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

V Bombs over Peckham and Nunhead ..............a story from Barney

The V1 was one of Hitler’s secret weapons which  he had told his generals would turn the war.

Rolling out a V1, 1944

The V1 was first launched against Britain in June 1944, just one week after D-Day.

The V1 is difficult to classify as a weapon as it was not a true rocket in that it did not leave the atmosphere, but it was also clearly not a plane. Perhaps it could best be described as a winged but pilot-less, fuel propelled, flying bomb.

The V1 was so-called because Hitler saw it as a reprisal weapon – a Vergeltungswaffen.
Wernher von Braun (23 Mar 1912 to 16 Jun 1977) was a German / American aerospace engineer and space architect credited with inventing the V2 rocket for Nazi Germany and later, the Saturn-V for the USA.

V1 & V2 Peckham and Nunhead.

The Peckham and Nunhead areas were badly damaged by "Doodle Bugs", (V1 and V2, flying bombs).
The rockets were to devastate many parts of the capital. Here are just a few examples of the damage and loss of life caused by the V1.

22nd June 1944 at 08:50

After a V1 ....... Upper Norwood, 1944

There was a very serious incident on the corner of Nunhead Lane & Peckham Rye on the 22nd June when 23 deaths occurred when a V1 hit a corset factory.

Many of the casualties were young female workers. The area today has been re-developed as a housing estate. 18 were to die when a V2 hit Waite street on 14th February 1945. This area today is still undeveloped and forms part of playing fields but the original line of streets can still be seen.

The area to the North of Peckham High Street was very badly hit by 10 V1's and 2 V2's.  This is probably one of the highest concentrations of V weapons that I have found anywhere in London. There would have been very few, if any, undamaged buildings in this part of Peckham. This has resulted in the area being more or less totally re-developed post war.

23rd June 1944 at 02:12

50 private houses damaged in Hollydale Road, surrounding property in St Mary's Road, Stanly and Lugard Road, slightly damaged by blast.

Picture; rolling out a V1, 1944, German Federal Archive, and after the V1Men of Civil Defence heavy and light rescue teams and men of the National Fire Service (NFS) listen for survivors as they search a cavity in a large pile of rubble, timbers and debris following a V1 attack in the Highland Road and Lunham Road area of Upper Norwood, 1944, Imperial War Museum, from V-1 flying bomb, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb

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