The London 1960 Cube

 

A London you can hold in your hands

 Seeing The Cube, it is instantly recognisable for what it is - a map of the London Underground. Looking at it, you soon see it is like no other map. It offers no explanations. There is no legend. You, the viewer, are left to interpret what is what; to provide your own explanations.

When I was designing The Cube, my first act was to create a grid of equal sized squares. It could not be of a square or a rectangular design, so I needed to find another design solution, which I did by chance and, given what The Cube is, I consider the solution reasonable.

It is my design and I have stamped my ownership on it in various ways, all visible, some more than others.

That I think linear when it comes to maps is understandable many ways:

It was the first map I ever saw, probably as a baby going into Wembley Central or Alperton stations. They were large. Outside the stations, in the ticket halls, on the platforms, in the trains (not the L.M.S. electric trains* running to Euston or, occasionally, Broad Street, which ran on the same rails and shared the same platforms as Bakerloo line tube trains between Watford Junction and Queens Park for most of my childhood). 

I saw the station names on London Transport roundels and pointed. My mother, when I saw her, took me on days out. Seeing her was always associated with treats. She would point with me and say ‘Alperton’, ‘Park Royal’, ‘North Ealing’, ‘Ealing Common’, ‘Acton Town’ and so we would go on, every station. No wonder my mother spent a lifetime telling me and anyone who would listen that I could read an Underground map before I started school aged five in 1949. I could read London Transport bus maps too. The London Underground was part of my education.

The Underground map also shaped how I saw London and, by and large, it made sense. I associated some stations with names and special places. I still do.

I could go on, but I’m pretty sure what I say about myself is also true for many others as well. The Underground Map is not just a collection of coloured lines and names. It is our lives. 

The original Underground map by Harry Beck is a work of art; an icon. Never bettered. 

Contemporary London railway maps are, sadly, overcrowded with lines and too much small print, making much of the information unreadable as far as many of those looking at the map are concerned, albeit understandable, the map has become as confusing as a maze.

What I hope I give you with The Cube is a London you can hold in your hands. It will get better I promise, but at 78 I cannot afford to wait until I have perfected my creation, so when you hold The Cube think of it like the world it tries to encapsulate - less than perfect, striving to be better.

Robert Howard. Cube map designer.

NOTE. * The pedantic reader may want to say the L.M.S. Railway was nationalised in 1948, which is true, but the old brown L.M.S. electric trains with sliding doors, which rarely stayed closed, continued to run in their old livery into the 1950s, when they were withdrawn. Anyway, during my younger years, the old names of railway lines and companies persisted. It was a long time before ‘British Railways/B.R.’ replaced the old company names in common parlance.

My 1960 London Cube

 It's been eight months since my last post, but Wembley has never been far from my thoughts. Creating linear maps and designing bus boxes have been among my activities for the last five/six years. Back in 2017, I designed  my first cube map box, showing Nottingham City Centre. It was a first, no one had ever tried to design such a box before to the best of my knowledge. Certainly not in Nottingham. Here is a picture of that box, in front of which stand two sides of a Beeston cube map box I made a month ago with the intention of marking 'open gardens' – a weekend fundraising event in the town. In the event the cube idea stayed just that but, by chance and not design I discovered how to make a cube map of Beeston:

From this, I realised how I could finally create a cube map of Nottingham city centre and a London Cube based on the Underground. It is the latter which has had my attention for the last ten days, of which the picture below shows the latest version. I am working on the final changes right now, then the next step is to publicise it and offer it for sale. Susan, my wife, designed the logo. If you look closely, you see that it includes the year 1960 in the logo. This will change with different versions of The London Cube, for that is what it is — a first. Some friends from my Wembley teenage years will be mailed gift copies at the end of next week.

I want to find space somewhere on The Cube for the tag line 'See the world a little differently with the help of The London Cube'.

When 1960 began I was still fifteen and, for four months, I had been working in South Kensington as a trainee animal technician, at the Chester Beatty Research Institute, attached to the Royal Brompton Free Hospital. It was my first job.

I travelled to and from work on the Piccadilly Line, every other weekend as well, plus public holidays and Christmas. It was that kind of job and I enjoyed it. That would change, as I'm sure I have written somewhere else in this blog. Within a few weeks of the new year beginning my nanna would be dead, just 68. She died of a brain hemorrhage, in her bed, as I was eating my breakfast. My grandfather, who I always called 'Pop', put his head around the kitchen door and said 'She's gone. Phone Dr. Sheldon and ask him to come'. In the April I, with a few others, left the Wembley South Young Liberals to join the newly formed Wembley South Young Socialists. Perry Boatfield was one of those who left with me and it was Clive Kent, who lived in Sudbury, who recruited us. I have seen both in the last few weeks.

I got my first girlfriend in the new year, a girl my own age, much wiser than me, who worked in Alperton with a girl I knew from my years at Alperton Secondary Modern School. I have put her name on The Cube instead of Watford Junction because she lived in Watford. We lasted six months, during which time a lot happened, but I was too slow. That was the truth of the matter. She was the first female to say ‘Relax’ to me. Others would follow. In fact, every woman I have known since has said it to me.

Back in 1960 I used the Underground more than I did buses, which I must preferred. Working in South Kensington, I soon found myself with a network of friends who lived all over London. I travelled by bus when I could, especially my beloved 662 trolleybus. By 1960 its days were numbered and one of the reasons I have never like Routemaster buses is because they were going to replace my 662, but then it was still two years away and I was one of the mad few who thought this act of madness by London Transport could be reversed. It wasn't of course. Local railways lines were suffering the same fate. The car was king! All these things occupied my mind in 1960, but I did have a routine. Barham Park Library, then the new library on Ealing Road. Never the same. A lot happened of which I have no reollection. Just Pop, me and lodgers after Nanna had gone. We did the cooking and shopping between us. I still do, 62 years later. I even do some washing. Perhaps I did then but I cannot remember. The London 1960 Cube I have made and personalised with my own history has prompted a flood of memories long buried. I will use this blog to share those stories.

Well, teatime calls. I have made  calzone/brioche buns, two filled with spinach and feta cheese, so time to stop.

I hope to post details of how you can buy a copy The London 1960 Cube at the end of the month. It will come flat, pre-glued, ready to fold into a cube. That simple.

You wait for ages and two come along together. Two 662 trolleybus bus tales - link…

 

Here is my link to two 662 trolleybus paperbag stories by me. Both are Wembley related and of my time in Wembley:

https://paperbagstories.substack.com/

I hope they bring a smile to your face.

Robert 

Click on the image to enlarge.

Brent Archives quickly amend wrongly captioned Swinderby Road photo

 Brent Archives have updated the caption which accompanies a photograph of my maternal grandfather (who I called 'Pop') at his workbench at the rear of 36 Swinderby Road in Wembley, with me and my mother, Betty, looking on. To the left of my mother, is my Uncle Syd, Pop's brother. Thank you Brent Archives. Here is the updated copy from the Brent Archives' online catalogue:

The photograph, of which I have my own original copy, is one of a number given to Brent Archives twenty years age by my Uncle Frank (Francis Howard), was was Syd's son and my mother's first cousin. They came all be found in the Archives. They are easy to find.

My first memory is of Uncle Syd and, like so many early memories, not a happy one.

Back in 2011, Mike Burnham, who was tutoring a WEA writing class I had joined a few months earlier, asked the class to write about a childhood memory and I wrote this in half-an-hour, then read it to the class. Reading again I feel it captures how I felt as a young boy growing up in Wembley in the late-1940s/early 1950s.

My first memory

My early years are blank,

I only know what I've been told,

Or seen in photographs of me,

Are they clues to who I am?

Perhaps reality lies hidden.

When did I become aware?

Sitting in a pushchair,

Uncle Sid and Pop. A fight,

Men running out,

A woman shouting.

Left in Nanna's care,

I remember little of those childhood years,

Pictures show a happy child,

One, standing on a tank,

And, yes, I see the man in me.

Conjuring memories now is easy,

Just how real are they?

And here they come,

A frenzy in my head,

A maze I scramble through.

Perhaps a play describes them best,

In the theatre of my mind,

Sometimes victim, never hero,

Sometimes audience, never star,

Then passive, watching other lives.

Now I see my life in others,

Childhoods that seem my own,

Still upon a stage,

Love growing up,

A family moving on,

And that first memory?

I was nearly two,

But was 26 before I knew,

It was a family gathering,

Of a kind we all dread.

'Well I never' my Pop said,

'Fancy you remembering that,

Now that Sid is dead',

Then we laughed,

And wondered who'd be next.

Robert Howard

3 April 2011.

What I have are the memories of what Pop told me and my mother later confirmed. Uncle Sid didn't want to go back to Springfield Mental Hospital, near Tooting and 662 and 630 trolleybus ride away, after having the spent week with us on Swinderby Road. Sid staring kicking Pop and they ended up wrestling on the pavement across from the old Wembley Police Station. It was probably my mother's screaming which brought the policemen running out and dragged Uncle Sid off Pop and took him to the police station, Pop and my mother following, me still in my pushchair being lifted up the steps. I remembered all this, op and my mother told me years later, at Uncle Sid's funeral. Pop explained what was what and Uncle Sid calmed down and was told that he could either go back on the bus with Pop or in a police car. Pop always said it was the sight of the uniforms that calmed Sid down and he did what he was told.

The outbursts happened from time to time and I would go with Pop whilst growing up to see Uncle Sid in Springfield every month. By trolley bus of course. Always a great adventure.

The photographs in Brent Archives include a number of Uncle Sid in 'Persia',but I grew up believing he become a POW during WW1 whilst fighting in Mesopotamia.

I still see the scene still in my head much as I captured this memory when prompted to write it down in 2011.

The life and loves I owe to being Wembley bred

If you ever come to Nottingham and see a Nottingham City Transport 35 bus you may see a person's name on the front and it may be me!  Yes, I have a bus named after me - how great is that! Here is the evidence:

How life at 75 reflects life at 8 and the 83 bus

I may have said already that back in May 2015 I was diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis (scarring of the lungs, which could erupt at any time). The same day as I received the diagnosis the thoracic specialist who saw me picked up on the fact that I had 'a heart problem'. The latter turned out to be more serious so took priority and in February 2017 I had open heart surgery to replace my aortic heart valve. Somehow I had managed to live 73 years with two cusps instead of three resulting in a valve that had been working a lot harder than it otherwise would have done.

The good news is that I recovered well and at no time have I ever felt any pain or discomfort, so by the end of 2017 life was pretty much back to normal and the main risk I faced (and still face) was my lungs becoming inflamed by an infection of some kind. The things I do to avoid this are pretty simple: no going to the cinema or theatre, meetings, crowded buildings, all things I manage with ease except for the occasional appeals to my vanity when I get asked to speak at a meeting or do a display. Writing this I have just realised this Wembley bus boy has not shared the fact that since October 2018 there has been a Nottingham City Transport 35 'History Bus' bearing his name.

This pic is taken from London Transport Buses & Coaches 1952 by John A S Hamley, published by Images in 1993. The photo was taken by A B Cross opposite Alperton Station. The book is out of print can be be bought secondhand on the web.

Anyway back to how coping with old age and health is like an 83 bus ride c.1952. Here is the text of an email I sent to an old Swinderby Road friend yesterday. I hope it speaks for itself: 

I’m currently on antibiotics and will attend my first lung ‘boot camp’ next Tuesday and therein lies my problem. There are periods when it is hard to be positive. I suspect I have spoken about becoming a ‘Half-day person’ and in managing that, lots of good intentions become baggage which either falls off the handcart you are pulling or pushing, or you push off to lighten the load. Other things fall off unnoticed. 

Another analogy is that of travelling back to Wembley on a Sunday evening on an 83 bus as a child (it’s always an 83 bus on a Sunday) from relatives in Kingsbury. Back in those days London Transport buses operated to a rush-hour timetable whatever day or the time. (this was a laudable union thing to protect jobs and pay - faster journey times = fewer buses = fewer drivers/conductors = less overtime = fewer family holidays and so on). What this meant at 6 o’clock on a Sunday evening was a very slow bus ride home, which I actually enjoyed, listening to the purring sing-sing of a gentle AEC bus engine. Nothing much happened, the buses were usually so slow that passengers just hopped on and off. Eventually it would turn onto Ealing Road and I’d get off outside the Regal.

Well, my life now is much like an 83 bus ride back then and I am very grateful for the fact. I know where I’m going and I’m very happy to be doing it slowly. In this respect I remain one lucky bunny.

Today I feel low but not down. I see such days as inevitable. The hot muggy days don’t help but it’s easy to do what  I’m told: stay indoors, stay cool and drink plenty of liquids. I probably haven’t been helping myself with self-imposed deadlines to help people and groups that I Iike. There is baggage on the handcart I mentioned earlier that needn’t be there.

The good news is that I still feel that I have plenty of time if I let life dawdle a bit like my 83 bus. My heart surgeon’s last words to me after my surgery were ‘Next time it will be keyhole’ and that is an appointment c.2029-2032 I want to keep, even with my lungs!

So that's it for now.

My Wembley boundaries when at home

This post has been prompted, in part be a conversation with a friend here in Beeston, Nottingham, where I have lived since the end of 2014. We were having a conversation about 'sense of place' and how important it has been to both of us throughout our lives.

Richard used to live in Lenton and we met through my Lenton based blog, Parkviews. Susan and I bought our Lenton house at 1979, but did not move in until 1980 and stayed there until we left in 2014.

We were active in the community for all those years and when I look  back at the places where I have lived being involved in the community has been a common factor: Wembley until I was 22 and from 15 I was active in Wembley South Young Socialists and the Labour Party; then Harrow 1966–69; Birmingham 1969–78; Mansfield 1976–1979; Lenton, Nottingham 1980–2014 and Beeston, where my involvement began in 2011 when I joined the WEA Beeston Branch writing class.

The common thread has been the Labour Party and local history, the former I trace back to my Uncle Dave and Auntie Nannie, who I used to stay with in Harlow New Town, as it was then, throughout the 1950s. They were Party activists and Uncle Dave was Secretary of then Plumbers' Trade Union Harlow branch, so there was a steady stream of visitors. The latter, local history, came through my grandfather, Ernie Howard, who I called 'Pop'. He had been born above the family shop on Totnes Terrace (part of Wembley High Road between Ealing Road and Wembley Central Station) in 1896 and was living at 36 Swinderby Road in 1976, the year he died in Harlow whilst staying with Uncle dave and Auntie Nannie. He lived on Swinderby Road for fifty-four years. My Nanna, Anne Starr, grew up in Ickleton on the Essex/Cambridgeshire border and they met during the First World War and every day I see and use things which they used every day and I love that sense of continuity.

I can never remember sitting down and listening to Pop talk about his Wembley, it kind of seeped out over the years during chance conversations or when I heard him reminiscing with old Wembley friends, many from his childhood days, perhaps in a shop when buying shoes, groceries, fish or with family. In the 1940s and 1950s Wembley, despite it rapid growth during the inter-war years, especailly the 1930s, still had a solid core of pre-First World War families, of which the Howards were part.

My Wembley was, by today's standards, quite constrained, yet I was happy with it as it was and the legacy of that happiness has been an ability to be happy in all the places I have lived. I could probably create a similar photographic record for Lenton and Beeston (and in a sense I have since 2007, thanks to blogging), but right now I want to share with you My Wembley as captured on a few chance postcards in my possession. At some point I will give them all their own posts as memories are triggered.

Swinderby Road looking north towards Wembley High Road. No.36 is on the right-hand side of the road, with the handcart outside the semis with the angled front bays (the one furthest from the camera). From the open windows, despite, the clouds, it may have been a warm day, although wanting to keep the air inside the house 'clean' was something I grew up with and, with the benefit of hindsight and a better understanding of history, I suspect that my Nanna, born in 1892, was Victorian enough to believe that ill health and stale air went together. Fresh air equated with healthy. 

Ealing Road from Wembley Brook looking north towards Wembley High Road. Uncle Joe's tobacco shop and newsagents is in the parade of shops on the left and from when I was seven until I was eleven he paid me 5/- (25p) to deliver afternoon newspapers every day except Sunday to about seventy houses.

Just out of view on the left-hand side of the road, the first house beside the brook was a dentist, where I used to go until I moved to Harrow. The fact that I still have most of my own teeth and do not need dentures I put down to my dentist. My mother used to tell me that she took me there the day after the National Health Service (NHS) started and that I never needed to see the school dentist.

Further up the road on the left-hand side, nearer the High Road, opposite the Regal Cinema was Cut & Quality (grocers) and DeMarcos ice cream parlour and coffee bar.

On the right-hand side you can just glimpse the entrance to Union Road, where I went to Sunday school at The Church of God in the British Legion Hall (which was on the south-side) every Sunday. I went there from about six until I was eighteen.

On the other side of Union Road the Labour Party built its New Hall in the late-1950s, where we held Young Socialist meetings and where my first wife, Tricia, and I had our wedding reception in 1965.

Just beyond that and before the Regal Cinema was St Andrew's Presbyterian Church where I went to the 1st Wembley Cubs. I didn't join the Scouts because by the time I was eleven I didn't like uniforms or the discipline!

The Regal Cinema came next (bottom left-hand), where I went to the pictures most weeks, including the Saturday Club and was a member of the 'ABC Monitors'. It cost 6d (2½d) to get in.

In the parade of shops facing Ealing Road which were part of the Regal were Radio Rentals, from where we rented our radio for 1/- (5p) a week. We didn't have electricity in our house until 1958, so I had the job of lugging the acid battery to and from the shop on a trolley every few weeks, where I got a replacement.

Close by was the fish & chip shop on Station Grove, at the far end of which was the Toc H hut.  

A view of Wembley High Road looking east from its junction with Ealing Road, about which I could probably write a book. I will return to it in future posts. I went there most days for something. Just beyond the Station Hotel was Sharvil's the fishmongers. Reg Sharvil was one of Pop's closest friends and they played snooker most nights in the Fairview Club. I would go the shop for fish every other day or so it now seems. I grew up on a diet of fish, cheese, beetroot, runner beans  and apples and only cheese has fallen by the wayside in recent years because too much now upsets my bowels!

Barham Park along with One Tree Hill were my childhood playgrounds if you discount Swinderby Road. In the house they did tea and cake in the summer, but it was demolished sometime in the late-1950s if I remember correctly, by which time I was visiting Barham Park Library more often.

An 83 bus across from Alperton Station on its way to Ealing Broadway. For most of the 1950s there was a Sunday extension renumbered 83A to Kew Green (later changed to London Airport). The 83 took me everywhere in my then known world, well not quite, it took me to family in Kingsbury and on days out to Kew, Hampstead Heath and Gunnersbury Park.

The 18 and 79 buses, and the 662 trolleybus also played a big part in extending my childhood boundaries, as did the Piccadilly line (see previous blog). Trips from Wembley Central Station were in the company of family, every couple of months to Broad Street on a Sunday morning to visit the Petticoat Lane market. My love of buses and public transport began in Wembley as a child.

As a child my world was Wembley and the trips I made to Harlow and Grantown-on-Spey, with visits to Glasgow as well, gave me a sense of being part of something beyond Wembley, but it was home and it was where I always returned to. I read Anne of Green Gables when I was about twelve and remember a male teacher reproving me for 'reading a 'girl's book'. It is a book about place and its importance.

Life has taught me that townscapes change over time, as they should, not always for the best, but sometimes, but individuals endure and they are what I want to remember and celebrate. Wembley may be different in many respects, but what I see and hear I still love.

That is the memoir and legacy I want to pass on to my grandchildren and the families I will never know, that we carry the past with us and we decide, as ourselves, what to do with it, no one else.

Three Wembley histories and different perspectives

Back in 1954 I was ten and saw that a book called Wembley Through the Ages had been published by the Wembley News. It was the local newspaper of choice in my house on Swinderby Road. Pop (my grandfather) read the Evening News Monday–Saturday and The People on Sunday.

I took this photograph in the kitchen at the back of the house in about 1958. 1959 at the latest and, at some point, it got torn, so I stuck it together with sellotape!

We didn't buy the Wembley Observer, though I did deliver it every week. It was not as popular as the Wembley News if my afternoon newspaper round was anything to go by. From the age of seven until I was eleven I delivered papers for 'Uncle Joe' Lochmatter, who had a newsagents shop on Ealing Road between 'The Brook' (as I knew it) and Chaplin Road. I was paid 5/- a week (25p) to deliver all the roads between Chaplin Road and Eagle Road up to Barham School. To deliver papers for bigger newsagents like W H Smith up on the High Road, between Ealing and Ranelagh roads, you had to be eleven, but Uncle Joe gave me a round because he and my Pop were drinking pals and members of the Fairview Club, up on Harrow Road, beside the fire station, as you head out of Wembley towards Sudbury.

I also got the comics to deliver and looked at them in the shop, preferring to buy the small 6d (2½p) cowboy picture story books a bit smaller than what we would know today as A5 size. My favourites being Rocky Lane and Lash LaRue. So long as I bought something each week I was able to read the comics at the back of the shop. I was also marking up my round after a while, so I would dash out of Barham School and go to Uncle Joe's. By four o'clock I usually delivering my papers and by 5.30pm I was home. It was my routine six days a week, except when I was on holiday or ill.

Anyway, it was reading the Wembley News as I did that I found out about Wembley Through the Ages and decided to buy my mother a copy as a Christmas present. Needless to say I read it as best I could and it came back to me in 2006 after her funeral.

Of the three books about Wembley, it is probably the best written and opening it again for the first time in years I went immediately to the chapter on enclosure. It spoke to me in much the same way as it did when I ten.

'The 1803 (Enclosure) Acts… completed what private greed had begun, and abolished people's rights… So far as Wembley was concerned, the wholesale robbery was completed under the Act (and) the only people who were forgotten were the small tenants, who lost not only their rights but, in many cases, their land and livelihood. This ought to be remembered today when the cry is "Back to the Land" and, particularly, when one thinks of the vast sums which now have to be paid for re-purchasing and acre of common land in order to provide a "lung" for the people… but the injustice (of enclosure) is that it gave nearly everything to those who had, and took away from the commoner even that little which he possessed'.

Rev Elsley does not criticise the consolidation of land holdings so that farmers 'were no longer compelled to wander all over the manor to do their farming'. It was the enclosure of common land that he was objecting to.

I never learnt about English land enclosure whilst at school, but I did learn about clearance in the Scottish Highlands, which was the same thing by another name, and I saw enough westerns at the Regal and Majestic cinemas in Wembley to know about the brutal treatment of 'Red Indians' and, again, I could see the injustice of it all without anyone telling me. 

Oh I know the reasons were these things were a little different, but all were about the powerful dispossessing the powerless.

Sixty-four years on and I wonder what Reverend Elsley would make of both Conservative and Labour governments privatising public assets over the last thirty-five years?  I suspect he would see the injustice of it all. As my wife, Susan, frequently points out, British governments do believe in public ownership, providing it is not British. The Dutch, French and German governments can own our buses and railways, and the Chinese our power to name just a few.

The Reverend Elsley is a man I will be quoting again in other blog posts I'm sure. I will end with tattered image from the back of the book's dust jacket:

A History of Wembley edited by Geoffrey Hewlett dates from 1979 and published by the then Brent Library Service.

It is divided into topics with contributions from a number of writers. Like many local histories of its time it is antiquarian in style and light on interpretation. Housing* and politics are noticeable by their absence, which given Brent has always been a very political borough seems strange, for its councillors as individuals and a group had made Brent what it was in 1979. Reading this book I get no idea of what political parties have won elections in Wembley or what wards. It is a history without passion, but as a collection of starting points it is invaluable.

Memories of Wembley by Derek Addison and Tony Rock is the last book in this short list dates from 2016 and is an update of an earlier version from 2011 (which I also have and referred to in 2013 posts)over the next few days.

The 2016 edition has more pages, covers more locations and topics, and has different photographs. It is a guide to Wembley in the 1940s and 50s I am happy to recommend. I love their perambulations around the borough and they remember far more than me, perhaps because there are two of them. I do have my own Wembley 'buddy' who I may have mentioned before, who grew up on Swinderby Road a few doors away from me and is just three weeks younger. She is writing her take on her Wembley days and we do compare notes, exchanging names and memories. Her name is Audrey Watson, still is, and like my wife, Susan, has chosen to keep her own name.

Derek and Tony went to the same schools as us — Barham and Alperton Secondary Modern — and there is a chapter devoted to the latter dated 1948–1952, which makes them six or seven years older than us (we were both born in 1944), but their memories offer a different take on the school. I wholeheartedly agree with them when they point out in their Introduction that 'A wise man once observed that if ten people were asked to describe a particular event that occurred fifty years earlier, there would be at last fifteen versions'.

They say, for example, that 'The teachers at Alperton School were doing the best they could, at a time when the post war socialist government was tinkering with the education system, levelling down where possible, and generally lowering the quality of education throughout the country. With classes of 45 or more pupils they had problems enough without the need for directives passed down from the Orwellian bureau known as the Ministry of Education'.

The 1944 Education Act, is also known as the "Butler Act' because Rab Butler, who was a Conservative MP and the Education Minister during the Second World War, prepared the legislation to reform post-war education in England and Wales, with the support of both the Labour and Liberal parties. There was nothing 'socialist' about education at Alperton School. The Act raised the school leaving age to 15 from 1947 and reduced the number of church schools and placed an emphasis on nonsectarian religious teaching in secular schools like Alperton. Local education authorities where left to interpret the Act which, in Wembley's case, meant Middlesex County Council.

Alperton Secondary Modern was more secular than Barham School, where I remember Catholic and Jewish pupils sitting in the corridor outside the assembly hall during the short morning service at the beginning of every school day. Right now all I want to point out is that, at the time time Derek and Tony were being educated, I wonder how they came to the conclusion that 'socialists (were) tinkering with the education system'?

A few pages on, whilst writing about 'The School Nurse' they refer to TB and, to quote, 'another government inspired programme at the time was the eradication of TB... This project would no doubt have succeeded in ridding the country of this disease, were it not for the later flood of third world immigrants who brought not only TB, but Smallpox with them. Today, TB is alive and well in the UK and apparently resistive to the antibiotics which could have totally eliminated in the fifties'.

This is racist nonsense. Why? Because the authors are clearly blaming the continued presence of TB in the UK on 'third world immigrants', a pejorative term for non-white people, but which in recent years has been extended to include east Europeans. TB has nothing to do with colour or the third world! It is all about rich and poor, and the reason it is rising again is rising inequality in the UK. 

Also the description 'third world' conveniently hides the fact that many of the people who came to live in the UK during the years after 1945 did so because they lived in countries the UK occupied and we told them they were free to come to 'the mother country'. In my time at Alperton School we celebrated Empire Day (24 May), so I guess the school did the same between 1948 and 1952, when Derek and Tony were pupils. What I learnt from those days was to welcome people of all colours and faiths as fellow subjects because they had (and have) as much right to be in this country as I do — that is a great lesson for life I learnt during the years I was at Alperton Secondary Modern School and I cannot thank the teachers responsible enough.

I have had a couple of things published elsewhere which relate to Alperton Secondary Modern School and its part in making me actively opposed to racism in all its forms and why we should all take an active interest in democracy, even if we do no more than vote!

So, as you can see. I find a lot in Memories of Wembley that needs to be challenged, especially the way the authors interpret Wembley history as they remember it. I thank them for providing the opportunity!

NOTE *: Housing was the driver of Wembley's development in the first half of the 20th century and it is, I believe, better understood if related to what was happening across south-east England during the same period. The best, popular, history I know is 'Semi-detached London' by Alan A Jackson, first published by Wild Swan Publications in 1973 (my copy is a revised edition dated 1991).

A 9d Piccadilly ticket to Museumland

News in The Guardian and on BBC News yesterday that Tristram Hunt is resigning from Parliament to become Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington, reminds me of how growing up in Wembley gave me a life long love of museums.

I have a vague memory of memorabilia being displayed in the old Barham Park Library and when the Brent Borough Council opened the Grange Museum in Neasden one of its first displays had the photograph below at its centre surrounded by work tools my family gave to the Museum before it opened. By chance, Susan and I knew the museum's first curator, Val Bott, because we were all members of the then Labour Arts & Museums association (LAMA), which later merged with Arts for Labour.

The photograph is from the 1920s, when my great-grandfather had his own business, H Howard & Sons, which had a shop on Wembley High Road and a yard on London Road. My grandfather (who I called 'Pop'), with my Uncle Arch, worked with their father, but by the time I was on the scene and remembering things in the late-1940s, the business had gone and my grandfather was trading from the backroom of 36 Swinderby Road as E W Howard & Son. Pop is on the far right of the photograph.

The 1906 Wembley Directory & Almanack has an entry for 'H Howard, Ironmongers' at 3 Totnes Terrace and the 1932 Kelly's Directory lists 8 London Road as 'H Howard & Sons Contractors yard'.

Totnes Terrace was on the southside of the High Road by the Station Hotel.

But I digress (this is a good example of how one thing leads to another and takes you away from the topic/memory which got you writing in the first place), the main point of this post is to write about my Wembley childhood and the importance of museums, especially the South Kensington museums, which could be reached direct from Alperton Station for the cost of 9d half-fare return ticket on the Piccadilly Line.

When I was little, before my mother got married, I remember her taking me out for days on our own, just her and me. She wasn't about most of the time (even though she is recorded as being at 36 Swinderby Road on the electoral rolls for 1947–52) and one our regular haunts was the museums at South Kensington. They were easy to reach, a ten minute walk to the station, thirty minutes on a tube train, then along the pedestrian tunnel which linked South Kensington Underground Station to the natural history and science museums.

They were (and remain) all close together, the V&A, the natural history, geological and science museums. What has gone is my favourite from those day — the Commonwealth Institute as I remember it, although back then records show it as the Imperial Institute.

The V&A didn't get much of my attention, nor did the Geological Museum — ten minutes was usually enough, but I could lose myself all day in the other three. In the Science Museum there were a few what we would call today 'interactive' displays, mostly mechanical. There was the telephones which you dialled and then watched and heard a mini exchange click and whirr before another telephone rang a few feet away.

I used to watch other children approach the telephone with caution, not sure of what to do. In the late-1940s/early-1950s home telephones were a rarity. At Swinderby Road we always had one because Pop was a plumber. The first number I remember is Wembley 394 (or was it 439?) and our upright telephone did not have a dial. Later it did and our number became Wembley 4394. It was the mid-1950s before we got a modern telephone, complete with a pull-out tray containing cards on which you could write telephone numbers. We may have been high-tech insomuch as we had a telephone, but we had gas lighting until 1954, so I grew up a little in awe of light switches! Even now, in 2017, I press a light witch and somewhere inside me I am amazed.

When my mother got married, our days out together came to an end. After that, for a while Uncle Jimmy came along as well but when they married and they moved to Kingsbury, we would not visit museums together again for many years and started visiting museums together again with my children, Alicia and Owen, then my grand-children, Laura and Natalie. I see my mother as responsible for sowing the seed which grew into a lifelong love of museums on my part and for that I thank and remember her still.

My interest in the Commonwealth Institute (as I will call it) must have been enough to prompt my being given a Commonwealth Annual one Christmas as a child, and then every year thereafter for a good few. 

I took them into adulthood with me and left them behind in Birmingham in 1975 when I left Tricia, my first wife, for Susan, then Curator of Mansfield Museum & Art Gallery in Nottinghamshire. The best and worst acts of my life all rolled into one and there, at the centre, so to speak, were museums, for I met Susan at the 1975 annual Museums Association conference, held in Durham that year, where I was speaking about 'Museums in a period of inflation' and what local councils might do to address the challenge (one thing I did not advocate was museum admission charges).

There were other museums I visited regularly as a child, Gunnersbury Park and Kenwood House. The former my favourite childhood museum and park. Gunnersbury Park and its museum will get a blog post of its own one day because that childhood connection re-surfaced in the 1970s, during my years as Chair of the Midlands Area Museum Service (MAMS) and a former curator of the museum introduced me to Susan in Durham. His name was Vernon Radcliffe and he was curator at Gunnersbury in the 1950s. He became  a mentor when I joined MAMS. I gave the eulogy at his funeral in 2011.

There really was a dearth of local museums in our part of Middlesex, so by the time I was eight or nine I was taking myself off to South Kensington on my own because, by then, I had the confidence to use buses and tube trains like an adult. 

I think the Commonwealth Institute played a part in shaping my take on the world even then, looking at the displays and watching films in its cinema, you could not but help see the way we treated Black people in Africa and the West Indies. Those in charge were always white and the workers always Black, yet I knew from the Fanthornes (I hope I have spelt the surname correctly), who were Anglo-Indians and members of St John's Church, that colour was no bar to ability. In those days Black faces were a rarity in Wembley, but when they came my years of visiting the Commonwealth Institute helped to put their arrival into some kind of context.

Add to this liberal schoolteachers like Mr Fowler, Mr Irvine and Mr Sladden at Alperton Secondary Modern, and listening to adults talk at 36 Swinderby Road, I can understand how I became who I am today. Pop and my Uncle Dave had very different views of the Suez War in 1956. At school I was on Nasser's side, just like I was always a 'Roundhead', never a 'Cavalier'. These things just went with the territory of me being who I was, a little apart from others even then.

The Natural History Museum helped me question what I was taught at Sunday school long before I knew the name Charles Darwin. It was there, all in plain sight for any child to see if he or she looked. My questions resulted in being given The Story of the Bible as my reward for regular Sunday school attendance in 1957, which I still have (all it did was fuel the fire).

I wasn't bright at school because I suspect I was seen as disruptive, always asking questions, even challenging what teachers said at times, but these are things for another day.

Had I not grown up in Wembley, a 9d train ride and forty-five minutes away from 'Museumland', as I liked to call it then, I would not be me.

There is one teenage footnote to this story. My first job on leaving Alperton Secondary Modern School eas as a a trainee animal technician at the Chester Beatty Research Institute in South Kensington, so I would take myself off at lunchtime or when I finished early on a Saturday to the V&A Museum, which was just five minutes away. This was when I got to see and learn about another side of history and as really my introduction to 'the arts' as such. If I had my way all museums would have a virtual reality website so that, with the touch of a finger (or saying a few words) we could visit them all if we wished! 

I will end where I started, with another reference to Tristram Hunt. He is on record as supporting museum charges and the V&A has already felt the need to reassure the public that it has no plans to introduce charges. I have always opposed museum charges (just as I am opposed to university tuition fees and private fee charging education) and, at the root, of this objection are my own experiences as a child. Had she to pay, I suspect my mother would never have taken me to museums… the rest you know.

Three years and I'm back

The last post to this blog before this one is dated 6 October 2013 in which I said I was going to Brent Archives to look at electoral rolls for Swinderby Road, especially at the names of who lived at No.36, where I lived from my birth in 1944 until buying a house with my first wife, Tricia, in 1966*.

So, why has it taken me so long to return to this memoir? In truth, the local historian and writer in me has yet to finalise how I want to proceed, plus the fact that I returned from London in 2013 to find our cat, Markiza, was ill. She had come to live with Susan, who I have lived with since 1975 and married in 1977, and me after a close friend went into a nursing home in 2008, by which time Markiza was already quite elderly. We knew Markiza as long as our friend Michael had because I had gone with with him to the Cats Protection Shelter at Watnall, near Nottingham, and was there when he chose Markiza.

Markiza.

In early November 2013, Markiza was put to sleep in our arms at home. It really was a peaceful end. We had been thinking of downsizing for several years and her passing was the trigger. It took us a full year to move, even though we sold the house quite quickly. We didn't move far, just under three miles to nearby Beeston, an area we knew well. It was home from the day we moved in, my daughter Alicia and her partner Steve came and stayed a couple of days and did all the grunt work.

2015 was election year and though I was no more than a Labour Party foot soldier, living in the marginal Broxtowe constituency meant there was  a constant stream of delivery to do, plus work on the house and the largest garden we have ever had in our lives. Fortunately, the latter was well maintained and our plan for 2015 just to pull weeds, pick the fruit and cut the grass. The first time I did the latter I coughed up blood, which led to me having an x-ray on the day after the general election. Ten days later I was being seen in the lung assessment unit at Nottingham City Hospital, because the x-ray had revealed 'established fibrosis of the lungs' (I have never smoked), with the doctor asking me 'How long have you had a heart condition?' 'What heart condition?' I replied. At the time I felt in the best of health, but the NHS picked me up and has spent twenty months monitoring me. To cut a long story short, my lungs are 90% normal and my heart condition is congenital (I was born with two cusps in my aortic heart valve instead of three), but it has reached the point where I am down to have open heart surgery later this month (January). In the last few months I have become a 'half-day person'. Right now I consider myself one lucky bunny, the NHS have been faultless in their care and support and I am looking forward to getting back to my old self.

In readiness, I have cleared the decks and decided that post-op I will have three interests: the garden, writing and my memoir, beginning with my Wembley years, so here I am, about to climb back on the bike so to speak, knowing that I may disappear from view again for a few months, but with this posting anyone who chances upon this blog will know it does have a future.

After my October 2013 visit to Brent Archive I prepared three tables based on electoral roll information. I include the tables below without comment other than what I may have already included. I know there are people missing, some of the lodgers at 36 Swinderby Road for example, and those faces I can see from my childhood days, but to which I cannot (yet) attach names.

To see the tables more clearly, click on to enlarge:

A CAT PS...

Eileen Matthews and me with our cats c.1951–2 at the back of 36 Swinderby Road. My cat Tibby died when I was about 18.

Me in the early-1990s snoozing on the sofa, with our then cats Coco and Jenny above me sleeping as well.
We have not had a cat since Markiza passed on.

NOTE: * I lived with my mother and step-father in Swindon when I was 12–13 for about four months before coming back to Wembley and returning to Alperton School. I cannot remember the exact year (something I still have to check).