At the time of their marriage, in August 1930, Ted was working for Margolies, a removal company. He used to speak of how under-powered the vehicles were and how it was sometimes necessary for the crew to dismount leaving just the driver to persuade a very reluctant piece of transport to stagger to the top of a hill; south-east England even in those early years of the 20th century contained no hills higher than The Downs. [The older members of the family will no doubt recall that well into the 1960s it was not uncommon, when travelling up a hill, to slow to a crawl because a lorry ahead was travelling at little more than 15-20 miles an hour, often unladen.] Some time later Ted considered joining the Metropolitan Police, but this was vetoed by Peg who did not want Ted to do a job which would involve ‘shift’ work. Instead in July 1937 Ted joined London Transport driving trams out of New Cross Gate and doing ‘shift’ work.
In 1932, probably looking for a better environment for their first born, Ron, they moved from a flat in Camberwell or Peckham to a house at Dagenham from where Ted commuted to New Cross by motorcycle. However, with Ted away working each day, Peg had felt lonely and isolated from her family and friends, therefore, eventually they returned to London, where they lived in damp rooms in an old house at Honor Oak.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war in September 1939, the British authorities had evacuated many mothers and children from London to areas which, then, were considered to be safer once any bombing might commence. Pregnant with Ken, Peg must have had her work cut out when she was evacuated to Hastings; with Ron (7), Pat (3 years 10 months) and George (18 months). This was during that period known as the phoney war when, although war had been declared by Britain against Germany, hostilities hadn’t yet started between them.
It was while the family was in Hastings that Ken was born in February 1940. Ted continued to work on the trams and visited Hastings whenever the opportunity allowed. It was during one such visit that he told Peg that he had managed to rent a house on a new estate at Bellingham. By this time, with four children to cope with, Peg’s feelings of isolation and loneliness had probably disappeared and the prospect of a new home in the outer suburbs was very welcome.
The prospect of the new home must have been too great because it was not long after the time when Ken was born that the family returned to London. In fact, because the hostilities hadn’t started many wondered why their lives were being disrupted and in common with Peg they returned to their peacetime haunts.
In preparation for the anticipated air attacks the authorities provided air raid shelters. At 49 Elfrida, in the back garden, a large hole was dug, lined with concrete, roofed with corrugated steel and covered with earth; this type of shelter was called an Anderson. [It would be interesting to know who dug the large hole in very heavy London clay bearing in mind that many young men had been ‘called-up’.] Other homes sometimes had an indoor shelter which was like a cross between a table and a cage being a substantial iron or steel frame which supported steel grids and usually contained an iron-framed bed. Larger civic shelters built of brick and or concrete were erected in towns; the one I chiefly remember was located at Bellingham Green, on the pavement almost opposite St. Dunstan’s Church and was still there many years after the end of the war.
Ted had an exemption from the armed forces, possibly as a result of an irregular heart beat, however, in common with many others in similar circumstances and including those too elderly or too young to join the regular forces, in addition to his job on the trams he was a member of the Home Guard.
In 1942 he was in hospital for two weeks suffering from bronchial pneumonia but apart from that and an ankle injury sustained during a youthful football game, which was to haunt him in much later years, he enjoyed remarkably good health for most of his first 60 years.
Trams were not fitted with seats for the driver, therefore, during all his approximately 20 years as a driver of those bone-shaking contraptions he always worked in a standing position. However, there was not even the consolation of standing in a warm, dry environment because trams did not have heating or indeed doors. I believe that those vehicles fitted with glass around the area where the driver stood were not introduced until the late 1930s, therefore, in those days when winters were cold, wet, windy and snowy and summers not much better and when fogs and smogs were not uncommon Ted completed his 8 hour shifts exposed to all those elements protected only by his serge uniform. Even after the glass was fitted he still had to contend with the elements through the non-existent door on his right side.
His hands bore grim testament to the conditions under which he worked as he was plagued with chilblains and deep fissures. Also what must have made his life very difficult was that he was, to quote Ted, “Afflicted with psoriasis for upward of 50 years”. We were aware of this condition as it affected his elbows but it was not until his latter years did he reveal the extent of the problem as it affected his legs.
Because of the size of the family and the poor wages paid by London Transport, Ted had no money to spend on a hot meal instead he sustained his daily bodily needs with 2 cheddar cheese sandwiches and, presumably, a hot cup of tea in the canteen if the opportunity arose but also the contents of a billy-can, supplied by the company, which would have been shared with his conductor. Smoking, which he enjoyed, he did, very, very rarely, by rolling his own using Old Holborn tobacco; his cigarettes were barely thicker than a matchstick and had to be constantly relit thus enabling an half ounce to last for very long periods.
When the trams were phased out his old route, which I believe ran from The City to Woolwich, was one of the last to go. He then transferred to the buses, operating out of Catford, and he drove a series of different routes over the next few years. Unfortunately his eyesight deteriorated as a result of cataracts. In 1969 he underwent operations on both eyes but that on the right eye was not a success and despite a further two operations on it he was left totally blind in that eye. He wore a contact lens on his left. The last part of his working life was spent working in an office. For him this must have been the ultimate irony as he had joined The Motor Union Insurance Company straight from school at the age of 14 but resigned to take a job away from the stuffy environment of an office.
Ted was no great carpenter but he could do and did a number of woodworking jobs during his life. The frequency and indeed the scope of what he did was, unfortunately, always limited by the continual bugbear of insufficient funds. However, among those works which lasted for many years was a nursing chair which he made for Peg in readiness for Ron’s birth. It was probably used in many if not all Peg’s nursing activities and it survived long past the time and need for which it was made; whatever happened to it?
In the scullery at Elfrida Crescent there was a sizeable white pine table of the type upon which all the cooking preparations were carried out. It was probably about 6 feet long but possibly longer and contained at each end a drawer in which were stored at one end cutlery and many miscellaneous items which knew no other home, and in the other would be contained table linen, tea towels and the like and, often, additional miscellaneous items of no fixed address; a very useful piece of furniture.
When, in 1952, the family moved to Farmstead Road it was to enable us to have more bedrooms, however, the house was no larger than that at Elfrida which resulted in the rooms being smaller. One room which was dramatically smaller was the kitchen.
For a couple of generations now we have taken it for granted that a kitchen should be suitably fitted out with plenty of cupboard space for the crockery, cutlery and of course all the groceries which need to be stored, however, the reality of those days was somewhat different. The only items fitted in the kitchen at Farmstead were the kitchen sink, a wall-mounted hot water storage tank, the gas pipes to which one needed to have one’s gas appliance fitted and the gas meter, which seemed to be a ravenous monster with an insatiable appetite for coins. There was in addition, tucked away in a corner and angled between two walls meeting at 90˚, a small brick larder with walls from floor to ceiling and a door which, for maximum inconvenience, opened into the already tight space of the kitchen. Inside the larder, on each of the walls to the left and the right of the door were a couple of wooden shelves and between them, beneath a small window, was a large stone shelf intended to keep perishable items cooler. This shelf worked very well in Winter or any other time when the temperature didn’t exceed about 65˚F (18˚C), which in fairness in the days before Global Warming was the larger part of the year, but was useless when anything like Summer weather should appear, which was often as many as half-a-dozen times a year.
Our large kitchen table was far too large for the smaller room and so Ted, using his rather basic collection of tools, proceeded with a great deal of skill and success to cut it in half. He demolished the larder and in its stead built his own fitted cupboards both at floor level and wall mounted; these were so successful that they were still in use right up to Peg’s death. Later a back-boiler and water storage tank was installed behind the living room fire and the water tank in the kitchen became redundant and was removed. Around this time Ted was able to supplement his hand-built cupboards with a wall mounted cabinet and a free standing cupboard, which Yvonne Reilly (Nee Harris) was throwing out. The table disappeared into retirement, where?
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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