Whilst in my local Sainsburys recently, I bumped in to an old friend who I hadn't seen for over 40 years who has since moved out to Kent. He was brought up in London, near the East Street market - which we called "East Lane". I asked him if he had any memories of the area which he might like to contribute to this site and although at first he said he wasn't one for looking back, he has come up with a wealth of memories, the reading of which both made me laugh and made me cry. His descriptions of the rooms in his home brought back so many memories of how most of us lived at that time and the description of his hard-working parents has led me to thinking hard about the difference between then and now. In those days, parents were more concerned about their responsibilities than their rights - they accepted without question the fact that it was their responsibility to put a good dinner on the table for the family and clothes on their children's backs and if that meant they had to work two or three jobs, then that's what they would do.
Since John started looking back at his family history, he has been in touch with other members of his family who are now doing the same and they are all comparing their memories. Likewise, I have heard from an old school chum of my brothers, Alan Cole, who has lived in Australia for 48 years - he is really enjoying reading peoples' memories on this site and has submitted some of his own, which I will be posting shortly. His family are all looking forward to compiling some more memories over Christmas - that gives me a really warm glow - our Uncle Jim would be so pleased.
Writing this piece about his history has led the author, John Webber, to consider writing a book. I think he should. As Jimmy told us "Photographs are not enough - it's the words ordinary people put on paper which makes our history."
John has done that beautifully!
Nursery Row, Walworth 1950–1953 by John Webber.
1950. My first day at St. John’s Walworth Primary school in Larcom Street off the Walworth Road. I remember getting dressed in my uniform of a royal blue jacket and cap and grey shorts. The emblem on the breast pocket was an eagle with outstretched wings embroidered in gold thread. Even at the age of 5, I couldn’t believe I was wearing all these fine clothes because mum and dad had 5 sons, and we were always short of cash and I wondered where the money came from. I got ready far too early for school so I went out in the street to show off my finery.
Our street was Nursery Row and it was one of 4 streets near East Street Market in Walworth, each street was of equal length one next to the other starting with Eltham Street, then Nursery Row, followed by Stead Street and finally Wadding Street - which is the only one still there. These streets were off Brandon Street at one end and Orb Street at the other. Except for bomb blast, our street was the only one with all its houses still intact after the war, unlike Eltham Street where about 6 houses were flattened and the same in Stead and Wadding Streets. Pre-fabs were built on the bombsites and I was so jealous of these sweet little white houses with their front gardens and bathrooms.
When it dawned on me that I was about to be sent to school for the first time – I threw one of the worst tantrums ever. I cried and kicked my poor mum and begged her not to leave me there. But she did and watching her own tear-stained face didn’t help matters – but the strong and determined hand of my teacher Miss Parker soon had me sitting in this tiny little chair in Class 1, with its big fireplace and a coal fire burning, surrounded by a fire-guard where Miss Parker used to dry our wet pants or knickers wherever one of us had a little accident. The smell of those steaming undergarments is still with me to this day. St Johns was a Church of England school and most of our early morning assemblies were held in the Church right next to the school – except on days when there was a funeral or mid-week wedding and then we’d use the tiny school hall. To this day, I still remember all the words to most of the popular hymns and carols. Dad wasn’t religious, but he made us join the church choir to get us out of the way for a few hours.
Practically every house in Nursery Row had families with children – and a lot of the kids were my age. There were about 40 houses in the street and I knew who lived in every house. The houses on each side of the street differed in style. Mine was a typical late Victorian terrace with a ground floor bay window and the houses on the other side were larger double fronted houses but still terraced. One side of the house had a bay window and the other side was flat fronted. All the houses had little areas in front which had iron railings separating us from the pavement. The railings had long since gone to make armaments in the war by the time I arrived.
By the time I was born, my family had moved from several different houses in the area because of bomb damage to their homes. I never liked my house. It typically had no bathroom, no hot water and an outside toilet. Winter was the worst time. Ice used to collect on the inside of my bedroom windows and we had piss-pots under the bed, the contents of which used to freeze. As you came in through the front door, there was a long passage. The first door on the right was the front room (the parlour). As in most houses in those days, this was kept for best and was locked to keep it that way. The passage continued and next came the stair case with another room to the right. This was a bedroom with a fireplace and gas mantels on the chimney breast. Gas was the only form of lighting at that time in our house. The next room along the passage was our ‘kitchen’ which had a ‘range’ which was a huge black oven-type thing heated by coal. This was how mum did the cooking. She would start a fire in the range and put the pots on top and the oven was next to the fire. Mum also used the top of the range to ‘heat’ her flat-irons. She had 2 irons on the go at same time. While one was ‘heating’ on the range, she’d do the ironing with the other. This room had a bay window which faced onto the back yard and although we called it the ‘kitchen’, it was our ‘living room’. It had a wireless (radio), a dining table and 4 chairs, an easy chair and a sideboard. The big oval mirror over the fireplace was where dad used to shave – his shaving mug on the mantel piece. This room led you straight into the scullery. Here you had a deep sink and a cold water tap and no draining board. In the middle was a wooden table where mum did all her food preparation and it was scrubbed and bleached almost white. This is where we washed ourselves each morning and on Fridays, the big tin bath was brought in from the yard, filled with pans of hot water heated on the range, and one by one, we each used the same water – mum topping it up when the water cooled and skimmed off the surface scum - YUK. The floor of the scullery would be quite fashionable now because it was laid with flagstones and boy was it cold to walk on. In the corner was a ‘copper’ or ‘boiler’ where clothes were washed. Again, this was powered by coal, but mum gave up on this method in favour of the ‘bag-wash’ where you bagged all your dirty laundry up in a sack and took it to the laundry where your sack of washing went in with everyone else’s and was boiled white. Outside was a back yard with a brick wall dividing us from the neighbours to the side and back which was covered with creeper. Also outside was the toilet which had been burned down by an incendiary bomb and was hastily repaired very badly. The door to the toilet was made of wooden planks, which were so poorly put together, that I could sit there and look through the gaps in the door planks and over the wall to see Mrs Davis next door in her toilet doing her own business at the same time. The ground floor rooms were very damp and dad was forever trying to re-paper the walls using all kinds of anti-damp methods. We had one bedroom upstairs. The middle room! The other 2 rooms were occupied by my aunt Ivy, (my mum’s younger sister) uncle Percy (a p.o.w. escapee) and their young son David. They had a kitchen/living room at the back which had a sink and a cooker in an alcove on the landing. Opposite the cooker was an indoor toilet (oh, the luxury of it). Past our bedroom was their bedroom – the biggest room in the house which was the width of OUR front room downstairs PLUS the passage, where all 3 of them slept.
I had 3 older brothers, Richard (Dick), Derek and Tony, then me John and my youngest brother Bob. When we got older, we no longer used the old tin bath. We paid sixpence each for a ‘proper’ bath in Manor Place Baths off the Walworth Road. The water supply was controlled from outside the bath cubicle. If the water was too cold, you would shout out ‘more hot in number 12 please’, and a man would come along and from the outside of your cubicle would turn the tap to supply you with more hot water. We only used Manor Place once a week and, if we needed it, we would have a ‘strip-down wash’ in the scullery which meant not only did we wash our face and hands, but also our armpits, lower regions etc while standing at the sink. No wonder our house always stank of sweaty feet.
Mum did any part-time work she could and one of the worse places was a rag-sorting shop in Brandon Street opposite the Guinness Trust buildings (all demolished). I was always a bit ashamed of the way my mum looked. I didn’t think she was pretty nor young but on the rare occasions like on a holiday to Ramsgate, she made an effort to have her hair shampooed and set and she looked reasonably nice. It always seemed to me that all the other kids had younger, prettier mums than mine. Of course, I realise now, how ill she was and how she’d struggled to feed us and keep the roof over our heads when dad had to be hospitalised for many months for some unknown illness and there was no money coming into the house. I would run errands for her either to Youldens the butchers on the corner of Rodney Road and Orb Street to buy cuts of meat you don’t even hear of these days. Scrag end and best end of neck made delicious stews together with a pound of pot-herbs from the greengrocers opposite. All of our general food items came from Jones’s Dairy on the corner of Stead Street which was run by Mr and Mrs Jones. We used to buy wonderful broken biscuits and bacon which was alive with maggots which Mr Jones used to pick off and say ‘these wont do you any harm’ and we’d cook it and eat it with no ill effects. There was another general store similar to Jones’s on the corner of Eltham Street called Northwoods and for some reason mum never used it much – mainly I believe because they wouldn’t allow her credit. I could always run into Jones’s and say “Can mum have 3 eggs and she’ll pay you later” and he always obliged. Otherwise, our food came from East Street market where mum bought her eels, live and wriggly. Even after the fishmonger cut off the head and gutted the eel, the damn thing still moved and one day, one particular headless monster, wrapped in newspaper, wriggled out of mum’s basket and dropped at my feet. You never heard a kid scream so loud in all your life. BUT, stewed eels with mash and parsley gravy was the most delicious meal – particularly conger eel. We used our sweet coupons in Teds sweet shop at the other end of Eltham Street where we would choose our 3 pennyworth (2oz) of sweets which Ted or Daisy his wife, would scoop out of large glass jars into small paper bags. Sherbet lemons were my favourite and if money was short, I’d have a penny gob-stopper, a HUGE ball of hard sweet stuff which changed colour and it lasted for hours. How we never choked on those lethal sweets, beats me. Its strange – the sweets weren’t wrapped and Ted would used his hands to scoop the sweets out of the jars and you’d think we’d all go down with some nasty tummy bug – but we never did.
Dad was tall and well-muscled and he was a painter and decorator at this time. I was scared of him and I don’t know why because I don’t ever remember him hitting us but when he was angry with us he could really shout. Every Sunday morning without fail, mum would get me and Bob in our Sunday best clothes and dad would take us out somewhere on a bus while mum got dinner ready. He’d take us to places like Greenwich Park or see the changing of the guard and have us back home in time for dinner. Sunday tea usually consisted of a vase of celery and winkles with bread and butter with a home made cake. I used to love picking the winkle out of its shell with a pin. Dad couldn’t be bothered with all of that and usually had shrimps instead. In the evenings, I used to like it when we’d all sit around the fire talking and toasting crumpets on an old toasting fork. They’d remind each other of neighbours who were killed in air-raid shelters and school friends my brothers never saw again. The crumpets and the shell fish were sold by men with barrows walking round the streets and they’d ring a bell to attract your attention.
What I couldn’t forget was the fact that both my parents smoked. By the time I was 8, I realised something was wrong at home. Mum was in hospital. Children weren’t allowed to visit in those days and it seemed as though she was away for months. She was allowed home at Christmas and it was a shock to see her again. She’d lost a lot of weight and was very weak. Dad cooked the Christmas dinner that year. The parlour was opened up for the holidays and we put a Christmas tree in the bay window and Bob and I made paper chains with flour paste and paper. We never got very much for Christmas presents but to us it was magical. We’d usually get one main present and a stocking filled with sweets, tangerines and nuts. Mum went back into Guys hospital soon afterwards and then she was transferred to another place run by nuns at Clapham Common. Again, Bob and I were not allowed in to see her but when dad came out – he said that mum wanted to see us, so he took us round the back of the building and stood me on his shoulders to reach up to a window. He told me to look in where mum would be in bed waiting for me to show. I looked in and saw this ward full of women in beds and they all saw me and they were all waving furiously. Dad said, ‘can you see her’? I said yes – but they all looked the same and even though I tried desperately to find her face – I couldn’t. When I got older, I was told this was a home for the incurables. Mum had lung cancer. I never saw her again. One day I was surprised when I saw my dad at my school and he said he’d spoken to the head master and it was alright for Bob and me to take the rest of the day off. We went to a shop in the Walworth Road and dad bought us both a new set of clothes – but these were mourning clothes. A grey suit each and a black overcoat. Even then, it didn’t dawn on me until that night when he sent us to bed early with some comics and he came up later, sat on the bed and told us that mum had died. Bob cried – I didn’t. I was scared. A stream of visitors came to see my mum lying in her coffin in the parlour although I didn’t realise it at the time. Dad said they were just visitors who came to talk about mum. Neighbours were more respectful in those days. Every front room window of every house had the blinds drawn until the funeral and mums friends and neighbours crowded round our front door and openly cried as we left our house for Nunhead Cemetery where she was buried in a pauper’s grave. This is where 4 or more bodies are buried in the same grave. She had a small headstone and the grave always looked nice and for some time afterwards, dad would take us there for a visit.
So, dad was left with 5 boys to bring up and a job to hold down. I really thought he’d put us into a home but he told us that mum had asked him to keep us all together – and he did.
Recently I found a 1920’s photo of my dad’s brother (my uncle) and my mum’s sister (my aunt) getting married to each other. My dad was best man and my mum was bridesmaid and they were both about 19. You never saw such a handsome man or more beautiful woman with the most stunning legs in her flapper dress. My only surviving aunt Olive (mum’s youngest sister) still lives off the Walworth Road near the dreaded Aylesbury estate and when I visit her, I love to hear stories of her own life down Nursery Row and to see her faded photos of family members long since dead. When I told her of my thoughts about my mum – she soon put me in my place by telling me my mum was the most beautiful of all her sisters and the most loved. My mum taught all her sisters how to cook and keep house and always gave the best advice on bringing up and caring for kids. Their own mother also died young so my mum took on the task of looking after the whole family until her marriage to my dad. I guess having 7 pregnancies and 5 surviving sons took its toll on her good looks. Even though I was 8 years old when she died, I still remember her very well and dad continued to look after us all until he himself died of stomach cancer when I was 16.
I attended Vauxhall St. Primary School then at 5-6yrs old, we moved back to 29 Ethelred St. with Nan and Grandad again, Wally & Maud Wooller (nee Swash). I still went to Vauxhall Primary, and then on to West Square Secondary Modern near the British War Museum. We lived in Ethelred Street until the big move which we all took to Brixton and far flung places. I moved to Australia in May 1961 and I have lived here some 47yrs. Unfortunately I never got back to Lambeth although from what I hear the old place is not what it used to be - thank god for memories. 29 Ethelred Street was right opposite Palladino’s Barber’s and Tock’s Vegetable shops. To the right on the corner, Edie Ashby and her husband (see photo below) ran the corner shop and across on the opposite corner was the Prince Regent pub.
Edie was a sister to Mrs. Shannon who had the shop on the corner, next to the bombed school (Lollard Street School). My sister Babs worked in Edie’s shop after school and my sister Pat worked at Mrs. Shannon’s. (I can still remember the Pinball machine as you walked in and her white Stuffed German Shepherd dog on the wall. It was named Silver or Prince, I think!
Ethelred Street about 1954
