Smuggling cigars

Dad's stepfather George Pokham was a merchant seaman who worked mainly on the ships carrying various items between the London Docks and the Baltic ports. Only short runs and he was rarely away for more than a week at a time. 

With her somewhat difficult experience with her first husband, our Grandmother did not trust the second one to come straight home after being paid off and she would regularly be at the dock gates and often inside waiting for George to leave the ship. Security was not as great in those days, there were only the Dock policemen on the gate, it was quite a regular occurrence for wives with their children to wait inside the gates for their husbands to come off the ships with their pay.

Gran usually had a couple of the younger boys with her on these occasions and they would run up to George to be lifted up and swung round with great shows of paternal affection. He was also stuffing their pockets with contraband cigars during this process. He would always speak to the dock police at the gate and offer his bag for inspection. Ironically this was at the gate in Pennington Street now being used for the upmarket event venue called Tobacco Dock.

Dad was never sure if Gran or even the policemen for that matter was in on this minor smuggling, but it seemed to happen every time. The blind eye may also have been related perhaps to the fact there was a small block of Police flats in Pennington Street at that time, so many of the regular gate police were neighbours as it were. 

Before Duvets

 Winter has arrived without a doubt in the Northwest of England so we have changed over to the winter weight duvet. 

Perhaps there are still a few people like me who can remember a time before duvets in English bedrooms,  although there is a popular song in these parts called "when I was a lad" which refers to greatcoats on the bed!

The first duvet I encountered was shortly after completing my National Service in the Military Police and spending most of that in the Suez Canal zone I decided to take a hitchhiking holiday in France.

I set off from the ferry at Calais and headed for P\aris and got some lifts on the way, and spend a couple of nights in the little bivouac tent I carried astride my haversack.  I spoke no french.  Although I had learned some French at school, whatever  I knew at 16 had disappeared by the time I was 21 so I relied on a French/English phrasebook, much to the amusement of any french person I tried to speak to.  I was able to speak the french phrases quite fluently which gave the impression that |I knew what I was saying but unfortuna\gtely I could not understand any replies.   Still, I got by although for the most part I lived on bread and cheese which I could buy just by pointing.

Obviously, I did not use the main routes and did a fair amount of walking on the quiet country roads. One day I had not got any lifts so was quite tired by the end of the day and I knew that I was still some way from the Amiens, the nearest town. Seeing a sign on the gatepost of a farm I went in and asked for a room for the night.

  No English was spoken at this house but I was welcomed being both young and English.  I was given a good meal of soup and some homegrown ham and bread and then shown to the bedroom.  Anyone familiar with "Allo Allo" would recognize the room, a sloping ceiling and a large iron bedstead with an enormous feather-filled duvet which I assumed was an eiderdown.  

I was a little nonplussed at first as there was no sheet under the duvet, not knowing that this was not regarded as necessary, and getting in the bed the weight of the cover took some getting used to. But I was tired and soon adjusted and slept like a log until close to midday the following day much to the amusement of my hosts. Still, I had breakfast and was on my way after paying a very trifling amount which I am  sure was much below the going rate even for then. 

Catholic tories

In the 1950s I was a young Labour councillor on Lewisham Council.  Having been brought up as a Catholic one of the things I found difficult to grasp was that there were Catholics on the other side of the council chamber.  Tories!  On the Labour side there were several Catholics including John Henry a former fireman with a scarred face as testament to the bravery of his calling and Fred Copeman, OBE, a former member of the International brigade fighting the fascists in Spain just before the war.  My father had been a councillor in Stepney between the wars,  was a Papal Knight and an active trade unionist.

The Pope at the time was preaching social justice and the Catholic Church in the UK was  active in working to secure better conditions for working people.

So how could these "good Catholics " belong to an organisation that ignored all that?  I found it difficult to even be friendly to these blue Catholics.

I was naive of course not yet having come to realise that in a conservative world,  no matter what people professed as a religion, personal gain and advancement took priority. 

Sixty odd years have passed and nothing has changed.  A Tory can claim that they believe in helping those well off and spout the current catch phrase "levelling up " but what they actually do does not bring that about. Conservative government still means that the rich get richer by means of old boy networks, cronyism and access to government contracts.  Legislation that protects the rights of employees gets whittled away so that it ends up being meaningless. 

Press button "B"

 Many phrases like this one, well known in the past no longer have any meaning.  It of course referred to the system of payment in public telephone boxes.  The red public phone box was on almost every street corner in the days when there were few telephones installed in private houses and before the invention of mobile phones.  In many remote areas of the Uk, they were the lifeline for a village and the only means of communication with the rest of the county.

 To use a public phone box it was necessary to make a prepayment of the necessary number of coins before dialing the number you wished to call.  If someone answered the call then it was necessary to press button "A" to make a connection.  If there was no reply then press button "B" to get the coins back.

Quite straight forward you would have thought but it did not always work that way.  The coins used for many years were pennies.  Probably the most common coin in the Uk in terms of usage so that they were also then the most worn.

. Pressing button B to get them back often resulted in two coins getting stuck together and not falling through into the receptacle cup as intended.  After a few bangs on the black box, they could come through but otherwise, the frustrated caller would go off. The next person in the box could be lucky and their coins could dislodge the stuck coins and they could make a call by pressing button "a" or their own coins would get stuck as well, adding to the blockage.

Then perhaps along came an enterprising young boy who would manage to dislodge the blockage by various means.  Most youngsters "tested" the phone box on every occasion.  Often it was just a question of pressing button "b" and retrieving the coins left behind by a caller who had been frustrated in making a call and dashed off without retrieving their money.  Otherwise, a few sharp bangs on the box would do the trick, or the judicious use of a penknife, the necessary adjunct to any schoolboy's pocket then, could release stuck coins.  Didn't work every time of course, but it was always worth a try, and if you are sauntering along with nothing else to do.......

Army sport

Until I did my national service I had never seen a game of rugby. Bear in mind that this was in the days before TV.

Whilst doing my military police training we were supposed to have Saturday afternoons free but if the camp rugby team were playing at home then we were obliged to watch. Standing on the edge of a football pitch that did not look like a football pitch and the goalposts were a strange shape as well. Not my idea of a free Saturday afternoon!

And I did not understand what was going on at all. Having played football at school and attended a few professional games I was well aware of the need to keep the ball on the pitch. These rugby players seemed to spend a lot of the time throwing the ball off the pitch and then throwing it back on again. All very strange. 

And then there were the scrums.  A very odd procedure to someone who had not seen the game previously.  The two teams seem to huddle together on the pitch and try to push their opponents until suddenly the ball is thrown into the middle and then kicked out again. Being of a logical bent even in those days I could not work out the point of that. 

After the match, both teams went into the Naafi, got drunk together, and sang bawdy songs.

Come straight home

I am sure that I was not a particularly stupid child but I did not seem to be able to understand the stricture "come straight home from school".  At infants school in Wapping the way home was through the park (now called recreation ground) and there was a playground in the park...How was I expected to bypass the playground and go straight home, even though I knew that my mum was watching from the window of our top floor flat and could see me? 

 Later when we were evacuated to Brighton, the way home went past a monumental mason working in his outside workshop. I got lost in amazement as I watched him chisel out the lettering on a gravestone then later fill it with little lead triangles and then paint over the top. How I wanted to go in and get a closer look and learn how to do it, and the time went by!

 When we moved to Guildford and I was billeted at Shalford which was about two and half miles from school then there were plenty of distractions along the way.   Lewis Carrol's house with illustrations from Alice on the garden entrance: the river Wey ran for quite a long way along the road and at times there were folk rowing there or the water birds to watch.   In the winter months a meadow alongside the river was flooded from a sluice gate in the river and froze. Custom designed for small boys to skate on. 

Living with my mum after running away from my evacuee billets we lived in a small cottage in Trinity churchyard.  At the foot of the stairs leading into the churchyard there was a second hand bookshop which had a box of damaged books available for free.  Always worth a look for a few minutes or more. 

And so it went on.  Going straight home was never an option. 

Rambling

 

Rambling is one of those words which have a number of meanings.  When we were young it mostly meant a weekend activity with a group of friends going for a walk in the countryside.  A group of us from the local branch of the Labour Party League of Youth in Lewisham used to go out to Farnborough, Kent to the end of the number 47 bus route and follow one of the walks listed in a small book sold by the Evening news. 

Most of the walks started off by going through the churchyard but then diverged to different walks, some circular  returning to Farnborough, others finished elsewhere like Down or Halstead, mostly at a pub. These were never particularly active outings like keen ramblers seem to do these days with there alpine walking sticks and backpacks.  Ours were  more a country stroll with frequent stops just to loll about in the grass and talk.  We used to do a lot of talking in those days, rather more than groups of similarly aged young people in the twenty-first century. 

 At the end of the day it was usually wend our way home by the next available bus, and if we had been in the pub there was usually some singing including the Red Flag and the the Internationale, much to the consternation of homegoing church goers.  Getting a bus  could be hit and miss on a Sunday evening so the alternative was a walk to the nearest country railway station and the train to one of stations near home depending on which line we were on. The train journey was frequently free as country stations in those days were rarely manned on a Sunday so there was no one to buy a ticket from and at the other end there was no ticket collector either. It didn't seem illegal when there was no one to collect the fares. 

That kind of rambling is for the relatively young and fit.  As you get  older there is a greater inclination to do the other kind were your mind rambles around in a haphazard way, trying to remember a name that escapes  or a memory which is no longer as clear as it used to be.   C'est la vie.

What A Life!

I started researching our family history perhaps 40 years ago and started writing them up some 20 years ago. My first books I printed myself on a laser printer and just sent copies to those family members that I thought might be interested. Later I started having my books printed on Amazon, originally Createspace and now KDP.

I started blogging about 15 years ago about genealogy and family history, odd stories about my research and so on and then started to include small anecdotes from my childhood before the war and as a evacuee from London.

I've written and published some ten books mostly family histories of our ancestors and two detective novels. Some of my family have read what I have written and suggested that I should write my own story.

I am not a great fan of autobiographies so I am reluctant to consider that my own life story is worth a book. Does the world really need another diary of a nobody? I suppose I have had a fairly interesting life, married and raised a family and done a variety of jobs. the archetypal Jack of all trades I suppose. Our travels as a family have taken us to the other side of the world and back, but we do not need another travel book.

I have promised to write my story, if only for the information of my family who have claimed that they know little of my life before they were born. I have started but it is a bit off and on, so many things get in the way. However it has come to me, on my birthday that whilst I am trotting towards the end of my life, my memory is actually galloping away. So many things that I used to remember quite clearly are not just fuzzy but non-existent. So many names and places that I can no longer recall, struggle as I might. So I will have to knuckle down and get it written soon.

Take heed all writers out there. If your story is worth recording then do it now.

Tempus fugit and all that as well as Memento Mori

WW1 Prisoners of War made to work

Saw a film on TV this week called Land of Mines.  Danish made and tells the story of a group of young German POWs after the end of WW2 being compelled to clear landmines on a Danish beach, with the inevitable consequences.

Reminded me that my cousin Harold Daynton had a similar experience in WW1.  He had been captured near Albert,in France in February 1918  and had been shipped off to Germany.   They were asked to volunteer for work as carpenters and as conditions in the camp were so bad many did so in the hope of better rations.  They were disappointed as then a group of the men where  taken back to battlefields in  France their "carpentry" work job being to locate and make safe booby-trapped buildings which the Allies had vacated in the massive German Attack of 21st march. 

They moved around with their Guards to various locations for different tasks. They apparently got on well with the four Guards who sympathised with their situation but explained how short of food and other vital supplies in Germany  actually were. They stayed with these Guards for the remainder of the war, receiving no rations so living  on what food they could steal or acquire. 

 On 11 November they all shook hands, with the Germans walking eastwards and the 10 British POW’s walking westwards. That took quite a time as they were actually released somewhere in the triangle of  Aachen/Verviers/Maastricht and their long trudge took until late November when they reached Calais. They finally reached England on a ship on December 2nd.

Tell it to the Marines

My Mums uncle, Edward Eder joined the Royal Marine Light Infantry

at the age of 19 in 1881. Served for twelve years in Gibraltar, Malta  and Egypt, including  the Sudan during the Mahdi rebellions but was not involved in the disastrous Siege of Khartoum as far as I can gather.  But he did receive the Egyptian Medal and the Khedive Star so he must have been around somewhere.

Left the Marines in 1894, mostly earned good conduct pay having spent only seven days in the cells which for the army of the time was good going over a period of just over twelve years.

Obviously he  did not settle to civilian life as he signed up again in May 1901 into the Royal Garrison Artillery and remained in until May 1905 spending most of his time in Gibraltar.  

There is a family story that Edward visited his Grandfather in Trieste during his military service but this seems unlikely as the journey from Gibraltar would have taken quite a long time.

When the first world war came along Edward signed up again in October 1915 but was discharged in December as being "unlikely to become an efficient soldier".  

According to his Service record Edward was 5 foot 6 and half inches when he joined in 1881 but was 5 foot nine and half inches in 1894.  Obviously the good life in the Marines. 

The qwerty keyboard and me.

 I have had an association with the qwerty keyboard for something like 72 years and sadly it appears to be coming to an end.  I am still a reasonably competent touch typist but an unexplained damage to my left wrist some four months ago has meant that I have not been able to use my left hand for typing and I think I am l;osing the ability to do so.

Many two finger typists would consider that not to be a problem.  But if you learned touchtyping all those years ago then that is the only way you can type.  The constant repetion of familiar keys when learning to touch type means that the fingers automatically go to the correct key to press without having to think about it.  I think this is called muscle memory consolidation.  Your right hand then  does not necessarily  know where the keys normally pressed by the left are located. 

I tried to use speech recognition software but the skill involved in thinking and talking at the same time is completely diferent to thinking and typing at the same time.  I used to be fairly competent in having my fingers on the keyboard keeping up  with my mental flow when I was writing, say  for instance something like a blog.   But to dictate to the computer and watch the words coming up  on the screen inhibits the thought flow.  At least  does for me. 

Its Census year again.

 The next UK census will be held in March 2021 continueing a process which has taken place almost every ten years in a constantly changing format since 1841.

Every census year the amount of information being collected has increased and this yar will be no exception.  As usual there will be many who disagree with this process of compelling citizens to disclolse what many regard as being private information.

Only being released after a period of a cedntury, the censuses are a continuos source of discovery for genealogists and family historians, like myself, providing information about birthplaces, accomodation, size of families etc. 

As an example, my Great Grandfather, Alphons Eder is recorded on the 1861 census on board HMS Ganges  somewhere in the North Atlantic ocean, they were not near any land so the chart oordinates had to be given. The place of census then is at Latitude 34.50 North: Longtitude 35.47 west

HMS Ganges was the last sailing ship to be the flag ship of a Royal Navy admiral and was returning to England after spending three years on the Pacific station, based at Valparaiso but spending much of the time at Vancouver Island.

Alphons Eder was a musician and had joined the ship in 1857 as a civilian bandsman, the other bandsmen on board were all members of the Royal Marine Light Infantry.  On the voyage home in 1861 from Vancouver Island the rear admiral, Sir Robert Baynes was accompanied by his wife and 6 year old daughter with two female servants.  They were the only females on board so one assumes that  there would have been little need for the small band to play dance music.

When Ganges finally arrived back in home waters in April 1861 she had logged up 60,100 nautical miles since leaving in 1857.  Our Great Grandfather married in London the following year and as far as we know never travelled again. 

The mat weaver,the tea packer and the corned beef inspector

 Occupations which have gone  from British industrial life, like the wheel tappers and the saggar maker's bottom knocker also include common occupations  in 19th century east end of London like the mat weavers and the tea packers.

There were numerous mat weaving factories in the east end in the late nineteenth century.  coconut fibre was imported in large quantities to be made into mats which were an almost staple floor covering on working class houses, particularly those with stone floors.  Coconut fibre was hard wearing and popular up to the 1950s but is almost lost as a material for the larger mats used in those days but is still popular for the small doormats.  Hard-wearing and able to withstand years of use where front doors of houses come straight in off the street and dirt and wet being brought in on the shoes of every visitor.

In December 1906 the newspapers headlined a mat carpet made to cover the great arena at Olympia in London, It was 83,000 square feet in areas and was claimed to be the largest ever made in the world. It was sent to London by rail, and it is reported that it filled 37 of Harrod's pantechnicons and the procession of vans through the London streets was more than a mile in length. It was manufactured in Glemsford in Essex and the London "Express" called it a triumph of British manufacture, but this industry, like many others came at a price. My Grand Aunt, Rebecca Worsfold worked at the Glemsford factory and died a few years later from Carcinoma of oesophagus at the age of 52.

My mother was a tea packer when she married in 1918.  The biggest tea company in the area at the time was Mazawattee who had a large factory at Tower Hill, quite a walk from Cable street, Stepney but not an unusually long distance for folk to walk to work then. Tea came into the country, mainly from India and Ceylon and was blended in the factory mainly by hand as the machinery for packaging was still rudimentary. The dust from the packing process was everywhere and and the hours were long and the work ardous affecting the health of all the workers. My mother only lived to the age of 60.

The corned beef inspector had a much safer job as of course he did not exist!  Corned beef came into the country already canned so could not be inspected.  The epithet "corned beef inspector" was given to anyone standing around with nothing to do.

Pure at London Bridge

Pure at London bridge

There is an eating place near London Bridge station with name "Pure".  I dont know who owns this chain of eateries but I wonder at their choice of location for a food shop with name Pure.  It may well be that they are not aware that in this part of south London that "pure" previously had a connotation far removed from food.

Many will know that this part of Bermondsey was originally the location of a large number of tanneries. 

I am an old pure-finder, yes pure is the word 

 What I find, me and my kind, you might find absurd 

 I searches out what lurchers left, it’s a strange kind of job

 Picking up a job or two, to pick up just two bob.

Yes dog poo as it is now almost quaintly called was used extensively in the curing of animal hides in the tanning industry.   Dog feces contain enzymes that break down collagen in hides, part of the tanning process called “bating.”  Skins arrived at a tannery bloody and wet with whatever animal remains still clung to them. First, they were soaked in water to clean them. Then came urine to help make them pliable enough that the hair could be removed with knives.

And that’s where the poo came in. It may sound wholly unappetizing now, but at a time when there were no ready-to-use chemicals, the lovely sheen of fine leather goods was achieved by soaking the hides in a mixture of water and dog poo.

The trade is barely remembered now except in the names of some of the Bermondsey streets , like Leather Market, Bevington street and so on.  The strong smells that pervaded this part of the borough probably still pervade the fabric of some of the yuppified flats in places like Snowfields.

Christmas has gone. Again

Christmas seems to last a long time these days and suddenly its over.  Last Christmas was like no other and for many is best forgotten.

 I can't say that I have many memories of the Christmases of my childhood. Just a snapshot here and there. My earliest is perhaps not a particularly happy one. I was quite young and was given a chocolate policeman. What I do remember is that were always taught to share so when my Dad asked for a taste of my chocolate policeman I offered it to him not expecting him to actually taste it. I burst into tears when he bit the head off tthe policeman. I never forgave him for that

I appeared in the Christmas pantomime at primary school . Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the panto you have to guess which dwarf I was. I won't go into any further detail except to say that I left the stage part of the way through as in those days and for a long time after I had difficulty in controlling my bladder

At the Infant School in Wapping the children were given a Christmas present which were all laid out on the table and the children could walk around and choose something.

I chose a toy cowboy cap gun which was immediately confiscated as soon as I got home as my dad was a pacifist and did not approve of guns as toys

Midnight mass  everyone went to midnight mass in Wapping. I don't know the proportions but most of people near where we lived were Catholics and so there was always a big crowd and even the children went and on one occasion my older brother Tom rushed home and played practical joke by dangling a lighted skull from the roof of the block of flats where we lived .

 In our house Christmas dinner was one o'clock sharp and everyone had to be there. The main thing I remember about those dinners was the overcooked Brussels sprouts and cabbage..

My first Christmas away from home, apart from the evacuee years was the first one of national service When I finished my Military Police training we were just given a short home leave but had to return to Barracks the day before Christmas Eve. Christmas was spent in the barracks and there was some kind of silly tradition there that the sergeant brought round cups of coffee laced with rum which I found quite disgusting

My second Army Christmas was in Moascar in the Suez Canal Zone. It was free booze all day long and then there was an evening meal. The cook Sergeant fancied himself as something of a chef and laid out a really tremendous feed. However in the middle of the table there was this enormous salmon which he had decorated with coloured piping of some kind, possibly mashed potato.

I took one look and went straight outside and brought back up all the free beer I  had drunk during the course of the day. 

The A.F.S in Wapping

 The AFS in Wapping

My brother Tom joined the Auxiliary Fire service in 1938 soon after it was established.  The AFS was a volunteer service set up to supplement the London Fire Brigade in anticipation of the forthcoming war. Tom' was 18 at the time and probably thought that being a fireman would be a bit more exciting than his day job as a typewriter mechanic . 

Although the London Fire Brigade estimated that they needed 28000 volunteers there are no statistics about how many men, young and old, signed up to be trained as firemen.  In Wapping there is a kind of snapshot of some of men and women who had volunteered to become a part-time firefighters .

There were 18 men listed on the National Register on the 29th September as being on duty at the substation and two young women.  Their ages ranged from a 55 year old taxi driver to a 26 year old warehouse packer.  Most of the men were married and generally older than many would have expected. 

The occupations were also disparate including a shipping clerk and a barristers clerk as well as a tailor and a meat Packer, a lorry driver and a hardware salesman There was of course a couple of wharf labourers as well as a rubber stamp maker and a painter and decorator.  There was just  one full-time fireman on duty that night who  was no doubt responsible for the training of these volunteers.. The  two young women at that time would have been learning the control room duties: one was a typist  during the day and the  other a dressmaker. 

Tom learned the hard way about the dangers of firefighting.  Whilst he was at the top of a ladder with a hose a colleague, No doubt with insufficient training, increased the water pressure without warning with the result that Tom was thrown to the ground  damaging his knee.  That ended his firefighting career but of course it did not prevent him being called up into the RAF when the war started. 

The valiant work carried out by the firefighters both the full time men of the London Fire Brigade and their part-time colleagues in the AFS during the Blitz of the following years is well known but it doesn't hurt to be reminded of this from time to time and realise that firefighters today face equal dangers.