John I lost touch with and at least one from Edmund Waller I came across on a family history site just a few years ago and I am sorry to say he had lost none of the vain boasting which accompanied his time in Miss Reeves’s class.

I suppose most of when we think back that half century or more think of the buildings and the familiar places which time, the developer and the Council’s plans have done for and less of the friends and acquaintances we passed our youth with.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Adventures out of Peckham no. 2 ....... Abbey Wood and beyond

I have tried to remember what we did when we got hungry on an adventure, back in that golden time of the late 1950s.

We would have been on anyone of a set of “daring dos” which would have taken us from Lausanne Road up to Nunhead Cemetery, or across to Greenwich Park and in the fullness of time and with the help of a Red Rover out to the far reaches of the city.

Most would have started after breakfast and by the time you have washed up by the Cutty Sark or in deepest Holborn or faraway Abbey Wood, getting back for lunch was not going to happen.

I do have vague memories of the bread loaf and bag of chips, which involved buying a loaf and eating the inside which then became the place to put the chips and a second meal.

But that all supposed we had the money and that there was a chip shop to visit, which was certainly not going to be the case in snooty Holborn or leafy Epsom.

So, in answer to my question I have to say I can’t remember.

That said many of the trips out from Peckham and New Cross are still with me, and none more so than the ruins at Abbey Wood.

We will have done the journey on the bus or buses, and it will have been inspired by Jimmy who always seemed to know of these places, although how we got there could be problematic, but we always got there.

Of the three of us I was most attuned to the history of the site but the challenge of walking the walls, hiding behind the taller ones, and acting out a medieval battle, pretty quickly pushed the serious stuff away.

It always seemed to be that the grass had only just been cut which left us covered in the stuff which stuck like glue.

Eventually a combination of hunger, thirst and boredom would set us off on the way home.

Of course back then most parks and public places still had working water fountains, although one I remember stubbornly refused to yield any water.

It was one of those tall pointed ones made out of brown polished stone, had a plaque proudly announcing its date of erection with the names of those civic dignitaries who attended the opening ceremony but was as dry as the desert.

Its stone trough was full of leaves covered in dust with the odd sweet wrapper and the hint that it had once been home to some furry thing and if it had had drinking cups they were lost a long time ago.

Such setbacks we took in our stride and never mentioned when were asked what we had done that day.

Nor if memory serves me did we vouchsafe what we had eaten

Location; south east London

Pictures; Other Kid's Adventures, Manchester in the 1970s, from the collection of Andrew Simpson