Alfred Jones married Amy Nellie Knevett in 1889. She was the grand daughter of a tallow chandler and her father Edmund, also a tallow chandler, eloped with Amy’s mother, Anne Rackstraw. Anne’s father, a publican, did not approve of Edmund. Alfred and Amy’s children in order of birth were Rosa Amy (Rose), Catherine (Kit), Lydia (Lil), Edith May (died aged about 2), Edward (Ted), James Leonard (Len) and Winifred Elsie (Elsie). Grandma Jones (Amy Nellie) died of a stroke in May 1922. Grandfather Alfred died in August 1940.
My family issues from the union of Edward Jones and Elizabeth Hall on the 24th August 1930.
Dad, Edward (Ted) Jones was born on the 27th July 1906 in Camberwell in South London. His father was a platelayer on the tram system, which meant that he laid and repaired the rails; this being a labouring job it would not have been paid handsomely. As far as I am aware although he had a poor childhood it was a reasonably happy one, at least until his Mother’s death.
For working class pupils, schooling would have been fairly basic and they would have been taught religion, just enough history and geography to show the scope and influence of the British Empire and the three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic. The writing aspect would have aimed to produce a beautiful script known as ‘copperplate’ handwriting, i.e. very particular attention would have been paid to how each letter was formed and joined together. Apparently Dad was a bright lad and learnt his lessons well and he certainly never lost his love of reading and writing. His arithmetic knowledge stayed with him all his days and he continued to produce beautiful handwriting until the end.
As the working class population was generally expected to perform manual and other unskilled functions, the education authorities did not consider it necessary for their children to remain at school much beyond the age of 14 years. Therefore, Dad completed his education at the age of 14 and entered the big wide world of commerce armed with very good handwriting, the ability to read, add, subtract, multiply and divide and a few certificates for bible studies and swimming. Apparently his first job was as an office boy with The Motor Union Insurance Company, long since absorbed by one of the major insurers, and I believe he remained there until his mother death.
However, Dad’s ideal of a heaven did not lie in a stuffy office, rather he wanted to be out in the fresh air, or what would have passed as fresh air in the smoked filled centre of London. Although the greatest volume of goods transported by road was still carried by carriers with a horse and cart, Dad wanted to drive a motor vehicle. I have no precise knowledge of the jobs he did except that I know that at one time he was involved in office removals and deliveries for a company called Margolies (to this day there is a London removal company of this name), and this may have been the company for which he was working when he met George Hall, my maternal grandfather and namesake. Dad has spoken of delivering safes and transporting heavy items from London down into the depths of Surrey and Kent. He spoke of driving large underpowered lorries or vans based upon the Ford Model T and labouring up even fairly low hills; sometimes in order for the vehicle to struggle to the top the driver’s mate would have had to get out and walk.
Mum, Elizabeth (Peggy) was born in Camberwell on the 12th October 1909 to George and Florence Hall and she was the last of 13 children, not all of them Halls. Florence Ada was married firstly to a man named Ward and secondly to George Hall. Unfortunately Mum no longer remembered many of her siblings’ names, however, some were Alice and Florrie, both of whom had long lives, and Edie who died at the age of 14 or 15 and Bertie who died aged 14. To the best of my remembrance I only ever met one sister, Florrie, who was married to someone in the newspaper printing business and who lived in Sutton, Surrey, but this was so long ago that it is only a flash of memory without any detail.
Lu has often expressed surprise over the size of the Jones family that she has calculated, based upon those she has known but if we were ever to trace all the descendants of the Hall and Jones families the numbers would almost certainly be very high although, of course, many will have died.
Mum and Dad were married on the 24th August 1930 at the Camden Church in Peckham and had six children. Ronald Edward was born in September 1932, Patricia Elizabeth in November 1935, George Alan in March 1938, Kenneth in February 1940, Victor David in May 1945 and Rosalind Carol in December 1953. Vic died on 15th October 1998, Dad followed shortly afterwards on the 30th November 1998 and Mum died on 5th July 2006.
Rose married Harry and had two sons, George, who died as a baby, and Albert. Albert joined the RAF before the Second World War and was stationed in Singapore from which he escaped when it fell to the Japanese; he returned to England via Australia. He remained in the RAF and the last heard of him was that he was a Wing Commander attached to the British Embassy in Paris. Albert married Joan and had two daughters. Rose died in 1967.
I only ever recall seeing Rose and Harry once when they visited us at Elfrida Crescent, and the memory of this visit sticks only because they left for us kids a set of full-sized cricket stumps including bails, a couple of cricket bats and a couple of cricket balls which, apparently, had belonged to Albert. It was our good luck that the equipment was of a first class quality, and stood us in good stead for a great many years. Ken and I were the main beneficiaries since, as far as I can recall, Ron was not then living at home.
Kit married Charles Titchmarsh and they had six children, Charlie, Eric, Doris, Iris, Beryl and Alan. Charles left the family in 1939 and never returned. The family home was in Downham where we would visit them from time to time; for us bare legged children this could be something of an ordeal because it meant running the gauntlet of the excitedly wagging tail of their very friendly English Bull Terrier called Radar. A group photo exists, of assorted family children taken in Kit’s back garden; from our dirty, tired and slightly unkempt appearances it is likely that it was taken after a hard day’s fun which would have accompanied a Castle Sports’ cricket match. On the day of the photograph, a bank holiday, Radar stole a ham from Kit’s kitchen when she was catering for the team’s lunch. No one ever owned up for the responsibility of letting the dog into the kitchen. At that time Charlie, Eric, Doris and Iris who were so much older than us had, probably, already left home.
I have a vague recollection of Eric, in army uniform, visiting Elfrida when home on leave, possibly during the war; otherwise I have no other memory of meeting him. He left home in 1946, married and had two children.
Charlie I met after Lu and I married when we drove the parents to visit him and his Scottish wife, Mary, in Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, this would have been sometime during the period from about the mid-70s to the mid-80s. They had five children, Roberta, Allan (known to his family by his second name of Ian), Lynn, Jill and Murray. Roberta and Allan both emigrated to Australia.
Charlie, who was blind and worked for the probate office had some very definite views, particularly on inheritance. He said that he had seen, through his work in the probate office, so many family arguments over who was going to have what from the estate of a parent that his will stated that everything, without exception, should be sold and the proceeds distributed between his next of kin. So no photos were to be allowed, no little item of fond memory to be argued over.
Not long after our visit and following Charlie’s retirement, he and Mary moved to Scotland to be near her family. Unfortunately, Mary died fairly soon afterwards leaving Charlie alone with his blindness in unfamiliar surroundings; he died of cancer in 2000 attended by his daughters Lynn and Jill. He had five grandchildren.
Doris who was married (married name Dent) with two children, one boy and one girl, emigrated to Perth, Australia from where she regularly corresponded with Dad. I wrote to her at the time of his death but Mum, who has never been a letter writer, did not keep up the contact. Doris died in September 2002 leaving seven grandchildren and four great grandchildren.
Iris married Les, who played the piano accordion, and they had three children, Garry, Steven and Lesley and one grandson. Les died, I believe from cancer, in 1991 but Iris is still alive and living in Thamesmead: unfortunately, Iris died on 31st December 2007. Both Iris and Lesley attended Dad’s funeral where I had a chat with them.
Beryl married Ron and they have three children Sheila, Peter and Robert all living in Snodland, Kent. Alan, the youngest of the family has been married three times and has three children, Duncan, Alastair and Alexia, and three grandchildren.
Lil never married and for this I have no explanation other than, perhaps, the fact that her right arm was very badly injured during the Second World War when a bomb damaged the house in which she lived and her arm was burnt when she fell into the fire. With this disfigurement and disability, which left her to all intents and purposes with only her left arm and she was right-handed, she may have felt that she could never make a good wife or mother; or was this a view some blinkered idiot of a man decided he should share with her? Another explanation could be that she, like so many other spinsters, did not start life in this role but instead had it thrust upon her when her man did not survive the war.
Eventually, after having undergone extensive plastic surgery, performed by the eminent plastic surgeon Sir Archibald MacIndoe at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Lil was able to teach herself to use her left hand and subsequently obtain a job in the offices of Brands Foods, a company which among its range of products made some particularly tasty fish and meat pastes and A-1 sauce. In a household where every penny counted and such things were considered luxuries they were greeted with ecstasy by us whenever we were lucky enough to be visited by Lil for she never failed to bring some with her.
However, much as we hungered for these wonderfully tasty items of food there were other things that she unfailingly brought with her for which we children had an insatiable appetite, and they were writing paper and stubs of pencils. When I refer to writing paper I am not describing that pristinely clean material which we now routinely buy from stationers and think little of but instead paper of all shapes, sizes, colours and quality but which had one thing in common, it had all been discarded as waste but was usable on the reverse side.
But what for Brands was merely paper waste was for us a magical material upon which we could draw and write and let our imaginations roam freely. We could engage in endless competitions, such as how many boys’ names could each of us find beginning with a specifically nominated letter of the alphabet, or make aeroplanes which readily proved the law of gravity but showed up the limitations of our design skills. Perhaps one of our favourites would be to take a sheet of paper and fold it into three equal parts. On the first would be drawn a head with a little amount of neck dangling into the second, where would be drawn a body and arms leading into the third part which was reserved for legs and feet. A different person would draw each part and it was most important that nobody saw the work of another until all elements had been drawn. Only when each had completed their part was the whole disclosed accompanied by much mirth and shrieks of laughter.
For most of the time Lil lived in Sternhall Lane, Peckham, together with her Pekinese dog, above a family whose son John would from time to time accompany her when she went to the cricket matches of Castle Sports, for whom she was the scorer. She died in 1968.
Winifred or Elsie, as she was known by all of the family except her husband, Arthur Berry, who called her Winn, had four children, Anne, Michael, John and Vivienne. Whilst the children were young they used to live in St Mary’s Cray where, as a teenager, I would visit them from time to time. Arthur had two great passions, the first by a long way was his beloved Winn and the other was classical music and he would, between his frequent but lightening rounds with the dustpan and brush, play for me his collection of 12 inch, 78rpm records, much to my delight and his. Later Elsie and Arthur bought a ‘mobile home’ near Gloucester but after Arthur developed Alzheimer’s disease they moved to Bexhill to be nearer to their children, particularly Vivienne and Michael. Arthur died around 1988 but Elsie continued living an active life until her death at the age of 89 in July 2002.
Len married Elizabeth, known as Minnie, and had three children Joyce, Brenda and Brian all of whom were born in tandem respectively with Pat, George and Ken. Len was an electrician who at one time worked in a film studio but later for Lewisham Borough Council. Despite both our families living on the Bellingham Estate, except for meeting them at cricket matches probably in the late 1940s and the 1950s we children saw very little of each other. I believe that some bad blood must have developed between the adults. Len died sometime in the early 1960s whilst still in his 50s but Minnie remains active at the age of 95, in 2007.
It appears to have been an idiosyncrasy of the family during the early part of the twentieth century that so many of them adopted names other than their given ones. Therefore, Rosa adapted into ‘Rose’; Catherine translated into ‘Kit’, through who knows what twists and turns; Edward became ‘Ted’, an abbreviation more usually associated with people bearing the name of Theodore, hence Teddy Bear named after a former President of the USA, Theodore Roosevelt; Lydia through some process of metamorphosis became ‘Lil’; Elizabeth somehow converted to ‘Peggy’, a name generally reserved for Margaret although Nick’s mother who was named Marjorie Primrose even more cunningly became a Peggy; Winifred became ‘Elsie’, although in this instance it was a case of using her second Christian name; James became Len also by the use of his second name, however, to make amends for this all too simple modification his wife Elizabeth by some alchemy transformed into ‘Minnie’. If certain of them had become rather more logically ‘Eddie’ and ‘Liz’, ‘Cathy’ and Charlie, ‘Winn’, which for Arthur she always was, and ‘Art’, and ‘Liz’ and ‘Len’ how might the course of history have changed?
[With many thanks to Beryl for reading and checking my facts and supplying so many others, particularly on the early history of the Jones Family and filling so many gaps in my knowledge of the Titchmarsh family]
For a greater outline of the Jones family tree reference should be made to the genealogical research carried out by Beryl.
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