The eastern end of the District Line

Whilst mentioning Jervis Johnson in passing yesterday, I was reminded that I have a very tenuous non-wargaming link to him. His father, the highly esteemed actor Richard Johnson (who played Colonel John Stewart in the film 'Khartoum' and Abou Fatma in the 1978 version of 'The Four Feathers'), was born in Upminster, Essex, the place that I lived from the age of eight until I left home at the age of twenty-two. My parents continued to live their until my mother died in 2002 and my father went into a care home in 2011.

Upminster was part of Essex when we moved there in 1958, but it became part of the London Borough of Havering when the Great London Council was set up in 1965. Its railway station is the terminus of the Underground’s District Line as well as being a station on the mainline between Southen-on-Sea and Fenchurch Street in the City of London. When I used it to commute to my job with Coutts & Co in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was almost universally known as the ‘misery line’. Trains were frequently late or cancelled, but I understand that now it is operated by c2c (which I understand stands for Coast to City), things are marginally better.

A map of that part of the District Line that runs from Upton Park to Upminster. © Transport for London (TfL).

There is a story that the word Upminster was used by some senior civil servants and/or politicians as a code word to describe some of the ideas that Mrs Thatcher came up with during her premiership. This was because Upminster was the end of the (District) line, and several stops past Barking (as in ‘barking mad!’). I don’t know how true this is, but there was an Operation Upminster. This was the name given to British Army operations in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in December 1998.

Over the years, Upminster has had its share of ‘famous’ people be born, live, or die there. These include:

• Sir John Benn DL and his son William Wedgewood Benn DSO, DFC, PC (last 1st Lord Stansgate and the father of Tony Benn MP) lived in Upminster during the nineteenth century
• Ian Dury (of Ian Dury and the Blockheads fame) lived in Upminster when he was a child
• Jimmy Greaves MBE (who was a member of the World Cup winning England Soccer squad but who did not play in the final) lived in Upminster
• Alice Perrers, who was Edward III's mistress, lived and was buried in Upminster
• Field Marshal Sir Henry Evelyn Wood, VC, GCB, GCMG lived out his final years in rented property in Upminster
• William Derham FRS was the Rector of Upminster, and used the tower of his church (St Laurence, Upminster) as one of the locations for his experiments to successfully measure the speed of sound in 1709

---

I should point out that my family actually lived in Corbets Tey, a small village that was subsumed into Upminster during the housebuilding booms of the 1930s and 1950s. This is about a mile to the south of the centre of Upminster, and still had a working village forge when we moved there.

The last time I visited Upminster, I saw that my favourite shop, Swan Books (which I remember as being called Swan Libraries) was still going strong, but I understand that it was forced to close on 18th January 2020 due to 'changes on the high street, aggressive competition online and evolving consumer habits'.

This was very sad news. It was the local book shop, and it is where I bought my first wargames books, firstly CHARGE (by Brigadier Peter Young and Lieutenant Colonel James Lawford), and sometime later, WAR GAMES (by Donald Featherstone).