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

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

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

Lost in memories of listening to Apache in Woolworths on a warm summers afternoon in 1960

Now I wonder just what eight records we would all take away to that desert island.

It’s not a causal question and if you think about it, it turns out to be pretty hard especially if like me you were born in the first half of the last century.

My seventy one years have been packed with friends and events many of which were happy and a few less so.

So do you go for the music you associate with lost romances or stick with the big events from leaving home, seeing the birth of your children to the very great moments of the last two centuries?

And if you do go for the top eight events, does the death of J. F. Kennedy win over Dr King’s “I have a dream” speech or the release of Nelson Mandela or should the end of a world war stand above the magic of a night spent sitting beside the Thames listening to the barges banging together on a summer’s evening with the girl of your dreams?

I guess it is an impossible task more so because it changes with your age and your outlook and especially the love of your life.

Instead perhaps it should just turn on the eight memorable moments.

My first was walking in to a Woolworth’s store and hearing Apache by the Shadows sometime in the summer of 1960.

This still has the power to take me back to a moment in my life before everything became complicated and grown up.

More than that it puts me right back into that Woolworth’s store with its wooden floor, heavy and solid island counters and the smell of ice cream which came in those circular shapes with matching small round cornets.

Now you can’t get more basic than that, but would I take it on that island?  No I  think not which still leaves me a shedful of moments and songs to work through.

Picture; Cliff Richard & the Shadows arrive at Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands, April 6 1962, Nationaal Archief, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands license.

One Friday night in Edmund Waller in the November of 1963

Every generation has that defining moment when a public event triggers a lasting memory of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

For my parents it was the death of President Roosevelt and later the funeral of Winston Churchill while for some just a bit younger than me it was the death of John Lennon.

Most of the events are deaths and most are of world leaders mixed with tragedies like Aberfan or the Munich Air Crash although there can equally be moments of great hope and optimism of which the release of Nelson Mandela, the inauguration of President Obama and Dr King’s "I have a dream speech" sit deep with me.

But all of these are a backdrop to the one that still has the power to take me back to a night in the November of 1963.

I had been at Sea Cadets which was held in the lower hall of Edmund Waller, a school I had left just two years earlier.

We got to wear naval uniform, learned to drill, master Morse code, recognise a multitude of flags used as messages and on windswept and bitterly cold Sundays go rowing at the docks.

And at the half way mark in the evening for the price of a few pennies there was a huge mug of tea and a selection of misshaped jam tarts provided by the caretaker’s wife.

The sessions have pretty much merged into a blur but bits of that Friday on November 23rd have stuck with me of which my total humiliation at failing to tie a reef note are all too vivid.

Of course that memory only sticks because of the bigger picture which was the assassination of President Kennedy.

I was just 14 and politics and current affairs were just beginning to take over from Dan Dare, rugby and Airfix models.  That said like many of my generation I had been scared stiff during the October of 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis  seemed to threaten a nuclear war.

But President Kennedy was a remote figure and it was more the stunned reaction of my mother which made the event assume such a powerful significance.

The shooting had occurred at 12.30 Central Standard Time and President Kennedy died half an hour later so with the confusion and time difference I guess the first news of the shooting and then his death would not have been flashed up on the telly until 7 in the evening.

By then I would have set off for Edmund Waller and it would be a full two hours and a bit before I bounced back into the house by which time mum and dad would have had hours to mull over the news and ponder on what it held for the future.

Later I fell asleep listening to the radio in the kitchen.  The scheduled programme had been put to one side in favour of more news and reactions from around the world.

Such is the impact of an event half way round the world on a 14 year old lad in Lausanne Road.

Pictures; President Kennedy, February 20 1961, White House Press Office, and a young Andrew Simpson circa 1963 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Finding my way home on a foggy day in January 1962

This is a fog story.

But not one of those autumnal mist type but the real pea souper sort I grew up with and was really smog which was that ragbag of pollutants which did nothing for your health and added to the grime of my bit of south east London.

I am too young to remember the great smog of 1952 which settled across London on a Friday in December and didn’t go away until the following Tuesday.

It killed thousands made travelling a nightmare and even slid into people’s homes.

But there were plenty of others I do remember.

At the time unaware of the dangers I loved that grey swirling blanket which would get thicker and hid every familiar feature and aside from the adventure of being out in it there was the way it muffled all the sounds and made you feel totally isolated.

Nelson’s Column during the Great Smog of 1952

And as the day wore on it got progressively worse which was always a bonus if it was a school day raising the very real chance that we would be sent home.

Today an army of clerical stuff would carefully check that there was someone at home or ensure an alternative place of safety.

But for us once the decision had been taken we were left to make our own way home through the gloom but this was all just a decade and a bit after the last war when far worse had tumbled out of the skies.

Added to which few homes had telephones and you could pretty much guarantee someone one would be in.

I don’t think we ever got lost but the route from school to Lausanne Road was pretty direct.  Once out of the gates it was down through Pepys park, along Arbuthnot and Dennet’s Roads where Jimmy and John Cox left me leaving just Mona Road and home.

Looking back it is easy to glide over the potential dangers especially when the fog obliterated most  points of reference.

I remember Dad telling me how he had walked around the ruin of St Mary’s church a good dozen times before he was confident enough to set off for the short walk up Belfort Road to the Swiss Tavern.

Oil flare after the fog, 1960

And there is no doubt that it didn't do your lungs any favours.

The bitter cold air mixed with the muck settled on your chest making you cough and left that foul taste in your mouth.

Thinking back it was as if someone had rolled a very cold stone over your chest.

All of that is now a dim distant memory so while I sit here and gaze across at the Rec already the trees on the other side of the park are becoming visible added to which there is no one with a face mask or scarf in front of their faces.

And that is a reminder of how deadly that smog was.

So much so that during one particularly bad smog day Mr Vaughn one of our science teacher’s had left a filter pad outside the lab window which was changed on the hour and as that day wore on the muck on the pads became thicker.

Not that we were over bothered unless that thickening muck meant an early end to the school day which it did.

That I remember well, but those basic things like the oil flares at road junctions and the more serious disruptions to daily life are lost  along with the smog itself.

Pictures; looking out over the Rec November 2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Nelson’s Column during the Great Smog of 1952, N T Stobbs, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.and oil flare, Wilbraham Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1960, A L Landers, m18486 , courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Mama said there'll be days like this ................

Samuel Pepys, 1962

Mama said there'll be days like this, There'll be days like this, my mama said* was not a song I remember back in 1961 when it reached number 4 in the US charts, but it will have marked that slow transition which took the boy from Dan Dare and Airfix to records, long trousers and a healthy interest in girls.

Not that this was a sudden event and bits of the old Andrew lingered on but by the September of ’61 I had consigned the Eagle Comic to the back of the shelf, begun to consider my appearance and discovered all that awkwardness which comes from being a teenager.

The trouble is no one warns you that it’s going to happen and unless you have older brothers and sisters you are pretty much on your own.

After all there is no way that you can confide in friends who themselves are adrift and wouldn’t admit to a moment’s confusion and uncertainty.

So you stumble through it all which was made worse by being at an all boys’ school.

From the age of 5 I had gone to school with girls, sat beside them, worked with them and occasionally were the butt of their jokes but then at 11 when it was important I was yanked away.

All of which meant the opportunities to meet socially were limited and in my case fraught with shyness.

We weren’t religious so the church youth club was a non starter, social media didn’t exist and few of us ever thought that hanging around street corners was the bees knees.

And so there was that uneasy spell when you had given up the trappings of being a kid but couldn’t quite adopt the confidence, or style of Cliff Richard and his friends.

Crown Woods, 1965

There were the endless mucky stories of the fantasist who regaled us all with tales of his Saturday nights on the back row and were matched with equally earnest discussions about what you would do if on  a date you dropped an opened slab of chocolate on the floor.

As for the first we never quite believed Ron while the issue of the chocolate bar was solved by Peter who offered a sliding scale of response.

If the date was the girl of your dreams then you walked from the chocolate bar making a joke of what had happened.

On the other hand if  this was not a serious night out you were permitted to pick it up but even then there was a prohibition on offering her any.  After all as Peter said “you had to look the part and show respect."

For me that existence in limbo land was partially broken when we moved from Lausanne Road to Eltham, pitching me in to the daily routine of travelling from home back to Samuel Pepys by train which gave me confidence and the chance to meet girls.

Not that it all worked.  The golden first date in some park in Brockley left me Billy no mates, sitting on a bench for an hour before making a dignified retreat in the fading sunlight to the station and home.

Later still there was that first time when you had to end the relationship which was something I never did very well partly because looking back it was mainly me who got dumped.

Crown Woods, 1968

But eventually it all settled by which time I had left Samuel Pepys and at the age of sixteen started at Crown Woods in Eltham which was a mixed comprehensive school of 2000 students and had the added advantage that me and my mate Bernard entered the sixth form as unknowns which made us a tad more interesting than all the other lads who the girls had known for five years.

That  journey to self confidence and being at  ease with girls had taken longer than most but in that September of 1966 mama was right.

Pictures; from the collection Anne Davey  and Andrew Simpson

*Mama Said, The Shirelles, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L842mz-tNBQ

Losing the Railway Tavern on Gibbon Road and remembering the chip loaf ............... an August day in 1960

Now it’s almost impossible to recreate an adventure you had when you were ten back in the summer of 1960.

But as you do I tried and it was doomed to failure.

That summer had hung heavy and although some of it had been spent with my grandparents  the rest was the usual mix of various parks, the odd long walk and when flush with pocket money a train ride or a Red Rover bus pass which seemed to offer up the world.

Me, I preferred the train but there is no doubting the freedom those Red Rover’s gave you to wander the city for what was just 2/6d.

I never planned my routes just turned up, bought the ticket and went off.  Sometimes you struck gold and others were one of those long journeys to nowhere.

But for now it was that adventure in the August of 1960 which took us out beyond Lausanne Road and up Gibbon Road.

We had planned to spend the morning in the park at Rye Lane but instead of staying on Evelina Road had turned off on to Gibbon Road and by degree discovered the cemetery which was I have to say a bonus.

Once inside it was far more magical than a park, afforded the potential for all sorts of scary and daft things and held out the promise of a return when the conkers had fallen from the trees.

Of course when you do these things for the first time and especially by accident it’s always a bit problematical if the trip can be repeated.

All of which I knew when I set off to recreate that walk, but the passage of  55 years can be hard on the memory and confronted me with more than a few disappointments.

The first was losing the Railway Tavern which has lingered at the back of my mind ever since we came across it because t was here that we had stopped to ask directions.

The pub was closed but the cleaners were in and the doors wide open and that distinctive smell of stale beer and polish permeated the entrance.

And if that wasn’t memorable enough this was where Jimmy dropped the bottle of Tizer which we had carried from home and which still was half full although by now it was warm and a little flat.

So I had good reason to look for the Railway Tavern only to find it had finally shut up shop in 2003 and been demolished three years later, making it another bit of my past that has been taken away from me.

The site is now new housing and comparing it with Adrian’s picture you would be hard pressed to make a match.

Still the old sign has been left although it’s not the picture I remember.

That said there had been one final bonus of the Gibbon Road jaunt and that was the discovery of the chip loaf.  Early on in the trip we had bought those small round loaves, and as walked we ate the inside.

Then at dinner time we filled the inside with chips and sitting down somewhere along the way home ate the lot.

That at least is something I still occasionally do much to the horror of Tina who being Italian thinks the inside should be filled with a mixture of roast vegetables, a few slices of mozzarella cheese and handful of basil leaves all covered with a dash of olive oil.

I can’t disagree with her but point out that in 1960, the inside would be less sun dried peppers and more likely a pickled egg or onion with a sliver of cheddar and a dash of vinegar.

And they say nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Which is certainly true in this case because I indebted to Simon Mitchell who has corrected the date of the picture, commenting, "sorry to disagree Andrew, but that photo can't be 1960 as there is an Austin Allegro in the shot and they were not on our roads until 1973."

Not that Simon should apologise I am just pleased we have got it right.  Thank you Simon.

Pictures; the Railway Tavern, 66 Gibbon Road, circa 1970s, from the collection of Adrian Parfitt and a London Transport single deck bus courtesy of Jean Low, 2015

As others remember .............. Barny and the coach trips to Ewell

The second of an occasional series contributed by readers who also grew up in south east London.

Here Barny remembers the school trips from Samuel Pepys to Ewell playing fields in the early 1960s

Who remembers you say??

How could I forget?

The memories come flooding back from purgatory...

(1) - The outgoing journey, New Cross to Ewell.

The smell of the dust from the old coach seats. Fighting for a back seat (essential for pulling faces and executing various hand gestures to anyone driving behind).

Ten minutes into the journey, that distinctive pong of vomit from those pupils who didn't travel well.

Outbreaks of skirmishes and bickering throughout the remainder of the trip.

(2) - Let the games begin.

Always Cross Country Running in the winter, so you had to suffer inhaling air at Absolute Zero. The pain!!

Hiding in a small wooded area, until joining the run on the last time around. Fag break!

Football, more like a medicine ball, kicked really hard against my soft skin. The agony!!

The abject boredom of being unpicked for a team and left goalkeeping.

Rugby, no fun at all if you're 8 stone (112 lbs or 50kg).

(3) - Cold Showers.

Oh! the joy. Towel flicking from horrible pupils, aimed at the soft parts of my body.

Five minutes to run the gauntlet through the ice cold showers. (time includes getting dried and dressed),

Getting dressed, almost impossible with wet skin and numb from the cold fingers, still covered in mud.

School duffle bag full of junk, deposited by some oiks whilst you were showering.

Pants or one sock missing. grrrr!

(4) - The home journey, Ewell to New Cross.

Fighting for a back seat again. Further skirmishes and bickering. The stink of Smiths Cheese & Onion crisps.
That vomit smell again.

Pupils comparing body parts and functionality, apparently!

Miscellaneous instances of irritating noise and diesel fumes.

It's no wonder that various rouses and schemes were devised in order to give Games a miss. My favourite and one that always worked well, was to leave a penny in one of your socks throughout the previous day.

Then, just before Games, you show the horrible looking bruise on you foot to a teacher, and viola! - excused!! Who remembers you say??

© Barny

Pictures; Banfield Coach, Leyland Tiger Cub, 1959

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 47 ............. Topper or Eagle?

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

Now if there is one thing guaranteed to bring forth a shedful of memories it is the name of a comic from the 1950s.

Part of the reason is that there were so many of them and the quality was so good.

For sheer knockabout pleasure the Beano followed by the Dandy ranks at the top of my all time favourites although they are closely followed by the Topper and the Beezer which were larger format.

All of them went in for the more serious story of which the invasion by walking jelly fish always fascinated me especially their ability to trap their enemies in transparent bubbles.

Sadly only the Beano survives although the Dandy did have a brief flirtation with an online version.

And between them they have a special place in our family because they became the chosen comics of our eldest sons and in the case of our Ben even now the Beano annual features in his Christmas stocking.

All of this I was reminded of by David’s picture of his Topper comic from April 1960 which was one that very probably came through our door.

But I have to confess that I was and still am a fan of the Eagle and of its companion comics, Girl, Swift and Robin.**

Eagle did have its silly and funny stories but at its heart were serious adventures featuring Dan Dare Pilot of the Future and a host of other daring heroes drawn from the French Foreign Legion, the Wild West and the Napoleonic Wars.

Added to which there were factual cutaway drawings and the stories of great lives.

At which point I could get quite pompous about the quality of these four companion comics but I have done that elsewhere and so instead I shall just return to the slapstick humour of the Topper.**

Picture; the Topper April 1960, courtesy of David Harrop, and the Eagle 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

**Comics of the 1950s,  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Comics%20of%20the%201950s

The story of one house in Lausanne Road .... number 43 ............ rabbits, dolls and other money spinning plans

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

Now mother came of that generation which was very practical about pets and erred on that simple premise that they either contributed to the common family good or they weren’t crossing the threshold which is how we got the rabbits.

There were two of them bought from a pet shop in Rushey Green and the grand plan was that like all rabbits everywhere they would breed and produce off spring which mother could sell.

To do this day I am not sure if this meant just selling on the baby rabbits , or taking the project to the next level and dealing in the meat and the fur.

Dad had been dragooned into building the hutch which stood on legs a full three feet off the ground with a long “run” made from an old door he had acquired.

But the plan failed because the rabbits didn’t like each other and after a decent time they went back to the pet shop and the hutch became firewood for the kitchen stove.

Of course we weren’t alone in such schemes.
Mr and Mrs Potts next door kept chickens and the man who lived beside Nana and granddad in Chellaston managed pigs.

Later mother joined one of those outsourcing schemes which in her case involved assembling little tourist dolls which were dressed in classic London outfits including a policeman, Guardsman and Yeoman of the Guard.

All these were just the casual way people round our way supplemented the weekly income.

Pictures; mother around the time of the rabbit project

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

This Is London ........ a unique guide to the London of 1959

Now I have no idea why I never got a copy of This Is London.*

Cover of this is London

I guess that there are only so many books that you can get for Christmas, and with the Eagle Annual and the odd history book that was enough.

Not that I think I would fully have appreciated it back then when I was only ten all of which is so different now.

It is a witty, informative guide to the London I knew as a child and is full of marvellous images in the style of the period and these alone take me back nearly sixty years.

But it is also the humour which shines through and marks it as something original.

It starts with a page of brown sludge with the occasional splash of yellow accompanied with “Well, this is London. 

 But don’t worry, it is hidden in fog like this only a few times a year in winter. Most of the time it looks- like this!”

And that is the start of a wonderful series of bright colourful and exciting paintings of London with a text to match.

All of which is a riveting read and one that has now become a history book in itself.

This Is London ........ a unique guide to the London of 1959

So much so that the new edition which was published in 2004** has updated some of the entries,  pointing out for instance that “Today the Billingsgate fish market is located in the Docklands, a rejuvenated section of the London Docks.  It moved there in 1982.”

Now that move passed me by and while I have no doubt it was for the best I have vivid memories of the market, the over powering smell and the debris left on the streets on a Saturday morning only hours after the traders and the fish had left for shops across the city.

Some three million passengers are carried daily in the Undgerground

It is just one of the moments which bounced out of the past along with those electric milk floats, old Routemasters and a river which was still a working river full of ships from every corner of the world unloading their cargoes under the shadows of tall cranes and massive warehouses.

All of which I remember and for those like my own lads who never knew that London, Mr Sasek’s book has it all.

And so as you would expect I have gone looking for other editions in the same series which included, Paris, Rome, New York, and San Francisco.

In time I might order up the reprints of New York, and San Francisco but at present I am content to wait for the arrival of This is Rome which was originally published in 1960 and reprinted in 2007.

Like This is London it has a page of updates which will be fun to match with the original text and my own memories of a city we regularly return to.

Now ever one to respect copyright I held off posting and substitute the same story but with images drawn from the collection.

However after contacting the publisher it appears at present no one knows who owns the copyright to the illustrations, so as the blog is no commercial and this is about encouraging everyone to buy read and share the booksof Mr Miroslav I can't think anyone will object, but if they do I shall revert to the original.

And for those intrigued by the books there is a site dedicated to the authors and his books.

Picture; cover from This Is London, and Underground train page 42 courtesy of Universe Publishing

*This Is London, Miroslav Sasek, 1959

**Universe Publishing, a Division of  Rizzoli International Publications, New York, www.rizzoliusa.com

***This is M Sasek, http://www.miroslavsasek.com/index.html

Growing up in New Cross nu 5 off to Samuel Pepys

The one sure certainty of failing the 11 plus was that you went to a secondary modern school.

Beginning Samuel Pepys, 1961

Not of course that this over surprised me.

My mother had been told by my year 6 teacher back in the January of 1961 “that I was not academic material.”  A sentence that burned deeply into my mother and condemned my father and me to endless evenings of 11 plus tests by the kitchen stove.

All to no avail.  I failed.  But not before I along with all the other also runs had to endure the class interviews where the hopefuls destined for a bright grammar school future would give a presentation to the rest of us, which were really rehearsals for the real thing in front of the head teachers of the local grammar schools.

To this day I remember my first introduction to Vasco da Gamma that Portuguese sailor who boldly went where no European had sailed before.  Even then I wondered why the cabin boy and cook as well as the man steering the ship never got a look in through the entire talk.

Years later teaching year 8s the European voyages of discovery, plunder and much else I was always pulled up by the mention of the said captain and taken back the twelve years to the upstairs classroom of Edmund Waller Junior School and the talk given by Barry Whatshisname.

Samuel Pepys, 1961-66

But enough of such bitter vituperation.  That was what the 11 plus was supposed to do.  Separate the elite from the rest of us, and while they went on to a bright academic environment we were destined for schools which specialised in more practical things, .......woodwork not Wordsworth, technical drawing not Tennyson and so much more.

Added to that our schools were not as well funded and led to one glorious episode where just before my O level history exam in 1966 we were given a world historical atlas published in 1938 which finished with the wonderfully optimistic comment that “it is hoped the leaders of Germany and Italy will see sense and rejoin the League of Nations in a profound desire to solve issues by peaceful means.”  

Now today I can see the dark humour in that, but at the time I pondered how we had to use a thirty year old text book which added to everything else got the next ten years of European history so wrong.

But my secondary modern school and many others across the country strived not to give us a second class education.

They were fully aware that a rigid test at 11 did not mean that those who failed to pass were failures.  And so many of us were entered for 0 level exams that badge of so called academic excellence while class mates were given the practical skills which enabled them to become tradesmen in a whole range of occupations

Getting ready to leave, 1966

And these places attracted the talented and committed teachers.  I can remember many who I would have been happy to work beside when I started teaching in 1973.

Indeed in the years after I started I benefited from the advice, good humour and wisdom of those who had been at Oldwood Secondary School here in Manchester before it was merged with the local grammar school to form Poundswick High School.

But despite all their efforts secondary modern schools were just that.  They were a secondary form of education for those who judged unsuitable for the full academic experience.

Today as then selection at 11 has its supporters who in their advocacy of grammar schools focus on the poor records of some comprehensive schools and on a golden age of grammar school education in the late 1940's and 50's.

Now I can be both objective and generous in my recognition of the opportunities grammar schools gave to children of all classes particularly ones who like me came from a working class background.

But I was under no illusion at the time and since that what we who failed that 11 plus were offered was less than best.

Not for us that heady excitement of preparing for a new educational world with like minded bright young things.  In the September of 1961 I assembled with the majority of my male ex classmates from junior school in the playground of Samuel Pepys, and apart from the uniform and an absence of girls there was little to mark this off as any different from what I had already experienced.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Growing up in New Cross nu 4 off on a Jolly down to Brighton with the works do

Dad circa 1947

I remember the first time I went to Brighton.

It will have been sometime in the autumn of 1963 and was what has become known as a “jolly” but was officially “the works outing” and amongst my Dad’s colleagues was simply a “Beano.”

Of course these dos weren’t exclusive to work places, many pubs, clubs and institutes would have their day out in the sun with just that right mix of beer, sand, sea and fish and chips.

For Glenton’s it was always the south coast while for Tudor Crisps in Peterlee where I worked briefly it was Whitby or Scarborough and for the countless pubs and factories here in Manchester it was Blackpool.

In many ways the destination didn’t matter, it was the journey which usually involved several pub stops along the way, a “slap up meal” before and after a walk along the front and more pubs and hotels.

Most of those on that Glenton’s do were from the garage although there were a few from the office at New Cross and I think a couple more from Saxton’s the estate agents who owned the coach company.

Off on a Chara early 20th century

Unlike most our trip was not in the summer but mid October when the season was over and the coaches parked in the garage and the drivers taking a long well earned rest

Such trips have a long history stretching back to the charabanc which was a horse drawn vehicle used for sightseeing and works outings usually to the countryside or seaside. They were usually open topped and were common in Britain in the early 20th century.

In time the horse gave way to a motorised version which often had a detachable body so that when the summer season was over the vehicle could be used as a flat bed lorry.


They were not very comfortable and by the 1920s were being replaced by the coach. These might still have a canvas top but were far more comfortable.

Horse drawn Chara, late 19th century

And here there is another connection with Glenton’s because for years back in the 1930s a model of Dad's coach proudly sat in the office window at New Cross, and by degree by the 1950s made its way to the back of the office and finally came home to our house where I played with it for years.

It was a beautifully crafted model which in the untender care of a six year old slowly lost much of its finer detail until all that was left was the chassis and four wheels.

All of which is perhaps a lesson on what a five year old should be given as a toy.

As for that day in Brighton it passed well enough.  Dad I think had gone out of duty and perhaps to fill the numbers I was invited along with my friends Jimmy O’Donnell and John Cox.

For me it was a one off and while I have been on work nights out I have never repeated the “Jolly” and have yet to return to Brighton which has along ago reinvented itself, unlike Blackpool which continues to offer that mix of cheap fun by the sea enlivened by the procession of hen night groups.

All a long way from Brighton and that day out with Glenton’s but thinking about it perhaps not.

Pictures; charabancs from the early 20th century, from the Lloyd Collection.