After I had found the photograph of the Frazier Street Coronation street party, I remembered that I had an aerial photograph of the Waterloo area dating from before the Second World War.
I have annotated it so that anyone who knows that part of London as it is now should be able to pick out the various places that still exist.
The following map extract should help.
I was born in the General Lying-In Hospital (shown below circled in red), my Aunt Mary, Uncle Peter, cousin Jacqueline, and grandmother lived on Webber Row (circled in light blue), my great grandmother and my Aunt Kit lived in a tenement off Frazier Street (circled in purple), and when she was a child my mother went to school at Joanna Street School (circled in green)
My maternal relatives did their shopping in Lower Marsh, which they always called 'The Cut' even thought the road with that name actually runs between the Waterloo and Blackfriars Roads, and I had another aunt (my grandmother's sister, who was also somewhat confusingly called Mary and referred to in the family as Little Aunt Mary) who lived with her husband on an estate just across the Waterloo Bridge Road.
My paternal relatives lived in the East End, and when I was growing up, I saw less of them than I did my mother's family. My grandmother looked after me a lot when I was very young, and her idea of child car was to take me to the Imperial War Museum (which is just off the bottom of the map) and let me wander whilst she sat outside chatting with her friends. The museum's warding staff (most of whom were veterans of the First World War) looked after me and explained the exhibits to me ... so it is no wonder that I grew up with such an interest in military history!
Very cool post! I always wonder about the things that drive me to enjoy wargaming, and appreciate you sharing this window into your childhood.
ReplyDeleteIrishserb,
DeleteIt was my pleasure to share a little bit of my life story with my regular blog readers.
All the best,
Bob
It all has to start somewhere. I have fond but vague memories of my grandfather giving me candy and telling me about battles while my mom always included toy soldiers and children's books about soldiers, battles etc as gifts at Christmas and birthdays. indoctrination really!
ReplyDeleteRoss Mac,
DeleteFunnily enough, neither of my grandfathers spoke about the war, but my uncles and aunts certainly did. It was still a very recent event for them and had seriously changed their lives, and they talked about it a lot in front of a very impressionable me! That, and regular presents of toy soldiers etc., for birthdays and Christmas was the icing on the cake.
All the best,
Bob
I worked in Lower Marsh for a while in the late 1970s when I was in the Crown Agents, used to drink after work in a pub Upper Marsh way where all the Trainee Docs from St Thomas' used to drink. I think it has all been knocked down now.
ReplyDeleteBenjamin of Wight,
DeleteThanks for sharing your memories. In the 1970s much of the area was still very much like it was when I was a child, but since then it has undergone quite a lot of regeneration … not all of it good.
All the best,
Bob
An interesting bit of your personal history, which got me thinking where my own interest in military history came from.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn’t from my surroundings; the nearest things we had that was historic or interesting were the sealed of air raid shelters and the pile of concrete rubble in the local park that used to be the bandstand, before it lost an argument with a doodlebug. However, there were books, lots of books, as my parents subscribed to three reprint book clubs* and I was reading all of them (so 3 every month) by the time I was ten. Some were fiction but there was a lot of non fiction - most of which was about the late war – and there were plenty of historical fiction titles to take me well away from WW2, though mostly to other conflicts. If I had to give credit to one title it would be “Years of Victory” by Arthur Bryant which first introduced my ten year old self to the Peninsular War.
The impact of this reading on my later interests does make me understand why many Americans are currently trying to control the books in their school libraries.
*the reprint book clubs were an interesting social phenomena, which is mostly forgotten but must have had a significant impact – along of course with the libraries – on the first generation of baby boomers, simply by putting a lot of cheap (but well made) hardbacks into a large number of homes. I have sometimes wondered if it has any connection to the higher level of social mobility seen at that time (though measuring social mobility let alone explaining it is a hard problem, and much of what I’ve seen of late is pretty useless attitude surveys where longitudinal outcome studies are needed).
Mike Hall,
DeleteIts interesting to look back and to see what hooked our interest in history in general and military history in particular.
We were avid members of the local library when I was young, so we had lots of books in the house ... but they were very rarely ours to keep! My mother did encourage us to read avidly, although I was a late starter due to a minor learning difficulty (cross laterality, which is somewhat akin to dyslexia) which was undiagnosed until I changed schools, after which I went from the remedial class to the top stream in just over a year. I passed my Eleven Plus and was accepted into a prestigious Boy's Grammar School, where I eventually passed my ) and A-Levels. (I did win a scholarship to the local fee-paying Public School, but my father - who was still just an accounts clerk and had yet to gain his accountancy qualifications - was told by the headmaster that I would probably find it socially difficult to fit in and that the cost of the 'extras' [things like music lessons etc.] might be too much for him to pay ... so I didn't go there.)
There is a lot more to making social mobility work than many politicians (and some theorists) think.
My grandparents would never have thought that one of their grandchildren would ever have ended up as a published author who had travelled abroad a lot after a career in banking and then teaching ... but I 've done those things. I put it down to my parents, both of whom encouraged their children to succeed in whatever field of endeavour they chose to pursue. Money might have been short at times, but encouragement and support never were.
All the best,
Bob
Bob,
DeleteDo you ever wonder how your life would have changed had you been allowed to take that scholarship? (I’m assuming that it was an alternative to the grammar school).
I actually did attend a fee-paying school on a scholarship following the eleven plus, but this was the days of the Direct Grant schools, and my guess is that 80% of the boys were on scholarships so it was more a case of those whose parents paid the fees needing to fit in. In fact, it was the most class blind society I have experienced. There were extra charges for things like music that my parents could not have afforded, but I had no musical talent anyway, so they only had to scrape together the cost of the uniform and sports gear (and you also needed this for the local Grammar).
Highly streamed, ruthlessly academic, it would not have suited most kids and the education was narrower than I would have liked, but it did take working class children and send many of them to the top universities. So social mobility, but for a select group.
As for grandad, he was a master carpenter, so at the top of the working class and had high expectations for his boys – though the girls were expected to leave school asap to start work, something I always regretted for my mother’s sake as she had a talent for mathematics which was never developed. He would not have been surprised at any of his male grandchildren’s success.
Allt the best,
Mike
Mike Hall,
DeleteIf I had gone to that particular school, I would have been a rough contemporary of Noel Edmonds, Douglas Adams, and Gryff Rhys-Jones to mention just a few of the school’s alumni. The chances are that I would have gone to an Oxbridge college and ended up working in the City or the media.
As it was, I ended up in a direct grant grammar school which - in my opinion - was a better and less class-ridden school. It also had a strong Masonic ethic, as I realised long afterwards. I suspect I was much better suited to the learning environment there. (I ended up getting my teaching qualification from Cambridge, and found learning very easy after my schooling and three years of working for a bank.)
My grandfathers were a retired baker and a blacksmith. The baker would have be pleased that I had been an academic success, although as an avowed Socialist and Trade Unionist in his younger days, he would not have been happy that I turned out as a ‘one nation’ Tory. The blacksmith hated everyone who worked with their brains rather than with their hands, and would probably have disowned me if he hadn’t died when I was eight.
All the best,
Bob
Fascinating seeing the photos (I commuted in and out of Waterloo for many years and have had many a 'social' evening around there, so it's good to see what it used to look like.
ReplyDeleteReading all the comments too has been fascinating.
I was the tail end of the Baby Boom, and by the time I went to secondary school they were comprehensive when I grew up. I have no regrets about that at all. I still did quite well for myself. Working class background from fishing and dock work family. So social mobility for bright kids was still present. If there were no private or selective schools, I'm sure the standards of all schools would be raised, though there'd still be some differences in life expectations due to background.
Being a (Baby) Baby Boomer, I was also brought up on the War, war films, Cowboys & Indians, Timpo, Airfix and War comics. It was inevitable really I ended up playing with toy soldiers!
Nundanket,
DeleteI’m very pleased to have sparked off a few memories for you! The area around Waterloo has changed quire a lot over recent years, and I doubt that I could find my around like I did when I was a lot younger.
I taught in comprehensive schools during most of my career in education, and the good ones were excellent, and gave students all sorts of opportunities they might not otherwise have had. Those close to areas where there were still grammar schools often lost out as the brightest pupils tended to be skimmed off by them, and since I retired the introduction of academies and so-called free schools has destroyed a lot of the the truly comprehensive schools.
I make some very political comments about the changes that have been made to the education system since I retired … but I’m here to blog about wargaming, so I won’t!
All the best,
Bob
Interesting discussion on social mobility, but what I wanted to say was how amazing to think that the men being kind to you in the IWM were Great War veterans. Of course, someone born in 1895 say, would be 19 in 1914 and able to 'join up', and then would not have reached retirement age until 1960 - at which point the trenches were only about as long in the past as The Falklands War is to us now . What a lot of history they had seen in that time. . .
ReplyDeleteDavid in Suffolk,
DeleteThe sight of limbless First World War veterans was not unusual when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, and my A-Level maths teacher had served as a subaltern on the Western Front during the Great War, I can still remember members of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ marching past the Cenotaph on what we used to call Armistice Day.
During my 72 years, I’ve seen the world change dramatically, and as I’ve written before, I can actually say that I’ve taught about events I witnessed as part of GCSE and A-Level history courses. By God, did that made me feel old!
All the best,
Bob