Mr George Dansie of Barforth Road Peckham Rye ......... currently residing in Manchester

Now recently I came across one of those fascinating links that connected my current city of Manchester with where I grew up in Peckham on Lausanne Road.

George writes home, 1917

And the connection was a Mr George Dansie of Barforth Road Peckham and a picture postcard he sent from Manchester in the November of 1917.

The card was of the Manchester YMCA in Piccadilly which was a temporary wooden building erected in the grounds of what had once been a hospital.*

It was also known as the Khaki Club and although meant for soldiers recuperating from wounds and shell shock was open to any servicemen and became a popular club.

I have yet to find out what Mr Dansie was doing in Manchester but given that he had been born in 1890 it is more than likely that he was stationed in the city.

There are a few men with his name in the military record and one in particular who was in the Royal Army Service Corps could be him.

The Manchester YMCA, 1917

Sadly George doesn’t give too much away in his message home.

He writes that he “will be writing a letter to you tomorrow” and that he had been to two theatres last week and was planning to visit another.

But what caught my eye was a sentence he added as an afterthought and squeezed into the top of the card where he wrote that the Manchester YMCA “is very like the Camberwell hut.”

And that took me on a journey which ended with the Camberwell hut or at least a painting of the building.

The Camberwell YMCA, 1917

The picture is in the collection of the Southwark Local History Library and Archive and according to the background notes was painted in 1917 by "the artist Russell Reeve who was born in Norfolk and lived in Hampstead. 
He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy of Art. 

In 1916 permission was granted for the building of a YMCA hut on Camberwell Green for the use of passing troops."

The Camberwell building is not unlike its Manchester companion and leaves me wondering what its fate might have been.

Interior of the Manchester YMCA, 1917

I don’t remember it but then we left Peckham for Eltham in 1964.

The Manchester YMCA was demolished sometime around 1920 when the site was turned into a public park.

So the hunt is now on to discover more of the history of the “Camberwell hut.”

Location; Manchester, Peckham and Camberwell

Pictures; YMCA Hut on Camberwell Green, 1917 Russell Reeve, GA0325, courtesy of Southwark Local History Library and Archive, the Manchester YMCA postcard from the collection of David Harrop and the picture of the interior from the collection of Bill Sumner

* Piccadilly Gardens ....... the early years nu 1 The YMCA Hostel 1917,

** Southwark Local History Library and Archive 

Walking down Kender Street looking for the cocoa works and finding a lost cinema

It will be something well over half a century since I last walked down Kender Street and even now it’s the smell of cocoa which is the first thing that comes to mind.

Kender Street, 1872

We lived at number 14 for about a year and a bit back in 1950 into ‘51 and for most of that decade and into the next we regularly  went back to visit one of mum’s friends.

And Kender Street was also one of those alternate routes from Lausanne Road up to the public library on New Cross Road, the wool shop and mum’s other favourite haunt the private lending library.

Now I went looking for all those places recently and of course the passage of fifty five years has not been kind to my child hood memories.  The cocoa works along with number 14 and a big chunk of the street have gone as have the library, the wool shop and much else.

And so comprehensive has the change been that I did begin to question just how much I remembered.

Undaunted I turned to a set of historical maps running from 1872 till 1954.

Most are online courtesy of Southwark Council* and they offer a pretty neat picture of the area over 80 or so years.

Now I couldn’t confirm the cocoa plant but I was struck by the number of industrial units ranging from a print works, and iron works to a cooperage and engineering plant.  Most were developed in the years after 1872 and plenty of them were still there around Kender Street and Pomeroy Street in the early 1950s.

Of course having spent years living in east Manchester which retained its heavy industry until the 1980s and only saw the colliery close in 1968 I shouldn’t have been surprised.

What I did find fascinating was the lost cinema on Queens Road which I only discovered from one of those old maps.**

This was the Ideal Cinema House which stood between Kender Street and Pomeroy Street.

It had opened in 1914 as the Queens’ Cinema House, changed its name a year later to the Queens’s Road Cinema and in 1916 was renamed again the Ideal Kinema and when it was bought by Naborhood Theatres Ltd around 1935 becoming the  Narborhood Cinema.

And there in its 790 seat theatre audiences could have thrilled to Tom Mix, Charlie Chaplin and enthralled at the first talkies.

Alas it’s time as the Narborhood were numbered.  It was destroyed by German bombs in 1940 and the remains demolished the following year which I suspect was why I knew nothing of its existence.

All of which just points to that simple observation that if you want to revisit your childhood, best do it with some maps, and the odd history book.

Of course there may be someone who has a picture of the old cinema and even of the cocoa plant, and may be even the Eno’s Fruit Salt Works on Pomeroy Street whose wall also backed on to the gaden of nu 14 Kender Street.

Now that would be something.

And to confirm that memory, Margaret Nash commented, "That brings back memories. My two brothers used to work at the cooper age in Pomeroy Street, it was called Bennet's and I think made barrels.  As kids we used to hang around the cocoa factory until someone came out and gave us some cocoa which we mixed with some sugar and made a dip".

Now I winder why I didn't think of that!

Picture; Kender Street !872, from the OS for London 1872, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

* Southwark Historical mapping
http://maps.southwark.gov.uk/connect/southwark.jsp?mapcfg=Historical_Selection&search=26%20LAUSANNE%20ROAD%20SE15%202HU


**Naborhood Cinema, 277-281 Queen's Road, Cinema Treasures, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/31141

A little bit of Manchester in Peckham

Now I went looking for a certain house on Barforth Road which is on the northern edge of Peckham Rye Park.

A postcard home to Peckham

The house in question is an attractive semi on two floors, and I know that back in 1911 it consisted of seven rooms and was home to the Dansie family.

Mr George Dansie described himself as a corn seed dealer and he had been married to Marion Elizabeth for 24 years.

He died in 1938 leaving £1,300 and for now that is pretty much all I know but in time I will go looking for his shop and something more on his wife and his three children.

And it was one of those children that first drew me in to the story of the family and the house.

This was George who was born in 1890 worked in the family business and in the November of 1917 was in Manchester.

I have no idea what he was doing so far north but given the date he may have been stationed in the city or just passing through.

The picture postcard from Manchester

There are a few possible candidates in the army records of which one was in the Army Service Corps.

And on that November day he wrote back to his mother that he “will be writing a letter to you tomorrow” and that he had been “to two theatres last week” and was planning to visit another.

Now he had chosen a picture post card of the YMCA hostel in the heart of the city which may have been acting as a hospital, all of which raises some intriguing clues to follow up.

And more so for me.  I grew up On Lausanne Road, spent a year in a school in Nunhead and played in the park.  Of course all of that would have been a long time after George and his family lived in Barforth Road.

But I like the way that a little bit of my adopted city made its way down to Peckham.

Location Peckham & Manchester

Picture; the YMCA Hostel in Piccadilly, 1917 from the collection of David Harrop

The search for the Book of Remembrance in Edmund Waller School

I am no nearer discovering the fate of the Book of Remembrance of the students who fought in the Great War.

The Sentry, 1921

It was housed in a glass cabinet, high up on the wall beside the entrance to the classroom of 3b, and every day of the school year during 1959-60 I passed it as I went and left the room.

Now when you are nine going on ten the book had little meaning.

I remember it stood open at a page and the names were recorded in black and red ink.

I have no idea if the pages were turned regularly and as far as I can remember it was never referred to, and I never asked.

Back then the Great War had ended just 41 years earlier, and despite the horrific nature of that war, it had already been eclipsed by the more recent conflict.

But many of those who had taken part would only have been coming up to retirement and may yet not even have had grandchildren.

Most would still be fit and have years more ahead of them and the memories of what they endured would be fresh, even if they preferred not to talk about it.

And for those who lived around the school and had attended, the names in red of their fellow students who never returned would be something else that they hadn’t forgotten.

Now I never forgot the book, although the last 59 years have been so crammed with just living that I didn’t give it much of thought, until that is I was asked to write a book about Manchester and the Great War, and then as you do in researching the men, women and children who took part, I came again to the that Remembrance Book.*

I assumed it would no longer still be on the wall and more than likely have been donated to the Imperial War Museum or the Local Studies Centre.

On two separate occasions I contacted the school left my details and waited for a reply.

Sadly I am still waiting, despite follow up emails.

Of course schools are very busy places and the children always take priority so in the absence of a reply from the school I am pondering my options.

I guess an approach to the Local Studies Centre will be the first step and then either the Imperial War Museum or the National Archives at Kew.

Edmund Waller, School, 2007

And in the meantime I wonder if anyone else remembers it or can shed  light on what happened to it.

Location; Edmund Waller School, Waller Road, London SE 14

Picture; The Sentry, 1921, commemorating employees of S & J Watts & Co, Manchester, from a picture postcard issued by Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck db, https://tuckdb.org/ and Edmund Waller School, 2007 from the collection of Liz and Colin Fitzpatrick
*Manchester Remembering 1914-18, Andrew Simpson, The History Press, 2017

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 8 ........ George Carly of Lausanne Road, born in 1894 and died at the Somme in 1916

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

"After a fight", 1916

George Carly and I were neighbours separated by just 40 years and sharing the same house.

Of course I didn’t know him and only discovered his existence yesterday when I began to explore the history of where I had lived in the 1950s.

The family appear on the 1911 census and were still there three years later when the Great War began.

That in its self has drawn me to them fired also by a curiosity over their names.  Mr Carly’s middle name was Garibaldi and his wife’s was Zilpah.

Not that their birth places were unusual.  Mr Carly had been born in Sussex in 1865 and Mrs Carly in Greenwich.

Unknown group of soldiers, date unknown

I suspect given his birth year his father may have admired the Italian nationalist Garibaldi and in time I will I hope discover more about Lucy Zilpah Carly.

But for now it is enough to know that in the April 1911 the Carly’s had been married for 18 years and had six children ranging in age from George who was 17 down to Ivy who was three.

And knowing the house so well it is easy to begin to fit them into the different rooms wonder who slept where and which jobs around the place each was given to do.

My dad always talked about how his was the job of cleaning the fire places and bringing up the coal in his home in Gateshead and I suspect the same would have been true of the Carly’s particularly as they did not employ a servant.

At which point it is easy to slip into speculation about the family.

Mr Clark and his son George described themselves as “catering clerks.”

The remaining children with the exception of Ivy were listed as “student” or at “school” and so I wonder if Edmund Waller was where they went which is the school me and my sisters attended.

The school dates from the 1887 with an extension added in 1899 so it is possible that at least some of them might have attended.

Greetings ........... circa 1918

And I will go looking for school registers and admission books but in the meantime it is George who occupies my thoughts.

At his death he was serving in B Company of the First Battalion Queen’s Westminster Rifles and was killed on September 18 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.

Now if I have got this right the Queens’ Westminster Rifles had been formed in the August of 1914 at 58 Buckingham Gate and had been a Territorial Force and left for France in the November.

Sadly like so many of the men who served in the Great War George’s military records were destroyed which at present leaves us very little other than a reference on the Thiepval Memorial.

Not that this will stop me.

Now I know we inhabited the same house I feel the need to find out more.

Pictures; Daily Mail War Postcards, 1916, and others courtesy of David Harrop

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

**The London Regiment, The Long, Long Trail, http://www.1914-1918.net/london.htm

My Peckham .............. nu 4 New Cross Library

A short series of places I grew up with.  

Some have already appeared and others will be familiar because as iconic buildings they are well known.

Now this was what our library looked like in 1911, and just over forty and bit years later it looked very different

Pictures; New Cross Library, July 1911, courtesy of the Music Room London.

*Music Room London, http://www.musicroomlondon.com/

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 31 ............ a heap of electoral rolls and the lost houses of Lausanne Road

The back of our house circa 1954

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

Miss Elsie Mabel Carly lived in our house on Lausanne Road for just under half a century.

The family were there sometime around 1904 and moved out in 1951 when my dad and mum bought the house.

I doubt that I would have found out that much about the Carly's had I not begun trawling the electoral registers to see where my parents lived before I was born.

And as I uncovered the different properties ending with Kender Street and Lausanne Road it occurred to  me that I should be able to use the same registers to find out who had lived in our house before us.

Now I knew the Carly’s were there in 1911, a piece of research that led me on to tell the story of young George Carly, who was born in 1894 and died on the Western Front during the Battle of the Somme on September 18 1916.**

At his death he was serving in B Company of the First Battalion Queen’s Westminster Rifles and if I have got this right the Queens’ Westminster Rifles had been formed in the August of 1914 at 58 Buckingham Gate and had been a Territorial Force and leaving for France in the November.

From the Thieupal Memorial

Sadly like so many of the men who served in the Great War George’s military records were destroyed which at present leaves us very little other than a reference on the Thieupal Memorial.

The family continued to live at Lausanne Road and it is those electoral rolls which allowed me to follow Miss Elsie from 1929 when she gained the first through the 1920s up to 1951 with that added bonus of a telephone directory which listed her as the subscriber in 1947.

Nor is that quite all because I she lived to see her 97th birthday dying in Hastings in 2000 which was where her father had been born.

The Swiss tavern, 2007

In time I think I shall go looking for her two sisters who she shared the house with until 1951.

Not that these were the only surprises that came out of those electoral registers.

Having found Miss Elsie I went looking for our news agents on Mona Road and found instead the house numbers of two of my friends.

I knew John Cox had lived on Dennett’s Road and Jimmy O’Donnell on Somerville Road, and there on the register I found their parents.

Not perhaps the greatest bit of detective work but one that took me back to my childhood.

And there were two final discoveries.  One was of a pub on Luggard Road which clearly has long gone and the other was the block of police flats which stood between number 28 and the wood yard which abutted the Swiss Tavern.

When I was growing up I just took the flats for granted.  Looking at them now they stand out as 1950s build and sure enough the prewar maps show eight houses identical to ours and from the electoral registers we can track who lived in numbers 30 through to 42.

The old police flats, 2007

And sometime between October 7 1940 and June 6 1941 they received a hit from a high explosive bomb and the rest as they say was a bomb site followed by post war reconstruction.***

All of which is confirmed by the surveyors report on the house from 1951 which commented on how
“The main roof is covered with concrete plain tiles (presumably done in recent years under war damage repairs) and appears to be in very good condition.”

Now I rather think there is a story here which if I had access to the local newspaper of the period I would be able to tease out but just maybe some stories are left unresearched and unwritten.

Pictures; our house, circa 1954, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and  the police flats, and the Swiss Tavern, 2007, from the collection of Colin Fitzpatrick

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

** The story of one house in Peckham number 8 ........ George Carly of Lausanne Road, born in 1894 and died at the Somme in 1916, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-story-of-one-house-in-peckham_15.html

*** Bombsight, http://bombsight.org/#16/51.4708/-0.0539

The church I just missed on Peckham Road, opened in 1797 .......... closed 1952

Cambden Church, 1904

Now I missed the Camden Church on Peckham Road by less than a decade, although it is just possible that I might have visited what was left of this 18th century building because services continued in what was really just a ruin until 1951.

It had stood on a plot of land just west of what is now Oliver Goldsmith Primary School and has one of those fascinating histories which just make you wish you had been there when a group of evangelical Christians frustrated at the new vicar of St Giles decided to break away and build their own church.

Camden Church, 1872

This they did and work began in1775 and was finished two years later and according to the County Victoria Histories was  "built of stock brick with stone dressings in the Renaissance classic style of the period; it has a chancel and nave with short transepts.

The west front towards the road contains the three principal entrances and has a horizontal parapet. Camden chapel, built in 1795, and subsequently enlarged, is a handsome edifice of brick, with a campanile turret."*

But in the way these things work within just 50 years St Giles just up the road would have the satisfaction of seeing the secessionist usurper become an Anglican chapel of ease and in another fifteen years a parish church.

The message sent on December 5, 1904

It went on to serve the community for almost another full century until the church hall was destroyed in 1940 followed by further bomb damage the following year.

Despite this the vestry and crypt were repaired and services continued until 1952 with baptisms and marriages continuing until 1951.

So it is possible that I could have gone there, but only just.  The church finally closed in the spring of 1952 and was demolished that year.

All of that was a long way into the future when E sent Miss B Strong of Lewes in Sussex this picture postcard with the message that “as far as I know the funeral is to on Saturday,” and an offer to get a wreath for Beatrice.  Adding that “I saw him yesterday, he is quite natural.”

Detail of the church, 1904

I doubt we will ever be able to know exactly who “He” was or the identity of “E” but she sent the postcard in the December of 1904 so just possibly a search of the census returns will lead us to Miss Strong and a a connection with some whose initial began with E.

It’s a long shot but I think I shall go looking and in time I am also minded to find out a bit more about Mr Flint who took the picture and marketed it from his offices at Church Street which was just round the corner.

Just a decade later he was no longer at nu 68 Church Street and his were being sold by Tuck & Son.

All of which begs lots of questions and opens up avenues of research.

Picture; Camden Church Peckham Road, circa 1904, Albert Flint Photographer and Publisher, 68 Church Street, Camberwell in the series Camberwell, marked by Tuck and Sons, and reproduced courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/ and Peckham Road, 1872, from the OS for London 1872, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

* Victoria County History, History of the County of  Surrey: Volume 4  H.E. Malden (editor), 1912

**Camden Church, Parish Churches - Church of England, http://www.peckhamhistory.org.uk/churchesCofE.htm

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 15 ........ Miss Jeannie Jeffrey, the sea captain and that grand property on Erlanger Road

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

Miss Jeffery of Lausanne Road marries Mr Wills, 1881

I don’t suppose any of us really know that much about the history of the house we live in.

Unlike those grand piles which were the homes of the people of plenty with an unbroken story going back three or four centuries, Lausanne Road was a comparatively new home on the block.

It was built sometime between 1872 and 1881, and apart from the bomb that fell opposite can’t claim to have witnessed any great event.

But that is to ignore that it was home to a shedful of people including my family who lived interesting and productive lives and were as important in their way as any great politician, general or scientist.

Mr and Mrs Jeffery

And that brings me to Miss Jeannie Jeffery whose story tells us a lot about this bit of south east London in the last decades of the 19th and the first few of the next century.

Now I don’t know if she was the first resident of our house but she was there by 1881 and described herself  as “Owner of House Property” which is just about all we do know about her, save that she was born in 1848, her father was a journalist and she died in 1912.

But there is one other detail and that is that in the April of 1888 she married Joseph Henry Wills.  She was 39 and he 34 and Mr Wills was well known to Miss Jeffery because his father and brother had been living in
her house as “boarders” and I guess as these things do Henry and Jeannie fell in love.

He was a sea captain as was his father and brother which put them in the same social grouping of many of the others on Luasanne Road.

Next door Mr Roberts was “living on his own means” while further down the road was a Professor of Music, a teacher and Stockbroker’s Agent.  Not perhaps the highest social grouping but comfortably well off people who knew they were cut above others in the area.

Market gardens 1872

And the Wills were on to better places, for within less than two decades they had moved up the hill to a fine double fronted Victorian villa on the corner of Erlanger and Arbuthnot Roads with fine views down to where they had come from and across at the recently opened park.

Even now this is a pleasant spot especially on a warm summer’s afternoon but back at the beginning of the 20th century I suspect Mr and Mrs Wills must have been quite content with themselves.

The park opposite had opened in 1895 and the surrounding properties like their own were still only about 20 years old.

As late as 1860 most of this land was still market gardens and even in 1872 the roads and houses stopped at the foot of what is now Arbuthnot Road.

But in 1861 Haberdasher’s Company began to develop the area for residential use and between 1870 and 99 the roads around the park and down towards New Cross were cut and the houses built.**

Most were constructed in the 1880s, which I guess meant that Miss Jeffery’s would have seen them going up from her house in Lausanne Road and by one of those odd little twists may well have taken the same route up towards the park as I did just sixty or so years later.

Of course back in the 1950s as I stopped to cross the road at the corner of Artbuthnot and Erlanger I had no idea that that house had been occupied by the family who had lived in our house.

Such indeed are the twists of history.

Pictures, Marriage entry, 1888, courtesy of ancestry.co uk, Lausanne Road, 1872 OS London, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

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

** A brief history of Telegraph Hill, © Malcolm Bacchus, Telegraph Hill Society 2004.  http://thehill.org.uk/society/history.htm

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 9 ........ that Roll of Honour in Edmund Waller school and George Carly of Lausanne Road

Replica Cenotaph, circa 1920

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

Growing up in Lausanne Road in the 1950s was to be untouched by the Great War.

Of course the evidence of the Second World War was still all around us.

Many of the bomb sites had yet to be redeveloped and there were those signs announcing EWS and Shelters.*

Added to which there were plenty of gable ends  which had been cemented over and told of the house next door which had been blown away.

But the Great War was different.  It was rarely a topic of conversation which given the more recent conflict was understandable.

And yet those who had participated in it either as combatants or on the Home Front would still be in their late 50s or early 60s, would yet to have retired and some were not yet grandparents.

But I can think of only one moment when it impinged on me and that was at school at Edmund Waller.

In the upstairs hall on a ledge in a glass case was the Roll of Honour, opened at a particular page with those who had survived recorded in black ink and those who had died in red.

I have often wondered if the pages were turned regularly and more recently whether it still exists in the school and is on display.

Today that conflict is remembered in a way that was not the case when I was growing up.

Rightly so we have come again to recognise the sacrifice of that generation but I think all too often we see them as either young men staring back at us in their ill fitting uniforms or as frail individuals with faltering voices in wheel chairs and forget that when that war was over they settled down to productive lives, raising families with decades ahead of them.

Joseph Thomas, circa 1914-15

And I was reminded of this when I met with Nicola whose great uncle had fought in the war and died aged just 23 on the Western Front in 1917.***

He had been one of those young me who had enlisted in the first few months of the outbreak of war and was in the 2nd City Battalion of the Manchester’s which formed the second Manchester Pals Battalion.

Early in 1915 young Joseph Thomas sent a picture postcard to his brother announcing he was coming home on leave.

The card like many of the time carried an image of a group of young soldiers and after posting the story Nicola got in touch and identified her great uncle.

In the family collection was this replica of the Cenotaph made by Kingsway Art China of London.*

Replica Cenotaph, circa 1920

Once these must have been manufactured in their thousands but I doubt that many still exist and those that do will be in collections whose owners have little knowledge of its personal history.

This one however retains that link with the Thomas family and that young man.

And by extension I wonder how many other very personal memorabilia exist in Peckham and which contain a story.

Yesterday I reflected on the story of young George Carly who had lived in our house.

He was  born in 1894 and died on the Western Front at the Battle of the Somme on September 18 1916 and I rather hope that I will uncover something of his.






Pictures; replica of the Cenotaph, circa 1920s courtesy of Nicola O'Neil and Joseph Thomas circa 1914-15 from a picture postcard, 1915 from the collection of David Harrop

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

**EWS Emergency Water Supplies, Shelters Air Raid Shelters

***Joseph Thomas, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Joseph%20Thomas