Take a walk down Garratt Lane and ask anyone of a certain age if they remember ‘Barney’s’ and a warm smile of recognition is sure to flitter across their face. Whether its the memory of that first hair-cut and being positioned across the arms of the barber’s chair on Barney’s plank, being presented with one of his lollipops or possibly having him give you a short back and sides with a cigarette dangling perilously close, his name lives on in Earlsfield and will do so for many more years when a historic blue plaque arises on the site of his premises later this year. 

A study of Garratt Lane has revealed that excluding the pubs, the premises at No476 may be the location of the longest continuous trade on this historic south London route connecting Wandsworth with Tooting. Before it became ‘Goodfellas’ it was most famously known as ‘Barney’s’ established in 1931 by Barnett Jacobs and run by his family for nearly six decades. I was lucky enough to attend a visit by his late daughter Daphne a few years ago in her 97th year. She ran the ladies salon and her son Stephen has very kindly shared family photos and press cuttings. Barney passed away in 1957 but is still fondly recalled by Earlsfield residents. 

A First World War veteran and ARP warden in the Second, he is remembered for his many kindnesses and immense community spirit. In the 1920s the shop was under the proprietorship of Thomas Stephens who was still there in 1930. From at least 1911 a hairdressing business was run here by Percy Goldsmith. Local historians consider this outstanding longevity worthy of a blue plaque and your support is helping make that happen. Geoff will be doing some of his local history tours and donations will go towards the cost. Look out for ‘Walk the Lane’ and ‘Barney’s Wandle Ramble’. If you are popping in for a snip or just passing by, you can also give George a donation. Celebrating our heritage in this way makes Earlsfield a better place to live so thank you all for your support!

So who was this affectionately-remembered character whose name is recalled over 65 years after his death. There’s no doubt that much of the love also stems from nostalgia for a very different, more gently-paced world with many less distractions. Earlsfield was a cosy unpretentious place, lit up by genial characters like Barney Jacobs and his landmark barber’s shop at the heart of Garratt Lane. He most certainly deserved his place in the sun as he’d been in a few dangerous situations in his early life. 

Barney was the son of a Lithuanian umbrella-maker from Brick Lane. Schlaime Solomon Jacob Fineman Yankel was one of around 2.5 million Jewish migrants who left the Baltic states controlled by Russia between 1880 and1920. Their communities had been overwhelmed by ‘pogroms’, a wave of state-sponsored murder and destruction which reached its height after the assassination of the Czar in 1881. He married Rebecca in 1891 and Barnett, born the following year was the first of their five children born after they came to London. Many of these settlers had tailoring skills and established businesses in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields area. Barney grew up in the frenetic Whitechapel area, attending Hanbury Street school. Other migrants have since populated this Brick Lane area and it still retains a unique energy and vitality. 

He must have taken up his scissors quite young because his naval records indicate his profession as ‘hairdresser’. He really did have quite an adventure at sea, joining the Navy at the age of 17 in 1909 and serving for over ten years. This would have course have covered the entire length of the First World War, though he still found time to get married and father four children. 

Barney joined the Navy at the time of a race with Germany to control the supremacy of the seas with new classes of battleship soon to propell both countries into conflict. He trained as a stoker, firstly on HMS Renown, then HMS Jupiter. He was then assigned to a land-based training establishment, HMS Victory II in Portsmouth. The 1911 census records him as a 20 year old stoker on HMS Assistance, a repair ship based in Portsmouth. On 6 May 1912, just a few weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, he married Elizabeth Jacob in Weymouth. Known as Bessie, she was originally from London but working in service in Dorset. Their four children were; Cyril born 1913, Ronald in 1915, Eric in 1918 and Daphne in 1921. 

Fortunate to avoid the horrific Battle of Jutland, Barney spent much of the War on various repair ships at Scapa Flow, the Naval base on the Orkneys, where the German fleet was scuttled in June 1919. He was assigned to HMS Assistance and HMS Greenwich and from August 1916 HMS Victorious II. His son Eric’s birth certificate indicates that in August 1918 he was serving on ‘HMS Daphne’ which was involved in mine clearance work. His family were living in Melcombe Regis, just outside Weymouth. In 1921 Barney and Bessie had their fourth child, they named her Daphne after this ship.

Times were tough as a new decade dawned but after all that time away from his young family, it must have been a difficult decision to go straight to Ireland and join the Royal Irish Constabulary. This was the time of the Irish War of Independence and the local RIC police force were boosted by recruits from England. Barney was now on the same side as the hated ‘Black and Tans’ and a deadly enemy of the revolutionary movement whose guerilla war had the support of the vast majority of people. His arrival in July 1920 coincided with some of the most intensive interactions between the IRA and Crown forces. Barney was based in County Clare in the small town of Feakle. Resistance to British rule was particularly vigorous in this area, a very dangerous place for someone in a British uniform. In December 1921 an uneasy truce was drawn up as the country was partitioned with the creation of six-county Northern Ireland swiftly followed by a vicious Civil War between those in favour of it and those against. The RIC was disbanded the following year and Barney returned to England. When living in Earlsfield he may have been aware of local graves connected to this conflict. Arthur Kenward, an English RIC officer and Lieutenant Henry Genochio are buried in Streatham Cemetery. The grave of Lieutenant Henry Angliss, a member of ‘The Cairo Gang’  killed on the orders of Michael Collins on Bloody Sunday is in Earlsfield Cemetery. 

Barney did well to get out of Ireland in one piece. Back on the mainland he appears to have settled with his young family in Weymouth for a couple of years. There is a story that he may have set up a barber’s business there but been let down by a business partner. For whatever reason, he and Bessie next appear on the electoral rolls in Battersea from 1925, living at 102 Meyrick Road, just north of Clapham Junction. Things around there would not have been a great deal calmer than revolutionary Ireland. A solid working class industrial area, packed with tight-knit streets filled with workers serving the giant Thameside factories; Morgan Crucible, Price’s Candles, Garton’s, various gasworks and distilleries. Barney’s young family removed from the gentle south coast, must have been shocked to enter this overcrowded world of tall chimneys and grim factories belching out pollution. ‘Red Battersea’ with a street named after a Boer general was also highly politicised, an area that stood apart and knew how to fight for its rights. Having produced John Burns, John Archer and Charlotte Despard, its latest political giant was Shapurji Saklatvala, elected Communist MP in 1925 and imprisoned during the General Strike. Support for the Strike was solid and the area was ring-fenced by military as the country teetered on the brink of revolution. 

Just one stop down the line from Clapham Junction but a world away, things were always going to be a little calmer a few miles away in more sedate Earlsfield. Perhaps for that reason Barney and his family came here in 1931, alighting at the hairdressers at 476 Garratt Lane. His teenage family would have been at the stage where they were thinking about careers and a family business was a great opportunity for them to work together. Barney’s father passed away in 1932 so he was now embarking on a new and exciting phase of his life. 

This section of Garratt Lane was a lively stretch with shops and businesses of every kind to cater for its growing largely working-class family-orientated community. Larger industry like Hunt Capacitors and Benhams was more at the Wandsworth end of Garratt Lane, the area north of the railway line renowned for its costermonger community and Romany heritage. In Summerstown, alongside the Wandle was a belt of light industry providing many jobs for local people; Stevenson’s box factory, Masson and Scott and Elm Works. In the 30s the Council took over the building of the Magdalen Park estate allowing more people to settle. An eleven minute trek to Waterloo made it the perfect spot for commuters to settle down and raise a family. The Leather Bottle pub and its bowling club were a social hub and the Deerhurst Club and the snooker hall were very popular. The nearest cinema was the Premier Electric Theatre, renamed the Rex and located just past the station. There were four schools close by and an imposing police station built in 1914 gave everyone a sense of security. Wimbledon Stadium had opened in 1928 and the 1930s were the sport’s golden era bringing crowds of visitors to the area, many arriving at Earlsfield Station passing Barney’s on their way to the dogs. Earlsfield was a solid straightforward area which lacked the swagger of Tooting with its Market, cinemas and lively pubs. A look at the street directory of 1940 shines a light on some of Barney’s neighbours. 

He was sandwiched between Hewlett’s newsagents and Miss Beatrice Bowles’ grocery store at 478. This must have been convenient for picking up snacks and reading material for punters waiting for a trim. On the corner, currently the much-loved Elena’s Cafe was Leslie Jobson’s dining room with the Woodland Dairy next door. A little further along, Mr Willows ran his ‘fried fish shop’, still going strong as the popular ‘Sea Horse’ – surely the best chippy on Garratt Lane. The chinese takeaway at 466 was Albert Foster’s sweet shop. The off-licence on the corner of Steerforth Street was still there with the superbly named ‘Canine Defence League Clinic’ a few doors further on. 

On the opposite side of the road the changes were more apparent. Directly opposite Barney, the current wedding dress supplier at 621 which went on to be the legendary ‘Ace Supplies’ hardware store, reputedly the model for The Two Ronnies’ ‘four candles’ sketch. At that point it was Mr Carlton’s cycle dealers. Next to there was Daniel Lloyd’s ‘ham and tongue’ dealer followed in succession by a drapers, butchers, fruiterer and fishmonger. Many thanks to local resident Maggie Gilbert who took the precious Garratt Lane street scenes featured here in the mid-80s.

At 633, Sidney Bruce’s boot and shoe repair business lasted until the late 90s. Look carefully and you can still see the green paint around the fascia. Next to that was Robert Vise, ladies’ hairdresser, providing a bit of competition for Daphne at 635. That was still going in the late 80s as the exotic sounding Gemelle Hair Design. Heading towards Earlsfield Station, what is now Domino’s Pizza at 617 was James Stevenson’s bakery and next door to that, another competitor for Barney was Percy White, working as a hairdresser at 615. 

A little further down, things get very exciting – at 577, Mabel Bown a photographer in the First World War period was still going strong, her premises are now a nail bar but back then were also the HQ of ‘Earlsfield Dancing Academy’. You can see her name on the awning in this famous photo of the newly formed Wandsworth Battalion marching past in 1915.

Down the road in Summerstown, another rival in the barber business was Albert Kirk at 715 and William Slingerland at 747 whose family have shared the lovely photo above. Their shop was next door to the Stadium Café, most recently a branch of Ladbrokes. Essentially this self-sufficent pre-supermarket era cluster of businesses meant that no one had to shop too far from home. Note the poster on the left advertising ‘greyhound racing’ at the recently-opened stadium. It was all there for them on this one sliver of mid-section Garratt Lane, though a bit further towards Earlsfield station were branches of David Greig, Victor Value and Boots. Times were changing though and in 1930, just a mile down the road Jack Cohen, whose family had a similar Whitechapel Jewish migrant back-story to Barney, was setting up his first market stall in the new Tooting Market. He was of course the founder of Tesco. Both First World War veterans, its fascinating to wonder if the two ever had a chat.

Into this cosy self-sustaining commuter homeliness, the Second World War came crashing. Earlsfield suffered with some small but high-profile incidents which would have shaken the community. Barney was a Warden with a post in nearby Garratt Park. In September 1939, half a million children were evacuated from London, including young Michael Aspel living at 42 Isis Street. He wouldn’t see his four year old brother Alan for five years. Some of the shops on Garratt Lane had their basements heavily fortified with concrete floors and extra strong timber supports to provide civilian shelter. One of these was the Sheehey’s Bonbon sweetshop at 420, now Mr Patel’s newsagents. In the early days of the Blitz, several high-explosive bombs wiped out a terrace of shops at the junction of Garratt Lane and Burmester Road opposite the Prince of Wales. In November fire stations were hit at West Hill and in Balham, killing 20 fire personnel. A few days after the Balham tube disaster, a bomb on the night of 17/18 October 1940 destroyed Waldron Road School, opposite The Leather Bottle and a stone’s throw from Barney’s home. A Home Guard was formed and the below photo was taken in Garratt Green with Franche Court Road in the background. It shows men who Barney Jacobs would surely have known.

In the summer of 1944 the rockets came down fast on south London. If you walk down Summerley Street from Garratt Lane you pass some of the finest old Victorian houses in Earlsfield, but about half way down on both sides the houses are all post-war. Next to the Wandle, a large number of houses close to the railway line and at the end of Skelbrook Street were destroyed by a V1 in the summer of 1944. Presumably the main target being the railway line. In June, a V1 landed behind the Anglo American Laundry, killing six people. St Gregory’s Roman Catholic Church was hit twice and had to be rebuilt. Only the sign over the entrance on Garratt Lane remains from the old church.

Wandle School was severely damaged by a rocket on Penwith Road and there was another on Wilna Road. The worst incident though was on 19 November when 35 people including 14 children were killed by a V2 rocket in Hazelhurst Road, directly opposite Smallwood School. All this would have placed great strain on local people. Barney would very likely have been on call at so many of these. The role of Wardens like him and Thomas Holloway was crucial in keeping morale as much as trying to ensure that people were safe. A very vivid account of her Second World War memories growing up in Earlsfield was recently written by Sylvia Morrison (nee Partleton).

Near the Leather Bottle was a Salvation Army Mission Hall and a small spiritualist Church The family of local resident Arthur Newbon serving in the army and captured by the Japanese received a War Office missing in action presumed dead telegram. Despite several confirmation communications,  his Mother Rhoda had a strong feeling he was still alive. She went to both places and they told her this was the case. He finally returned at the end of the war having been a POW on the Thailand Burma Railway.

Barney and Bessie, as Elizabeth was known, appear to have been pillars of the Earlsfield community. The above photo was taken in Weymouth in August 1954 when he was 62. Business thrived in the fifties as the post-War gloom lifted. Barney and Bessie might even have been tempted to take a bus down Garratt Lane to the Tooting Granada to watch Frank Sinatra’s first ever UK appearance.

Speedway was the next big thing, attracting huge crowds of up to 40,000 people at Wimbledon Stadium. There was even a cycle version on a track in Garratt Park with Winifred Atwell handing out the prizes. Incredibly the gravel circuit survives to this day, a useful spot for young children to learn how to ride a bike. There’s nothing to indicate its exciting previous existence.

Winifred Atwell opened her own hair salon in Brixton around this time, maybe getting a few tips from Daphne along the way. Barney was a regular in the Deerhurst Club, on the corner of Steerrforth Street, throwing darts or on the billiards table. For over ten years he was Secretary of the Hospital Savings Association and the club displayed a special certificate he was awarded. For the last 25 years the site has been the home of a doctor’s surgery.

Barney carried on at the shop until July 1957 when ill health caused him to step back. His death at the age of 65 made the front page of the South Western Star newspaper in December that year. Bess would live on at 476 with Cyril before moving in with Daphne’s family until she passed away in 1983.

The newspaper described how he was a real friend who very often cut people’s hair for free and would home-visit older customers who were too ill or frail to go to the shop. It also mentioned his Second World War service ‘No matter where or when the bombs fell in the vicinity, Barney somehow always seemed to be on the spot giving words of encouragement to the victims and worrying about his own safety least of all’.

With Cyril now at the helm, the shop carried on for over thirty years. George Yiolides took over the reins at Goodfellas in 2016. He really appreciates the heritage of the shop and was thrilled to welcome Daphne and her nephew Stephen to the shop in 2018. Here she met up with long-time customers like Alan and Russell who remembered Barney. It was great to get their visit featured by a local newspaper. After Cyril’s retirement 476 was run by Tony who eventually sold it to Savvas who named the business after the hit Martin Scorcese gangster film. 

All are welcome to join me for ‘Barney’s Wandle Ramble’ on Saturday 9th September, climaxing in a plaque unveiling ceremony outside the shop. What a great moment, not just reflecting on Barney Jacobs and a business that has survived so many ups and downs and still thrives after more than a century but also the power and value of people who quietly contribute so much to the community. The plaque indeed celebrates all small, independent businesses who have been through so much in recent years and continue to add personality and character, brightening our lives through their presence on what would otherwise be a very dull homogenised high street. Barney, George, Daphne, Cyril, Tony, Thomas, Percy and all the others, we salute you!

There is a network of streets on Planet Tooting that produce the occasional flourish of most unusual planting, some of which would not be out of place on a tropical island or in a rain-forest. There are also vibrant bursts of scarlet and pink camelias, roses and ceanothus. A green-fingered Imam is renowned for his exquisite sunflowers. A much-loved green space used as a sports field has the richest, most chocolate-cake like soil. Its borders, a forager’s dream of grapes, figs and the plumpest blackberries in the Wandle Valley. In the neighbouring Cemetery, once part of the nursery but now separated, two lime trees have fused together forming an arch, nature as ever showing the way forward. All of these wonders become all the more apparent when you know that for almost a century, this was the site of the highly acclaimed Tooting Nursery and the domain of gardening genius William Rollisson and his sons. 

I refer to it as the ‘Lost Nursery of Blooming Tooting’ simply because there is so little known about it. We would like that to change, which is why we want to put up a historic plaque in Moffat Road later this year. The site is bang-on where the glasshouses used to be. They really deserve it because in reality the name ‘Rollisson’ is widely known in gardening circles and a quick google will give you an idea of how far back they go and how significant they were. Digging for them online offers up the never-ending promise of revealing something exciting and exotic; reports of an orchid from Java first revealed at the Rollisson nursery in 1842  or an exquisite illustration in a gardening magazine of some wildly coloured, extravagantly-named specimen sent to Tooting from Madagascar or Nepal. Its almost as exciting as the adventures of the plant-hunters themselves, many of whom set off on their travels around the world on the instruction of the Tooting Nursery.

This is the Wandle Valley and at this point its rich alluvial soils, hydrated by a network of springs and watercourses give the area its name ‘Springfield’ and made it perfectly appointed to grow the most wonderful things. The name is most commonly associated with the hospital which has stood on the high ground overlooking all this since 1840. That is still going strong but is also now the site of a major development and the creation of London’s first public park since the 2012 Olympics. For many years the hospital was supported by its own farm and the growing tradition endures through the wonderful Share Nursery. All of this happens in the middle of a very densely-populated area, a network of green spaces which all have a horticultural heritage. Streatham Cemetery and Fishponds Field were once part of the Rollissons’ Nursery. Aboyne estate was part of Springfield Farm. Welcome to ‘The Green Fields of Blooming Tooting’.

At the very heart of all this and prominent on any of the old maps circulating from the 1860s/1870s is the Tooting Nursery, occasionally referred to as Springfield Nursery. On the one above the glasshouses are indicated by the cross-hatched boxes, most in the area of what are now Moffat and Hereward Roads. The Nursery was sandwiched between the grounds of two manor houses and nestled alongside an odd collection of mis-shaped water features whose legacy lives on through the naming of Fishponds Road. It was owned and managed for the entire period of its existence by the Rollisson family. These ‘ponds’ provide endless fascination, they were still all in place in the last years of the twentieth century, but by 1916, Gatton Road had been built over the most southerly channel. Living in one of these manor houses, Park Hill, was a wealthy philanthropist, Eliza Bell, known as ‘Lady Bountiful’. Her death in 1914, paved the way for major housebuilding in the 1920s. The main fish pond would be filled in and preserved as a playing field. St Augustine’s Church on Broadwater Road was built in 1929.

The best description of the Nursery recalls a period around 1860 when it probably had its biggest footprint. Thanks to Andrew Pettigrew’s evocative account in The Gardeners’ Magazine and a map from about a decade later, we can pinpoint the location of some of its key features and most certainly the main hub of the business which would have been entered from Upper Tooting Road. This was very close to the ‘dwelling houses’ of both George and William Rollisson who not only grew up here themselves but would raise their own families, among the flowers and ferns. I’m hoping some of their descendants might read this one day and get in touch!

Its quite hard to pinpoint when the Nursery was established. An illustrated handbill from 1875 suggests the firm had been trading for a century. William Rollisson Senior was born in 1765 so unless he was a child prodigy that is unlikely. From a well-established family, originally from Whitkirk near Leeds, he came to London as a young man and married Jane Evans in Lambeth in 1795. The land on which the nursery was established had been purchased in an auction by Thomas Rollisson, William’s father in 1767. Some of this extended to the other side of what is now Upper Tooting Road and was run as a nursery by Alexander Hay who supplied roses to the Duke of Bedford. Rollisson sold some of his land to Samuel Rush in 1785 and this was leased back to Rollisson for use as a nursery. This appears to be the point where William stepped forward to run it. All five of their children were born in Tooting. Sons William and George would eventually take over the business. They had three younger sisters; Ann, Grace and Harriet. Accounts of William’s experimental propagation and cross-pollination with cape heathers suggest the work was begun in Tooting in the last decade of the eighteenth century. 

The late eighteenth century saw a craze for collecting and cultivating species of Erica – ‘Cape heaths’ from southern Africa. It was similar to the previous century’s tulipmania and orchidmania still to come. With the cost of employing collectors becoming prohibitive, skilled and innovative nurserymen like William Rollisson embarked on a process of ‘cross-pollination’, creating their own hybrid versions. Experts agree that the main man in this field was William Rollisson. Intruigingly he didn’t tell anyone about what he was doing so his work remained unknown. He was most certainly doing this for commercial reasons but if it stopped hordes of plant collectors pillaging the beautiful flora on the Cape, then good on him. This was also a time of continual warfare all over the world so why put anyone’s life in danger. Rollisson’s secret work was only revealed publicly by his son on the pages of the gardening press in 1843 in which the names of 90 hybrids were listed. Just down the road in Mitcham, also dabbling in Cape heath hybridisation was Reverend William Herbert, one-time Dean of Manchester. Victorian gardening magazines like The Gardeners’ Chronicle contain a wealth of fascinating material including no doubt many more illuminating nuggets about the Rollissons. Many of these can be accessed online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Ericas were very much William Rollisson’s thing but he tried similar experimentation with azaleas, rhodedendrons and perlagoniums. Half a century of hybridising in Tooting means that a great many plants in circulation in this country were first raised here in the Lost Nursery. With no photography, these heathers also resulted in the production of a number of very expensive illustrated books such as the one put together by Henry Cranke Andrews. Many of these can be viewed online and the joy of stumbling across a gorgeous specimen of some exotic multi-coloured species raised in the Tooting Nursery is always a possibility.

In the mid-nineteenth century Victorian society went crazy for orchids, the ultimate ‘must-have’ plants and status symbols. Plant hunters were sent by nurseries to the ends of the earth in search of rare discoveries. According to Pettigrew, the Tooting collection was one of the largest and the best in the country, The Rollisson orchid connection was well established when Hugh Cuming sent a sample of Aphrodite’s Phalaenopsis, Greek goddess of beauty from the Phillipines in 1837. William Rollisson made it flower the same year. Having grown from being recorded as a walled ground and kitchen garden with a dwelling and hothouses just two acres in size in 1803, by the late 1830s and the dawn of the Victorian age it was 45 acres in extent. 

After William Rollisson Senior’s death on 24 April 1842 at the age of 76, the business was taken over by his sons William and George. There followed some highly successful and eventful years. Tooting was in the news in 1849 when 120 children at Drouet’s pauper hospital, close to the nursery died of cholera. It was a cause of immense local shame. Charles Dickens visited the area and wrote about it. The Nursery was mentioned in some of the reports with regard to a stagnant ditch supplying manure for the grounds. They strongly disputed any claim of negligence. 1851 was the year of The Great Exhibition. Pages of the gardening publications were awash with news of their achievements over the following decades. 

A magnificent account of the Nursery in its prime appeared in The Gardeners’ Magazine on 7 October 1893, written by Andrew Pettigrew. Born in Ayrshire, the son of a shoemaker, he worked his way up to become Head Gardener at Cardiff Castle. He had been employed by the Rollissons some 30 years before and the 1861 census sees him lodging at 104 Mitcham Road. The following year he married his wife Agnes at the nearby St Nicholas Church. In 1867 he took up a position as head gardener to the Marquis of Bute. His recollection provides a detailed and heartwarming review of a lost era. Everything went after an auction in the nearby Castle pub in 1880. It must have been very odd for anyone living there at the time. One moment the area resembled a mini Kew Gardens, the next it was a building site. ‘A region of villas and nursery gardens, very pleasant’ as described by James Thorne in 1876 quickly became streets of terraced houses. Hereward and Moffat Road emerged upon the key inner sanctum of the Nursery. Selkirk Road with its nod to Daniel Defoe’s castaway inspiration would have evoked tropical images any plant hunter would have recognised. The remainder of the area had to wait until the passing of Lady Bountiful before more house-building kicked in.

One tiny enclave of growing has survived in the form of a small allotment at the end of Herlwyn Gardens, a close off Hebdon Road. From what I gather some exceptional produce is harvested here and some of is displayed at the annual Transition Tooting ‘Foodival’. There are also a rather odd arrangement of back alleys and enclosed spaces between the houses in the Fishponds Road area, perhaps best appreciated by a view from overhead. These may well be indicators of various pathways and divisions in the Tooting Nursery. 

In his article, Pettigrew recalled that his first visit was on 17 April 1860, a precise date because it was also the occasion of a notorious ‘world title’ boxing match between Tom Sayers and John Heenan. This was the time the Rollissons employed William Bull as a collector. He went on to greater fame with his own nursery in Chelsea and is renowned for saving the Sri Lankan (Ceylon) coffee industry by supplying a variety of plant immune to disease. Another big name to benefit from the Rollisson tutelage was James Veitch, whose father sent up to Tooting from Exeter to be apprenticed. The story goes that the Rollissons declined any payment and James Veitch senior thanked them by buying a collection of orchids from which they caught the bug. The company bought extensively when the Tooting Nursery was sold in 1880 after George’s death. 

Pettigrew clearly had great affection for his time in the Tooting Nursery. ‘Famed near and far for its large collection of hard-wooded ericas, New Zealand plants, orchids, stove and greenhouse plants and new and rare plants of all kinds. The home nursery and grounds were extensive and complete and contained a great variety of soils suitable for the propagation and cultivation of nearly all kinds of hardy plants and a pond of nearly an acre for growing aquatic plants. The grounds were favourably suited for doing a large trade and were supplied with soft water from a moat dividing the grounds from the adjoining property. The portion of the nursery containing the principal plant houses abutted the public road to London, some six miles distant from London Bridge. It was about two acres in extent, enclosed by high walls on the south, east and west side and by Mr George Rollisson’s dwelling house and a large temperate plant house on the north side. A broad gravel walk bordered with grass plots and flower beds on either side, divided the ground in the centre and beyond these were the plant houses. The show house, a very large span-roofed structure with an ornamental lantern on top, was entered by a massive door in the end from the public road. It had a gravel walk all round with a broad bed in the centre, a stage on the south side close to the side lights and a border on the north side between the hot-water pipes and the wall. The bed in the centre was planted with camelias, rhodedendrons, aralias, araucarias, tree ferns and a great variety of plants from the temperate zones. The pillars supporting the roof, and the back wall of the house were covered with the best variety of climbers planted out permanently in the beds. The stage round the south side of the house was kept gay with a miscellaneous collection of flowering and foilage plants in pots. This was reckoned at the time to be the finest show house in the trade and deservedly so. I have a vivid recollection of the grand effect the climbers had when in flower. Passifloras, tacaonias, clematis and many others hanging down in long festoons from the roof around the principal entrance and the counting-house door – which had an entrance from this house – and the tall, stately tree ferns spreading out their large fronds in a graceful form, produced a sight not easily forgotten.’

The overall extent of the Tooting Nursery was in fact around sixty two acres by the 1850s and employing 43 men. In 1866 it was reported that they had been paying their gardeners 15 shillings a week for the last 25 years. Recruitment advertisements indicate that high standards were expected. In 1848, ‘As gardener – a middle-aged married man without incumbrance, who understands his profession in all its branches. Can have a good character from the gentleman he has just left and one of four years with the gentleman he lived with previously. His wife if required, could superintend a small Dairy or take the management of poultry or the charge of a Lodge – Direct to S.F., Messrs Rollisson & Sons, Tooting.’

Pettigrew went on to recall the craze for giant tree ferns, large consignments of which arrived from Australia in gigantic boxes, twelve foot by four. Bound together tightly with iron hoops, these trunks were stripped of their roots and foliage. They were unpacked and immediately potted in a moist shaded house until they started to re-shoot. He remembered the first arrival in Europe of Begonia Rex from Java, a surprise package, unknowingly included in a consignment of other species, sold in a London auction room and immediately re-purchased for £100. Cissus discolor apparently arrived in this country in similar fashion from south east Asia. I think there may be one sitting in a pot behind me as I write this… 

Behind the hard-wooded propagating pits was Mr William Rollisson’s house. ‘A modern erection with garden and pleasure grounds attached, beautifully laid out and planted with rare trees and shrubs and the best varieties of conifers then introduced.’ Rollison by this stage was involved with a new church in Tooting, Holy Trinity, not too far up the hill on high ground looking down across the Nursery and Wandle Valley. Built in 1855 with a tower added in 1860, William Rollisson was a church warden there from 1858 to 1869. With the tower recently renovated, attention focused on elaborate floral ornamentation which contains a frieze of what may very well be a representation of orchids. 

‘The orchid house occupied a site on the south side of the nursery not far from the entrance gate and some little distance away from the other houses. It is needless to say that they were well-grown and the collection was one of the largest and the best in the country, and a good trade was done in these plants. I remember the late Mr William Rollisson telling me that the Duke of Devonshire and his gardener Mr Paxton – afterwards Sir Joseph, had on several occasions come over from Chiswick House in a morning and bought several hundred pounds worth of orchids’. 

Paxton was of course at the centre of The Great Exhibition of 1851 which  the Rollissons saw as a great opportunity to amplify their business. The Exhibition was probably the most successful, memorable and influential cultural event of the 19th century. From May to October 1851, the site in Hyde Park would be visited by some six million people. It became one of the defining points of the nineteenth century and the Rollinsons had a presence, running an advertisement in French in the catalogue. As outlined on the pages of The Gardeners’ Chronicle, they won a lot of honours in those few months but John Mylam gardener of one of their top clients Sigismund Rucker appeared to steal the show with his orchids consistently scooping ‘Large Gold Medals’.

Sigismund Rucker is another part of the Rollisson story. A name that pops up all over the place in Wandsworth he is buried in the Old Garratt Lane Cemetery next to Southside. With a rhododendron named after him he was also a keen orchid grower. From his house on West Hill, Rucker raised orchids for over 40 years and also, from 1844 onwards, had fine collections of trees, shrubs, ericas and azaleas. His patronage of the nursery trade lead to him being dubbed ‘Prince of Gardeners’and he sponsored plant-hunting exhibitions to places like Columbia and Venezuela.

The ledgers in Kew Gardens Herbarium archive show a fascinating list of plant samples sent to the Botanic Collection from all over the country and overseas. A regular contributor were the Rollissons with a steady stream of plants, shrubs and bulbs moving westward to Kew. Elegant Victorian script painstakingly lists details and quantities of what was received.

Some of these have been preserved, pressed in great dusty scrapbooks, groaning with ancient samples of plants and flowers all carefully mounted and annotated. Looking through these precious volumes it was almost overwhelming to imagine the shrivelled specimens contained in them had been grown in Tooting soils some 170 years before. 

As well as orchids, Rollissons’ fern collection was one ‘of the best in the trade’ their elaborate catalogues ‘the best then sent out by any firm’. They also did a great trade in the mid-century in perlagoniums, fuchsias, petunias and new roses. Propagating houses, pits and frames were situated outside the walks on the west side. ‘Roses and rhodedendrons were grafted here by the thousand, the former making fine saleable plants, fit to be sent out by the month of May. Thousands of rhodedendrons were raised annually from seed in this department. The seeds were sown in six inch pots in peaty soil and placed in cold frames to germinate. When the plants were large enough to be bedded out in nursery rows they were removed to their grounds at Beddington (the soil of which was more suitable to their growth than that of the home nursery). I have never seen such fine healthy batches of seedling hybrid rhododendrons as those raised here anywhere since. The climate and treatment they received at the Tooting Nursery seemed to suit them admirably. The seeds germinated like grass and the foilage assumed that bright glossy colour peculiar to plants in robust health. Hardy herbaceous and Alpine plants and indeed all the newer kinds of flowering shrubs and conifers were propagated here in great quantities. The craze for plants with variegated foilage had set in and there was a growing demand for trees and shrubs of all kind with ornamental foilage. Collectors ware rummaging everywhere abroad in search of novelties and some of the best plants now in commerce were introduced by the Rollisons’.

The nursery at Beddington referred to by Pettigrew was almost certainly what was known as the ‘American Nursery’. In December 1872 notice was given that the Rollissons intended to sell off their entire stock there. This included 5000 Rhodedendrons, 2000 Kalmia Latifolia and 1000 choice hardy heaths. A further notice in February the following year gave notice of an auction to sell the premises of the American Nursery, the package included ‘many thousands of choice hybrid rhodedendrons and other choice American plants’.

Probably the most distinctive reminder of the Rollisson’s Nursery, preserved as a playing field to this day and much loved by its community is Fishponds Field, entered via Hebdon Road. On all the maps from the 1860s/1890s, this stands out alongside a cluster of other water features as a large rectangular lake. The ground is still soft as anyone playing football there through the winter months will testify. I can vouch for that as well, on a daffodil-planting exercise a few years back, I dug down into the rich moist soil only for water to bubble up and almost fill some of my holes! Very hidden away with only one discreet entrance on a quiet road, many local people were unaware of the Field’s existence. Over the last few years, thanks to the work of a dynamic community group ‘Forever Fishponds’ public access to this very unique place is improving all the time.

The ’ponds’ probably date from monastic Norman times and the settlement in the area of monks from Bec Abbey in France. Further generations would adapt them as a decorative attraction to lavish gardens attending their Manor houses. Queen Elizabeth the First may even have gazed across the waters during her stay at one of these in 1600. The innovative Rollisons were unlikely not to put the main pond to good use when their turn came to be its custodian.

‘The pond for growing aquatic plants and the marshy ground for osiers lay between the rhododendron propagating houses and the fruit tree and shrub department. The pond of nearly an acre was used for growing aquatic plants, of which there was a good collection, including the rarest kind. Adjacent to it was a good breadth of marshy land for osiers which were made into baskets, crates and hampers, used in the trade for despatching orders to all parts’.

Those blackberries, figs and grapes I mentioned may be a legacy of this fruit tree department; ‘Apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, medlars, mulberries, gooseberries, raspberries, currants, almonds, filberts, walnuts etc. Great pains were taken in growing, training and keeping the best type of fruit trees true to name and none but the best and those that could be thoroughly relied upon were sent out to the purchaser.’

‘Few gardeners over the last 35 years will have not been familiar with the name Rollisson if by nothing else than for growing their famous Telegraph Cucumber’ said Pettigrew. Originally cultivated in India, the cucumber was a favourite of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife. Apparently by the eighteenth century people had grown suspicious of vegetables which couldn’t be cooked but in the 1860s, the Rollissons helped by Heinz introducing it as a key ingredient in their pickles had helped re-established its popularity.

The obsessive search for a straight cucumber had gripped Victorian gardeners and the Rollissons once again came up with the goods. In 1868 their ‘Telegraph Improved Cucumbers’ were reported to be up to 26 inches in length. ‘It is extremely productive, each plant being able to carry as many as six to eight fruit. The skin is smooth and glossy; the flesh white, crisp and firm. Once grown…any gardener will not want to grow any other sort’.  The variety is still available today.  

Also revived in Tooting around this time was the daffodil flower. The Rollisons overlapped for a decade or so with Peter Barr ‘The Daffodil King’ who lived at various points along Garratt Lane and at Bells Farm, located roughly opposite the main entrance of Streatham Cemetery. Its quite likely that he collaborated with William and George in their later years. It is so fitting that a wonderful local organisation called ‘Friends of Streatham Cemetery’ have such a presence in this very special place. Since 1892 it has been a place where people are laid to rest but the spirit of the nurserymen and gardeners who once toiled here is very strong. It is one of the most tranquil retreats in this busy corner of London and a haven for nature and wildlife.

William Rollison died in 1872 in his 73^rd year. With other members of the family he is buried in West Norwood Cemetery. The Gardeners Chronicle describes him as ‘A genial, unassuming man, kind and considerate towards all about him and though advancing in years had shut him out from taking an active part in business matters, he will pass away amidst the keen regrets of a wide circle of friends’. George was very sadly also not a well man. The same source reported his death in 1880 as ‘a happy release from a state of paralysis and unconsciousness in which he had been lying for 14 years – long enough for him fortunately to have been in ignorance of the recent break-up of the world famous establishment of which he had been one of the chiefs’. Such a very sad conclusion to the Rollisson story. It appears that George was out of circulation from 1866 and also never knew about his brother’s death. 

The break up referred to appears to have started in November 1873 with an auction notice advertising the five day sale of literally hundreds of thousands of plants and ferns. The reason was in ‘consequence of a great portion of the Freehold being required for building purposes’. This included ‘about 40 acres of valuable nursery stock, comprising 10,000 border shrubs, 10,000 Cupressus Lawsoniana, 5000 deciduous flowering shrubs, 4,500 roses, 35,000 fruit trees, 40,000 ornamental trees including a fine collection of weeping willows, 14,000 polars, 4,000 limes, 14,000 oval-leafed and common privet, 150,000 climbers.’ Over the next few years the Nursery maintained a strong presence on the pages of the gardening press with a notable advertising campaign in 1877. They continued to win prizes and a Thomas Rollisson, William’s son is mentioned as superintending one show. There were still over 50 hothouses in place at the time of George Rollisson’s death, but its best years were now behind it.

William Hugh Gower is indicated as the Rollisson manager at this time and with George incapacitated he must have played a large role at the company for much of the 1870s after William’s death. He was previously a foreman in the orchid and ferns department at Kew which he left in 1865. Whilst there his specialist orchid knowledge saw him chosen to help select plants for Charles Darwin. His interest in orchids at the time lead to the book ‘The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects’ in 1862 which paved the way for the publication of ‘On the Origin of Species’. Gower also worked as a collector for Benjamin Samuel Williams of the Victoria and Paradise Nursery. He was a prolific contributor to The Garden magazine. He died of influenza in 1894.  

Another notable nurseryman who collaborated with Darwin was Robert Parker whose Exotic Nursery was based the other side of Garratt Lane in an area between Smallwood and Fountain Road. Its legacy endures with some stunning front garden displays. Much smaller than Rollissons, it did however punch above its weight and was acclaimed for its orchids and German irises. It was sold off at the same time as Rollisson’s and the name of one of the roads which replaced it, Rostella Road surely alludes to its orchid-growing heritage. The rostellum, a small projection in the flower which prevents self-fertilisation is the part of the orchid that so fascinated Charles Darwin. In the last few years, the discovery that prolific Royal Horticultural Society orchid artist Nelly Roberts is buried in nearby Lambeth Cemetery has revived interest in local orchid activity. 

Things did indeed come to a conclusion very quickly for the Tooting Nursery. Throughout 1878 and 1879 there were notices of impending liquidation. Some of them indicate a determination to find a buyer who might continue a nursery business on the site of a distinguished company that was ‘enjoying a worldwide reputation and considered to be one of the leading nurseries in the kingdom’. In a rapidly changing world that was always going to be a tall order.

In July 1880 The Gardener’s Chronicle reported that ‘one of the most successful sales of building land that has hitherto been held in that locality took place last Monday at the Castle Tavern, Tooting’. The estate of six acres, the nursery stock, greenhouses and other erections. All the plots were sold for a total of £8,500. The last word should go to Andrew Pettigrew. ‘But alas! This once famous nursery with all its manifold advantages has succumbed and the place where it once stood and flourished is built over with houses and nothing of it is left but the name of Rollisson. A name that will long be remembered and esteemed in the gardening world as the gentlemen of the trade’.

Along with Andrew Pettigrew, no one has contributed more to preserving this history than Graham Gower who so kindly shared his papers and extensive research on this area with us. Without his generosity none of this could have happened. Most memorable of all was a wonderful Walk we did with Graham and the children of Broadwater Primary School, now sadly itself soon to be consigned to history. I am also very grateful to everyone at The Herbarium, Kew Archives, the Lindley Library and RHS Library in Wisley who were so helpful when researching both the Tooting Nursery and Peter Barr. Thanks also to the Hicks family for the photo of their ancestor, William Rollisson. Please do support our campaign for a blue plaque so all of this history can be more widely known and appreciated.

The Corruganza box factory in Summerstown, south west London, came onto my radar when I was doing a local First World War centenary project. Going over 1911 census records I was surprised  how many women, worked as ‘fancy box makers’ or were employed there in some other way. Later on I even met a few of them, like Rose Mangan and her sister Shirley who worked for the company, then known as Hugh Stevenson & Sons around the time of WW2.  Back in 1911, if women didn’t work at one of the numerous laundries in the area, it was very likely they were employed by the box factory. I then came across Bronwen Griffiths’ account of what happened there a few years before, published in a book co-authored with Jo Stanley some 30 years ago called ‘For Love and Shillings’. This was the Corruganza Boxmakers strike and 115 years down the line, we intend to commemorate it with a blue plaque!

There appeared to be very little else written about it, but I started featuring the story on my Guided Walks. So many people seemed to have a relative or friend who worked at the factory. One of my neighbours popped up in a photo of the works football team in 1960. Another produced a watch and chain his Dad was given for long service. It appears the factory was around in some form until the late 1980s but no one seemed to have heard about the Corruganza Boxmakers. 

They were 44 young women who in the summer of 1908, went out on strike. This was in response to a pay cut in the firm’s tube rolling, cutting and glueing department and the dismissal of a forewoman with sixteen years experience who had raised objections. A young, largely uneducated group whose action would have been at great personal risk, they were very quickly supported by Mary Macarthur and the recently formed National Federation of Women Workers. Within a month, the strike was over, the women were reinstated and apart from a small deduction in one area, rates resumed to what they were before. History was surely made as the Summerstown women showed the power of a collective response and Mary Macarthur employed tactics which would be used to help women in future actions at Cradley Heath and Bermondsey. 

This was a poor area and work at the factory on the banks of the River Wandle was already irregular so reductions of up to 50 percent would have bitten deeply. Cardboard box making was traditionally a home-industry but recent advances had increased mechanisation, making for a  dangerous environment where injury was always a possibility. Mutilated hands, fingers stained brown by the stinking glue, extreme exhaustion and stomach pains caused by manipulation of heavy machinery. Some of the workers were  girls as young as 12 or 13, ‘small, nimble fingers’ apparently being advantageous in assembling a box. 

As Mary Macarthur cranked up the publicity, details of the exchanges and discussions were covered in the local and national press. Mary’s own channel was The Woman Worker, the weekly journal of the National Federation of Women Workers. In this she defined the pay cut as an attempt by the newly promoted owner’s son to impress his father by replacing troublesome workers with younger girls whom he could pay less. Hugh Stevenson had established his first box factory in Manchester in 1859 and the Summerstown works from around 1896 on the site of the Garratt Printworks, an old calico mill. The name ‘Corruganza’ adopted in 1900 reflected the popularity of relatively new corrugated board. By 1914 the company employed 2,610 workers. Recently re-married, Hugh Stevenson had relocated to the area and was raising his new family in Wimbledon with a governess called Barbara Clarson. She may have been the inspiration for the film version of Mary Poppins. (Stevenson’s youngest son Robert went on to work for Walt Disney and directed many very popular films including Mary Poppins). 

Mary’s passionate amplification of the strikers’ cause saw donations flood in from all over the country, enough to provide each striker with five shillings a week relief. The highlight of the campaign, plotted largely in Jerry’s Coffee Tavern on Garratt Lane was a fundraising march to Trafalgar Square. They even had a special song to sing along the way; 

“If you can’t do any good, don’t do any harm; Live and let live, we all know that’s a charm. Doing good for evil – it’s a saying old but true, take my tip- it’s the finest thing to do! I know – you know, quite as well as me, Its no use bearing animosity. If you have an enemy, try his faults to smother. We’re all as good – as good as one another!”

Top-notch speakers from the labour movement that day included Margaret Bondfield and Herbert Burrows, a key organiser in the Bryant & May Matchgirls’ strike, as well as some of the boxmakers themselves. A set of printed postcards of the occasion helped bolster the strike fund and give us an insight into some of those involved. The names of the great majority of the 44 are unknown, for fear of repercussions. Some do get a mention on the pages of The Woman Worker. Polly Cambridge and Annie Willock who spoke at the event. Alice Chappell who needed great physical strength to work as a roller was crudely referred to by the Stevensons as ‘The Battersea Bruiser’. 14 year old Mike Smith heroically refused a management offer to replace a striking worker. Mary Williams was the sacked forewoman, she was eventually offered her job back but declined. Mary Macarthur crucially also made sure that key Corruganza clients; Cadbury and the Cooperative Wholesale Society were notified of the dubious labour practices in Summerstown. 

Thanks to those 1911 census records we do know the names and can walk past the homes of some of the women who worked at the Corruganza box factory around that time and who would have surely been very familiar with the strike. Young women like Alice (19) and Nellie Webb (15), sisters from 52 Headworth Street. Or another pair of sisters a few doors along at No24, Ella Craven (17) and Dorothy (14). On the other side of the road, Rhoda Goodbody (15) from No27. In neighbouring Maskell Road were Annie Stanley (17) and Emma Hammond (19). Louisa Collins (45) was at 11 Turtle Road. All these addresses are so close to where this plaque will be placed. Flood damage in 1968 saw these streets literally washed away, to be replaced by Burtop Road estate.

Two families sometimes lived in these small terraced houses, like at No11 Bellew Street where Mary Kate West (43) was a boxmaker, as were two of her daughters Mary (18) and Annie (16). Anne Parkman (36) was the fourth boxmaker at this address. They probably walked to work with Marion Buckley (15) who lived a few doors along at No17. At 8 Squarey Street the Dewar family had a house to themselves and they needed it as 14 people lived there. Their 12 children included Agnes (14) and two boys John (21) and William (19) all working at the box factory. Alice Grenville (14), a ‘fancy packer’ was resident at 49 Burmester Road with two younger sisters probably keen to follow her into the factory.

At 38 Aboyne Road, Mary Homes (24) was a ‘fancy box hand’, presumably a step up from her sister Lily (16) a straightforward ‘box hand’. Next door at No40 was another boxmaker Evelyn Drake (21) living with her widowed mother who worked as a charwoman. At 841 Garratt Lane, now a Chinese takeaway, was boxmaker Edith Wilkes (26) daughter of a boot repairer. Emily Smith (28) and her sister-in-law Mary Ward (19) both ‘cardboard box makers’ were at 753 Garratt Lane – now the site of Burmester House. At No1 Keble Street, John Hames (49) was a ‘gas engine driver’ at the Corruganza. Ethel (25) and Sybil (19) were boxmakers and son Alfred (22) a fitter at the factory. Across the road at No8 were Esther Figgest (22) and her sister Rosa (18) both ‘fancy boxmakers’. A few doors down at No16 was Louie Moorhouse (17). Lilian Cousins (17) ‘cardboard boxmaker’ lived at 80 Summerstown near the old White Lion pub. There are so many more.

Discussions with the Board of Trade resolved the dispute fairly swiftly. Sophy Sanger (above) who went on to have a distinguished career as a labour law reformer and became the first woman to become Section Chief of the International Labour Organization, represented the strikers. Clearly the reputation of the Corruganza had taken a knock. A further newspaper spat in The Times saw the firm deny it had given way. Mary Macarthur was quick to counter that. By 1920 the company had reverted to calling itself Hugh Stevenson & Sons and it seems there was further unrest around that time. A major fire in 1924 caused extensive damage to the site and 600 workers were temporarily laid off. 

Despite all that, they remained a major employer in the area for over six decades and further changes of name. Their own publicity material including some fascinating film footage from 1937 portrays a community-focused organisation and a contented workforce enjoying lunch-breaks on the banks of the Wandle, excursions to Brighton and lots of sport and social activities. Older residents have memories of the firm’s boxes being used to salvage people’s belongings from bombed houses.

In 2015 Mary Macarthur made the news again with a blue plaque on her home in Golders Green. We got in touch with Cathy Hunt who was putting together ‘Righting the Wrong’ a new book about her. Cathy visited the area to tour the factory site and hear more. She came back again to deliver a talk at Tara Arts. Clearly the story of the courageous young women who took on a powerful opponent in the summer of 1908 needed to be more widely known and for that reason we will be unveiling a commemorative plaque on Saturday 20th May. Funds for that have been raised over a two year period through people coming on our Walks and generously donating. These have often been part of programmes such as London Unseen, the annual Wandsworth Heritage Festival or Wandle Fortnight.

The plaque won’t be on the site of the factory – still an industrialised area and not easily accessed. Instead it will be placed in a prominent position on a nearby housing estate, defiantly looking away from the factory towards Garratt Lane, the road along which the women marched on their way to Earlsfield Station and Trafalgar Square. Before they were irretrievably damaged by severe flooding in 1968, this was the location of a cluster of terraced streets in which many of the factory workers lived. The plaque will be passed everyday by thousands of people on one of south London’s busiest roads and is close to Burntwood, a large girl’s secondary school. Before the unveiling event I will be doing a Guided Walk of the area, visiting the factory location and passing the homes of many of the workers. Everyone is welcome and we will be joined by guest speakers and feature a beautiful banner celebrating the Corruganza Boxmakers, created by local artist Sharon McElroy. Full details below!

Exiting Tooting Broadway tube station, the imposing bronze figure of King Edward the Seventh seems to gently usher visitors towards the delights of Upper Tooting Road. Like some over-sized regal estate agent, it’s almost like he’s about to give a pitch on what a great place this is to live. Indeed he’s looking in the direction of Totterdown Fields. The construction of the great ‘garden’ estate there mirrored the period of his reign and a home on it would have been the place to be. The statue celebrates a golden Edwardian age, when thousands of arrivals flocked to the new commuter suburb, now just a short tram journey from central London. Great public buildings were built, cinemas opened and the radical Totterdown Fields estate was acclaimed around the world. In 1903, work-in-progress was famously checked by three future kings who rolled up on a decorated tram. The house they visited on Ruislip Street is marked with a plaque.

It was here, in the last years of the first decade of the twentieth century, to No26 Lessingham Avenue that Fanny Fletcher moved from Marylebone with her four adult children and grand daughter Violet. Its possible they might even have been in the crowd of thousands in the above photo, gathered to watch the unveiling of the statue in November 1911. It was here also, in the modest five room flat on Totterdown Fields, just round the corner from where the royal visit was made, that terrible news arrived in the spring of 1912. The great Titanic had sunk on her maiden voyage and Fanny’s youngest son Percy, the ship’s bugler, who had called passengers to dinner on that fateful night, was one of 1,496 lives lost. 

Always looking out for stories to tell on my guided history walks in the Tooting and Wandsworth area, I came upon an interview with Titanic survivor Frank Prentice. It made me wonder if there were any local residents on the voyage. A quick search took me to the Encyclopedia Titanica site and an outline of Percy’s background. The Fletcher family have a lively history and we took a deeper look. Fanny was a farmer’s daughter from the village of Rose Ash near Tiverton in Devon. She married Adam Fletcher in St George’s Church Hanover Square, London on 13 March 1874, they were both 21. He came from Lincolnshire and was working as a coachman. The residence indicated on the marriage register is Lambeth Mews, off Curzon Street in Mayfair. Its still there, now called Clarges Mews.

The Industrial Revolution may have sucked them into the big city but for whatever reason the young couple then moved to Guernsey. It was there, in St Peter’s Port that their first children, George and Alice Rose were born. The Governor General there at the time was a former army officer, The Honourable General St George Gerald Foley. Its quite possible that Adam and Rose worked in his household, for when Foley retired to Frimley in Surrey they appear to have gone with him. Adam worked with horses and as a coachman and the 1881 census picks them up at an address ‘The Stables’ on the estate at Tekels Castle in Frimley. Much of this was destined to be sold off to support the Army Staff College at Sandhurst with part of it submerged beneath the new M3 motorway in the 1960s. 

Back in London, the Fletchers returned to the familiar Mayfair area from at least 1883 and three other children were born. Maud in 1883, Arthur in 1884 and Percy on 3rd February 1887. It seems a strange reverse move, leaving the countryside for the big city and expanding their family, but of course they were following the money. The 1891 census sees the family of five at 10 Bourdon Buildings, just north of Berkeley Square, a small enclave for people catering for the needs of the wealthy, enclosed on all sides by grandeur and privilege. 

The most expensive spot on the Monopoly board, still today a strange world of gentlemen’s clubs and grand hotels. Growing up surrounded by so much excess would have given young Percy a glimpse of his future life and the kind of people he might encounter on a luxury liner. With many coach-houses, stables and farriers’ shops, Bourdon Street’s population consisted predominantly of people like Adam – coachmen, grooms and those involved with horses and carriages. Charles Booth’s notebook from 1899 reports on the abundance of stables and mentions a ‘Home for Fallen Women’. Just around the corner on Davies Street, Bourdon House was the home of the Duke of Westminster who of course owned most of all this.

In September 1898 eleven year old Percy enrolled at St Mark’s School in Marylebone, a distinctive building that still stands on the Old Marylebone Road and possibly where he learnt to play the bugle. It had been a sad year as his father had passed away a few months before and on 17th May was buried in St Marylebone Cemetery, East Finchley. Also the final resting place of our friend, Peter Barr ‘The Daffodil King’. Its possible that Adam Fletcher’s death, at the age of just 45, hastened another move. As the Victorian age came to a close, by 1901 Fanny and four of her children lived in Marylebone at 52 Wharncliffe Gardens, very close to Lord’s Cricket Ground at the junction of Lisson Grove and St John’s Wood Road. Fanny was 46 and no job is indicated, but everyone else was working. George (26) was an architectural draughtsman, Maud (18) a dressmaker and Arthur (16) a clerk for a coal merchant. Oldest daughter Alice had married Harry Goldson in 1897. He was a servant in the employment of John Wodehouse, the Earl of Kimberley, who served as a Foreign Secretary in Gladstone’s government. With Harry now working as a railway guard, they had started a family and were living nearby in Westbourne Park. Meanwhile 14 year old Percy had left school and taken up a job as an enamel and metal worker. 

Wharncliffe Gardens was an imposing set of five storey blocks, built in the late nineteenth century to house people whose homes had been swept away by the railway line entering Marylebone Station. It was named after the chairman of the railway company. A Victorian ‘model dwelling’ providing decent accomodation for working-class people, a typical flat had three bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen and an inside lavatory. Residents were mainly in regular work with good wages. A V1 rocket killed 33 people and destroyed much of Wharncliffe Gardens in August 1944. A memorial for the victims is in the same cemetery where Adam Fletcher is buried. 

At some stage in the first decade of the twentieth century, something triggered the family’s relocation to the rapidly developing suburb of Tooting in south west London. An area where the population had quadrupled over a fifteen year period. The jewel in the crown was the much acclaimed Totterdown Fields Estate, visited by royalty in 1903. It was built over a ten year period between 1901 and 1910, the London County Council’s first cottage estate, 1,244 homes for nearly 9,000 people constructed in the spirit of the art and crafts movement. Combined with a new tram line running from central London, Totterdown Fields kickstarted the evolution of our area into the busy commuter suburb it still is today. The below map shows how it all happened and the red dot indicates the Fletcher’s home. All Saints Church and Hillbrook School were two of the amenities built to serve this new community. Just a short hike across the Common, residents could take a dip in the new Tooting Bathing Lake, to evolve later into our much-loved Tooting Bec Lido.

The building of the estate was not without problems. There was wrangling over the costs of construction, complaints about shoddy workmanship and even resentment from local residents at the prospect of ‘a workmen’s town altering the character of the neighbourhood’. Eliza ‘Lady Bountiful’ Bell, a local philanthropist, well known for her views on ‘progress’ must have been enraged at the new development emerging on the other side of Upper Tooting Road within full view of Park Hill and her own estate. By April 1906, about a third of the houses had been completed. Prospective tenants not only having to show they could pay the quite steep rents but that they could keep a tidy house. The Fletchers’ five room cottage with scullery and bath would have cost between 13/6 and 10/6. With her adult children earning a wage, Fanny would have been able to keep up the payments at 26 Lessingham Avenue. Percy might be considering going to sea but as long as his contributions were received they would be all right. 

The presence of two year old grand daughter Violet at Lessingham Avenue in 1911 seemed strange as all the adult children were listed on the census as single and she wasn’t one of Alice’s children. Records suggest that in the spring of 1908, a woman by the name of Maud Fletcher had a daughter called Violet Marjory at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital in Marylebone. The little girl was baptised at St Mark’s Church, Marylebone on 1st May 1908. No father is indicated on the records. It is possible Violet was born out of wedlock and that as a result of her birth, shortly afterwards the family relocated to the new estate on the other side of London. Welcome to Totterdown Fields. Fanny Fletcher’s name was on the electoral roll at 106 Lessingham Avenue in 1909 and from 1910 to 1913 at No26. This was Percy’s family home and whatever his work, moving to south west London may have lead to him meeting his future wife, Mary Meaney. At the same time as the Fletchers settled into their Tooting home, on 31 March 1909, the keel of a giant ship was laid at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Fuelled by JP Morgan’s money, the White Star Line was about to produce the biggest, fastest most luxurious ship the world had ever seen.

At the age of 24, in September 1911 Percy returned to the St John’s Wood area and was baptised at St Mark’s Church, Hamilton Terrace, just round the corner from where The Beatles crossed Abbey Road. It would have been a short walk up Hamilton Terrace from the old family home at Wharncliffe Gardens. As I write this, very sadly, a fire on the night of 26 January appears to have destroyed much of the 150 year old building. 

Getting baptised was possibly something Percy needed to do before his wedding to Mary Meaney. His life was about to turn upside down. Not only was he getting married to an Irish girl living in Wandsworth but he had embarked on an exciting new career on the high seas. Mary, originally from the town of Kilrush, County Clare, was living at 13 Strathville Road, Earlsfield. Set back from the road on the curious Garratt Lane bend, its easy to walk past St Gregory’s Roman Catholic Church and forget that its there. It was here on the banks of the Wandle that Percy and Mary were married on 7th January 1912. 

Strathville Road is now a very desirable residential street at the Southfields end of the road, a short walk from Wimbledon Park. Many of the houses are painted in pretty pastel shades. The happy couple might have celebrated with a drink in The Pig and Whistle or more appropriately The Sailor Prince on Garratt Lane. The certificate indicates that Mary’s father Thomas, a draper was deceased. One of the witnesses was an ‘A Meaney’, the other was Percy’s brother Arthur. Its hard to guess how much rent Mary was paying in 1912, but a house on Strathville Road is currently offered for monthly rent at £3.6k. 

The dynamic Father Benedict Williamson was the parish priest at the time, he was also an architect and a few years before designed the stunning St Boniface Church in Tooting. He might have been having a day off on 7th January as Father Charles Murphy was the priest who officiated. Father Benedict was very likely involved in this religious procession which took place in the area just a few years later. The Church was destroyed by bombing in 1944 and the present building dates from 1956. By coincidence, its only a short walk past Earlsfield Station and up the hill to 97 Magdalen Road. Opposite the cemetery entrance on the corner of Ellerton Road is the house that was the last residence of Titanic survivor Amelia Lemore, believed to have been rescued in Lifeboat 14. She died there aged 84 in 1950.

Prior to his service on The Titanic, Percy was also a bugler on her sister ship, The Olympic. Interestingly his baptism date on 17 September 1911 was just a few days before The Olympic was due to set sail on her fifth Atlantic crossing. On the marriage certificate Percy indicated his profession as ‘seaman, bugler’. Could his baptism have arisen out of some kind of family desire to ‘keep him safe’ on the seas? He may possibly have been on board as she set out on the Solent on 20th, only for HMS Hawke to run into her side seriously damaging both ships. The voyage was cancelled and The Olympic had to be sent back to Belfast for repairs. This ultimately caused a delay in the completion of The Titanic. No one was seriously hurt but it would have been a frightening premonition of the vulnerability of these great ships.

Percy’s name comes up a lot on the internet in any detailed Titanic items and we are not sure yet when he first went to sea and was part of the crew on The Olympic. This may actually be footage of him! His blowing of the bugle to summon First Class passengers to dinner (as he did on that fateful night) has become an iconic Titanic moment in recent years, captured in the 1998 James Cameron film. He’s also in the 1979 TV movie S.O.S. Titanic. Some accounts suggest he came from Southampton and when he signed on he gave an address which we believe is a mis-interpretation of ‘Lessingham Avenue, Upper Tooting’. Southampton Local History Centre records seem to support this as they acknowledge the address given doesn’t exist. Percy was paid the same rate as a steward, £3,15 shillings a month. This would have allowed for a healthy contribution to the Lessingham Avenue rent.

The Olympic’s maiden voyage to New York was in June 1911 under the charge of future Titanic captain Edward J Smith. It was for a while the largest ocean-going liner in the world, only three inches shorter than The Titanic, which came along a year later. Mary would have known Percy was likely to be away from home for lengthy spells but surely never imagined that three months later he would lose his life on one of these great ‘unsinkable’ ships. Widowed at the age of 27, Mary relocated to Canada, settling in British Columbia, where she remarried in 1917, becoming Mrs James William Yell. Sadly he died of TB just three year later. Mary passed away in Vancouver on 22 October 1968 and was interred in St Peter’s Cemetery, New Westminster. 

Meanwhile a Titanic Relief Fund started a few weeks later and huge amounts were raised to help dependents. Almost certainly that would have been directed towards Mary rather than Fanny and his siblings at Lessingham Avenue. Another relatively new estate in this area was the Heaver in Balham and the company at 223 Balham High Road produced aluminium medals to give to ‘active workers of the Relief Fund’. Many of these turn up online on various auction sites. They bear the title ‘Help Surpasseth Pity’ with an impression of The Titanic at sea on one side and some statistics on the reverse. The relatively new cinemas in the Tooting and Wandsworth area also raised funds and screened newsreel footage of the disaster. The Broadway Cinematograph Palace had opened its doors just ten days after the sinking and the local newspaper reported it showing ‘a splendid series of pictures relating to the Titanic disaster, including Captain Smith on the Bridge and The Carpathia nearing New York with survivors on board’. There was also footage of icebergs off the coast of Labrador.

We’re not sure how much longer Fanny lived at 26 Lessingham Avenue but the loss of Percy was followed by further family tragedies which very likely contributed to her ending up at West Park Asylum. Four years of War and grave economic hardships in the twenties would not have made life any easier. We can’t find any records indicating that George or Arthur served in the First World War, though with such a common name and many British records destroyed its possible. Her eldest son George was listed at Lessingham Avenue in 1911 and working an architect’s assistant, though ‘disengaged’ at the time. In the 1921 census he was an inmate at Kensington Workhouse. Arthur, then aged 26 was employed as a coal clerk in 1911. He married Margaret Noonan in December 1912 and a son William was born the following October. Margaret passed away in 1929 and 1939 records pick Arthur up living in 58 Gipsy Road, Lambeth. Also present were William and his wife Vera. Arthur had climbed the ladder and was now a coal depot manager. 

The life of Evelyn Maud, the dressmaker daughter who was there in 1911 with two year old Violet was to take an interesting and ultimately happy turn. She married an Aussie soldier, Ernest Theophilus Greville on 19 October 1917 at St Matthew’s Church in Marylebone and went back to Sydney with him after the War. Here they had a son, Victor Raymond Greville born in 1922 when Maud was 39. Ernest was seriously wounded at Gallipoli and hospitalised in Egypt. Having turned 40 he voluntarily chose to join the War effort and was very lucky to emerge from the Dardanelles in one piece. His comprehensive military records show he came to Britain on leave in 1916 and presumably ran into Maud not long afterwards. On their marriage register the address indicated was 135 Lisson Grove. Its curious that Fanny’s name is missing, only that of her late father. Having lived on the sea-front at Manly, New South Wales, Maud passed away in 1960, a year after her husband. We haven’t found yet what happened to Violet.

Fanny’s other daughter Alice Rose had eight children, three of whom died in infancy. She lost her husband Harry in 1915 and Alice and her youngest children spent time in 1917 in St Pancras Workhouse. By 1921 she was living with her Mother at 23 Convent Gardens, just off Ladbroke Grove in Notting Hill. Alice is listed as an out of work machinist. She passed away in Hendon in 1956 aged 80.

The next we know about Fanny is that at some point she entered West Park Asylum in Epsom. This was one of a cluster of five mental hospitals constructed on the edge of London to cope with the rapidly increasing number of people in need of care. Hospitals like Springfield and Tooting Bec were already creaking at the seams looking after a generation whose mental health had been shattered by the effect of a decade of War and depression. It was the largest concentration of such hospitals in the country and the place that Fanny Randal Fletcher died on 9th March 1929, one of around 9,000 patients buried in Horton Cemetery. Many of their stories are being told on the Friends of Horton Cemetery website. Alice Mullen gives a harrowing account of working for one of these Epsom Asylums in her book ‘Alice from Tooting’.

So much tragedy, so many upheavels, so many deaths, lives foreshortened, a country which one hundred years ago was blighted by the shadow of War and desperate economic times. Outlined in this account are just some of the family tragedies we know about and who knows what other events helped propel Fanny Fletcher towards West Park. The family’s story is a fascinating insight into the precarious lives of so many people in Britain at that time. We hope we can honour the memory of Fanny, Maud, Percy and everyone else by telling their story on our Walks. Passing St Gregory’s Church, Strathville Road and 26 Lessingham Avenue will never be quite the same again. Totterdown Fields Forever.

The stretch of the Wandle Valley near where I live has a cluster of Victorian cemeteries with enough history to keep any graveyard sleuth fully occupied for several lifetimes. They each have a different charm, but running up the hill towards Wandsworth Prison and the Common, between the railway line and Magdalen Road, Wandsworth Cemetery seems upon first impression, more regimented and less interesting than the others. Little pockets of colour do however spectacularly illuminate it. Whether it’s the flowers, brightly coloured ribbons and bows on elaborate wreaths or grave-side ornamentation symbolic of horses and life on the road, they catch the attention and make you want to stop and say hello. One very striking collection of graves are those of the Hilden family, close to the entrance near Beatrix Potter School. They speak of much-loved family members and cherished memories of lives lived well. Often accompanied by photos of the deceased, the graves are well-tended and are frequently populated with fresh flowers. In many cases there is a seat or somewhere to rest. The headstones and surrounds will most likely bear the symbol of a horse or caravan, or some other motif indicating the heritage of the people who are buried here. Many of them are what I have come to know as ‘The People of Wardley Street’.

There are two small permanent Traveller sites nearby, in secluded pockets along the River Wandle. They are so discreet that many local residents may not even know of their existence. A number of homes in the area display horseshoes, a wheel or some kind of garden ornament alluding to this history. Its not unusual to see a horse and trap go past but the days of a rag and bone man walking his horse and cart up and down the roads off Garratt Lane have passed. It was a common enough occurence twenty years ago and that lingering memory, the presence of the sites and the graves made me want to seek out why there is such a strong Romany and Traveller tradition in this part of Wandsworth. 

There are a few bits and pieces in the local archives but not too much in the history books. What there was however is a lively online presence in ‘Romany Roots’ forums and chat groups, with so many of the memories centred around one particular road, Wardley Street. Its still there, much-changed but nestled between two pubs, the Jolly Gardeners and the Grosvenor Arms. Both would have seen it in its hey-day and could surely tell some tales. The Summerstown182 First World War centenary project researched a couple of soldiers with connections to Wardley Street and I started featuring it on my guided walks. So many people seemed to have had a relative there and spoke proudly of them and the community they came from. When we started commemorating ‘forgotten’ history in this area through putting up plaques, ‘The People of Wardley Street’ seemed an obvious contender.

Things really came to life with the discovery of a lively four page article in a 1948 magazine called ‘The Leader’. On the cover was a photo of George Matthews, ‘Father of the Costers’ tending his horse. There were loads of photos and quotes from residents, some of the names I was already familiar with from the graves in the Cemetery. Here was confirmation that Wardley Street was something special. It was a refreshingly positive and optimistic article about the lives and work of these ‘costermongers’. The usual mentions of ‘horses being kept in houses’ or policemen only visiting the street in pairs were noticeably absent. It focused on the great pride of the people, their hard work, long hours and a world of flowers, horses, family and community.  It hinted that things might soon change and within ten years the houses began to be demolished. A self-sufficient world of mobile shop-keepers and recyclers, people who moved with the seasons, providing flowers and fruit and veg in the summer, logs for the fire in winter, was all but gone. 

By 1957 most of Wardley Street was condemned and the greater part of a lengthy road of eighty homes stretching from Garratt Lane to the Wandle would be exchanged for characterless industrial development. In 1968 the Caravan Sites Act gave local authorities a duty to provide caravan sites for nomadic people. For a while in the early 70s, some of the empty spaces around Wardley Street were rejuvenated as caravans reappeared and community leader Roy Wells asserted his people’s traditional right to live in the area. As a result the council relocated families to the site alongside the Wandle, just over the bridge at the end of Trewint Street in Earlsfield. Cornered uncomfortably between a waste recycling plant and a towering new residential development, nearly fifty years later they are still there. Back in truncated Wardley Street, only three of the original houses and a pub on the corner remain. A fourth house has been converted from former stables. A small new-build care residence called ‘Wardley Street’ supports younger and elderly adults including people with learning disabilities

And Roy was right – before the station, before the rows of terraced houses and factories, before the name ‘Earlsfield’ was even considered, this was an area that had been somewhere that Travellers had long visited. With the Wandle threading its way gently towards the Thames, this stretch of its valley had attracted people on the move, emerging from rural Surrey, seeing an opportunity for livelihood in the rapidly developing city. Pasture by the river was ideal for horses and a seventeenth century map of fields in the All Farthing Manor indicates that where Wardley Street now stands was a plot of land called ‘Horse Leaz’. 

The 1861 census showed two encampments and 68 occupants in seven caravans and five tents at Palmer’s Field, Wandsworth, close to where the bridge would soon be built. Some of these people described themselves as basket-makers and a nearby area of marshland fringing the Thames was famous for its osier beds and a tradition of making baskets from willow shoots. A history preserved in the naming of Osiers Road and Osiers Square. Palmer’s Field was engulfed by the gasworks and is currently submerged by the Riverside West development off Smugglers Way.

In 1871, 50 caravans were noted on nearby York Road and in 1879 the Croydon Advertiser reported that ‘many dozens of tents each holding 8-10 persons’ had appeared in Garratt Lane. Any visions of pastoral life for those stopping along this part of the Wandle were soon dissipated when the Harrison Barber company set up a horse-slaughtering yard close to where the Henry Prince Estate now stands. Its presence spawned a wave of noxious associated industries; bone boiling, glue making, cats-meat production. Maps of the time coyly indicate it as a ‘Chemical Manure Factory’ as if to disguise its true purpose. The best account of what it was like is in a book published in 1893 ‘The Horse-World of London’.

The building of an enormous new ‘Wandsworth and Clapham Union Workhouse’ on Swaffield Road must have cast a further shadow over people living in the area. Those maps however also indicate a patch of greenery, perhaps a small market garden, cheek by jowl with the knacker’s yard and the workhouse. Somehow, between 1874 and 1896, this small cluster of allotments evolved into the fledgling Wardley Street and its neighbours, Lydden Road and Bendon Valley.

A key moment appears to be what happened in 1879 and the purchase by William Penfold and Thomas Mills of a number of houses in the new road. This coincided with the Commons Acts and a number of encampments being moved from Wandsworth and Wimbledon Common. The pair rented out the yards of a number of these dwellings and a Romany/Traveller presence was maintained. In 1880 it was recorded that 25 caravans were stationed in Wardley Street. Around this time, Penfold and Mills were summoned after a report by the local Medical Health Officer claimed that the site was ‘a nuisance and injurious to health’. Their defence was that nomadic people had always lived there and the claims were withdrawn for lack of evidence. Sadly the negativity and prejudice would persist with derogatory and widely-reported comments from Charles Booth at the turn of the century.  

As in neighbouring Battersea, some people would stay here in the winter months before hitting the roads for the fairs and hop-picking in summer time. As more houses were built, some of these families settled in bricks and mortar. Many continued to work with horses and carts, sold flowers or rose early to collect fresh produce from Covent Garden to bring back and sell in the neighbourhood.

A trip down the road in the 1911 census reveals a truly fascinating street of about 80 separate dwellings. So many flower-sellers, hawkers and dealers with an equal amount of general labourers. There are wood-choppers, cutlery grinders, boot repairers, horse handlers and dealers in sawdust. A smattering of musicians, organ grinders, even a ‘street pianist’ would have kept things lively, though one of these indicated that he had been ‘totally blind since nine months of age’. A few of the residents were born overseas in Italy and Austria. A yard at No60 appears to have been home to a cluster of caravans inhabited mostly by families working as flower-sellers; familiar names are Hughes, Hilden, Bassett, Anderson and Smith. Elizabeth Penfold lived in ‘a room above a stable’. At No36 George Matthews (very possibly a relative of the future ‘Father of the Costers’) proudly scrawled across the census form that ‘two sons serving in the 19th Hussars did not sleep here last night’. Quite a few people were gardeners but many of the women worked in a laundry and the Primrose Laundry was conveniently next door in Bendon Valley. There were also quite a few charwomen. Living in a prominent position at No2 was Charlotte Gess, a 71 year old widow ‘of private means’. She was part of a notable family involved in travelling shows.

It was common for organised religion to establish a presence in urban locations where travelling people settled and there was a branch of the London City Mission in Wardley Street. Just across the road on Garratt Lane, The Anchor Church parish magazines reveal sporadic attempts to set the ‘gypsies and flower-sellers’ on the path of righteousness. ‘There are few places in the County of London where aggressive Christian work is more necessary’ it stated and it would seem that Miss Esther Thompson ‘a converted flower-seller’ was a regular speaker. 

One person accounted for in that census was Ernest Briggs, father of ‘The Snowman’ author and illustrator Raymond. He grew up in neighbouring Lydden Road and the locality features in the animated film ‘Ethel and Ernest’, Raymond’s heartwarming homage to his parents. Ethel was a bit snooty about her milkman husband’s roots and he was never keen to bring her home. They ended up living just the other side of King George’s Park in Ashen Grove. 

Around this time an intruiging episode was the visit to the area of about 120 ‘Galician Gypsies’, many of whom were coppersmiths, passing though on their way to South America. Some apparently rented properties in Southfields and Garratt Lane. Others pitched tents on Wandsworth Common. Quite what Ethel would have made of them disturbing her Southfields suburban dream is unrecorded but they created quite a stir with sensationalist press reports fixating on their ‘display of priceless silks, bizarre colours, heavy gold and Oriental luxury’. A young photographer called Robert Scott Macfie spent much time with them documenting their progress with many extraordinary photos. It would have been most unusual if they hadn’t also popped in to visit Wardley Street. 

Two Wars smashed this area apart. The First World War was a big adventure for many, an opportunity to escape the grinding poverty and lack of prospects. Former policeman Harry Daley describes his visits to the street in the 20s and 30s when it was ‘thick with deserters’ and claimed that prospective employers blanched at the name of Wardley Street. Failing to serve the country or show ‘loyalty’ would have been another populist way of castigating ‘The People of Wardley Street’ but doesn’t sit with the stories of many soldiers contributing to the war effort in both conflicts, families like the Hammonds, Woods and Wards of Summerstown, Emmanuel Bassett in the Persian Gulf, Harry Morris in North Africa. At least two Penfold graves in Wandsworth Cemetery commemorate family members killed in the Second World War. A photo of the street festooned in patriotic decorations for the silver jubilee of George V in 1935 would seem to suggest a lack of revolutionary zeal.  

About five years ago I stumbled onto the London Gypsies and Travellers website and discovered their digital heritage map project. We went to an event at City Hall to hear more and met Anna Hoare and Ilinca who have become great supporters. They came on our hugely popular walks and joined an extraordinary event at the Anchor Mission Church on Garratt Lane just before Covid descended upon us in 2020. On a cold Wednesday afternoon, over 100 people piled into the tiny Church to listen to a talk and presentation. So many of them recognised their ancestors or family members in the Leader article. One of them, Noah Hilden, photographed as a boy in 1948 was present. I’ve lost count of how many other people have discovered ancestors featured in that magazine. Penfold, Hilden, Gumble, Matthews, Anderson, Botton, Bassett, Hughes…

At the event, we first raised the prospect of a historic plaque celebrating ‘The People of Wardley Street’. The response was wildly enthusiastic and further Walks since that day and the interest of the wider public have clearly confirmed that the people of this area are keen to see this heritage acknowledged and more widely known. In February, we took it one step further and discovered the yards and sites in the Battersea area. Mills Yard, Donovan’s Yard, Gurling’s Yard, Manley’s Yard are names that regularly pop up in Traveller family histories.

Some of the old press cuttings describing the sites make difficult reading, peppered as they are with racist sentiment and heavy on eulogising the evangelising of the missions. Although few traces remain, it was an education for us to stand at these locations and try to imagine what life was like for country people thrust into the Victorian industrial maelstrom. The tangle of railway lines which seem to come from every angle in this area seemed to sum up their predicament.

Another Walk will take place on 14th May, we will be back in Earlsfield, visiting the Cemetery, the site of the Chemical Manure Factory and Wardley Street. All are welcome. We are so proud to now have permission to put a plaque on one of the original Wardley Street houses and are grateful for all donations received so far to help pay for this. All being well, we hope to put the plaque up later this year. And on our Walk we will stop at that Hilden grave. Amy Hilden passed away in 1972 aged just 56. She and her husband look so happy in the photograph on their headstone. She was 32 and a young mother when she featured in the Costermonger article. It is such a glorious connection, proper living breathing history as witnessed by the care and attention given to her own and surrounding graves. Another of them is Lily Looker – a descendant on the Battersea Walk told me how she sold flowers around Piccadilly and the west end. Carnations, orchids and lucky heather. Closer inspection of her headstone reveals a motif of a flower basket etched into the red granite. 

Look around you, talk to the elders in your neighbourhood, search for the little details and get to know all aspects of where you live – you never know what you’ll find but I guarantee you will end up appreciating it all the more. Wardley Street is a survivor, a remnant of another age and a different way of life. The ‘People of Wardley Street’ plaque will ensure this history is known by many more people, it acknowledges its value to wider society and will, we would hope, add to understanding. It is our very great honour to commemorate it in this way and pay tribute to all the people who have passed through it or made it their permanent home. 

Thanks to Anna Hoare and London Gypsies and Travellers for their great support, enthusiasm and encouragement for this project. To Surrey History Centre for their excellent ‘Gypsy Romany and Traveller’ resource and for pointing out Alan Wright’s outstanding book ‘Their Day Has Passed’. To Wandsworth Heritage Service for the map facility used to pinpoint the development of Wardley Street. To Getty Images for images from ‘The Leader’ magazine. To Luci Hammond for the photo of the Hammond and Wood families. To Anchor Church for facilitating our research group. To the many individuals with family connections to Wardley Street and its neighbouring streets who have taken an interest, shared precious stories and memories and attended our Walks.

We continue to connect with so many people who have memories of Wardley Street and the recollections of Betsy Cooper (pictured below) are invaluable in capturing life there in the decade before most of the houses were demolished. See you all at the plaque unveiling on 22nd October!

Its about half way down Mitcham Road heading south of Tooting. The colourful yellow, green and black façade of Mixed Blessings West Indian Bakery will soon be further enlivened by the addition of a blue plaque. Anyone crossing the zebra will have their spirits raised by the sight of two magical words; ‘Reggae’ and ‘Music’. It will be placed there later this year and be a wonderful addition to the rich musical heritage of south London, a permanent reminder of the beautiful sounds created at this special location. And when people seek out the names of the artists who recorded there, they will be amazed at how many of them are so familiar! 

The idea for a plaque came out of the Black Lives Matter protests on Tooting Common last summer and a Black Pound Day Cycle Trail in September. On one of the stops I was asked to say a few words about the history of the recording studio, that people vaguely know was once located here above the bakery. There is a roll call of famous reggae names, synthpop pioneers, funkateers, glamrockers and of course the Bob Marley story! The owner came out and we suddenly thought why not put up a plaque so everybody gets to hear about this. A Crowdfunder appeal soon kicked into action as we set about raising the cash. Various lockdowns have slowed things up but people have been very generous and we soon achieved our target. The plaque is being manufactured and once its ready, we will sort out a day to put it up and invite everyone along to see it unveiled.

So many people have passed through what was generally known as the TMC Studios (Tooting Music Centre) but its perhaps the reggae musicians who have left the greatest legacy. Aswad, Maxi Priest, Dillinger, Black Slate, Sly and Robbie, Toots and The Maytals, Dennis Brown, Frankie Paul, Errol Dunkley, Mikey Dread, Osibisa, Leroy Smart, the list goes on and on…There are so many connections and threads, best summed up by lovers rock pioneer Dennis Bovell and Matumbi entwined with Wandsworth school friends Nick Straker and members of New Musik. Various engineers who worked there went on to be involved with some of the biggest names in the music industry.

Bernie Proctor, an ex-Merchant navy seaman who drifted into show business set up a record and music shop here in the sixties. His main claim to fame was an appearance as a harmonica player in the 1962 Second World War film ‘The Password is Courage’ starring Dirk Bogarde. Tooting had quite a Teddy Boy scene in the fifties but evolved into a  major pop music venue with big names appearing at The Granada and Wimbledon Palais. Pubs like The Castle ran a blues club and rock bands appeared at The Fountain on Garratt Lane. They all passed through; The Stones, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, Mott the Hoople, The Faces, Status Quo. A teenage Mod called Marc Bolan moved in just round the corner. Bernie wanted a bit of the action and in 1971 working with engineer Steve Vaughan he decided to have a go at running a recording studio. One of the first to visit were Errol Brown’s Hot Chocolate. Other major seventies hitmakers, Mud and The Glitter band would soon follow. A procession of punk rockers, synthpopsters and rockers would soon also be on the trail to the Mitcham Road hit factory; The UK Subs, The Slits, Girlschool, The Mobiles, Captain Sensible, The Lambrettas, The Piranhas, on and on…

One enduring connection is Euel Johnson’s ‘Music Specialist’ shop in Tooting’s Broadway Market which has traded for 49 years, for a while alongside another outlet in Brixton. In 1971 with Earl Martin and Pat Rhoden he founded a new independent label called Jama Records. Using TMC as their main recording studio, Jama Music started with an 8 track studio downstairs in the shop. ‘We would bounce from one track to the other yet produce beautiful, terrific sounds’. Mr Johnson opened his shop in the Market in 1972 and Bernie was a regular visitor most Saturday mornings, popping in to listen to demo discs or new releases. A few years later he improved the studio massively incorporating a 16-track system with all the available adjustable features necessary for a modern studio. ‘The word soon went out around Europe about this great sound coming out of Tooting which could compete with any world-class recording sound.’ 

One of the engineers there Andy ‘McEdit’ Geirus would agree. ‘There was something about the studio that the reggae artists really loved – they even referred to it as ‘Channel Two’. The construction was solid, creating a great quality of sound so it became a favourite place to record’. He recalls frequent all-night sessions there, preferred by most reggae artists and a procession of top names passing through. It was hard work mind, with the pressure of having reggae royalty like Sly and Robbie on the other side of the glass booked for a two hour session. But so many good times when they would all ‘just sit there grooving the night away.’ Word got around that this was a studio in London where engineers like Andy and the late Rick Norton really knew their reggae and could give people what they wanted. Though Chris Lane of Dub Vendor recalls recommending it to UB40 for their first album and by mistake they ended up going to another TMC, The Music Centre in Wembley. Andy was for a while part of a house band which featured Limmie Snell and was also a member of the Nick Straker Band. Another engineer Pete Hammond went on to work for Stock Aitken Waterman churning out the hits for the likes of Kylie Minogue. Safta Jaffery became a huge name in music industry management working with The Stone Roses, Coldplay and discovering Muse.

There were numerous sightings of famous names in the area to add to the TMC legend. One local resident, pregnant at the time, remembers being knocked over on Mitcham Road by a member of Mud. The band came running towards her pursued by a crowd of screaming schoolgirls. Les Gray apologised profusely and all was well. Musicians were constantly spotted crossing the road, having a quick drink in The Mitre or hauling equipment about. ‘World of Sport’ favourite, the masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki had terrified shoppers running for cover when he turned up at TMC to record his entrance music dressed in his full costume. Costa, whose shoe repair shop next door has been there longer than the studio recalls fixing up a pair of boots for Gary Glitter. 

There will be many stories of good times and great nights at this location but perhaps the one that most local people have heard of happened shortly after the owners of the bakery moved in. Renovations took place and they pulled back a temporary partition to reveal a wall covered in signatures. Clearly distinguishable among them was the name of Bob Marley. Sadly this was before everyone took photos of everything and in the building work chaos the wall was broken up and loaded into a skip. Bob was of course based in London in the early seventies and later lived for a period just up the road near Battersea Park and Kennington. A Mauritian friend of mine swears he saw him on a bus in Blackshaw Road but the story that he had a girlfriend nursing at St George’s might be stretching it.     

Tragically, Bernie’s son was killed by a drunk driver and TMC Studios rather sadly faded away sometime around 1987. Bernie has also passed away and all that’s left are lots of fond mentions and scattered reminiscences online. It’s a place that clearly held very dear memories for a lot of people and is associated with so many extraordinary talents that it deserves to be acknowledged. On behalf of everyone who has contributed towards the plaque, we are so proud to bring this story to a wider audience. Its our show of appreciation for all the musicmakers, engineers and technicians whose artistry and skills have given people so much pleasure. 

Growing up in Northern Ireland in the early seventies, we needed an injection of glam rock more than most and ‘Top of the Pops’ was my weekly shot of escapism. Slade, Sweet and Wizzard were all pretty exciting but leading the charge for freedom was a delicate London Boy whose wild hair, eyeliner and glittery cheeks suggested something more exotic. His hypnotic electric beats and poetic lyrics delivered in a dreamy laidback drawl mesmerised this nine year old. I may have had posters of Lou Macari and Pancho Pearson on my bedroom wall but I truly loved Marc Bolan and his band T.Rex. Who would have thought that 50 years on I would be living in the street next to where his old family home was, planning to champion his memory with a blue plaque!

Summerstown, near Wandsworth in south west London has had a bit of bad press which is not fair when you think where it is. About eight miles out of central London, not far from Wimbledon and just up the road from vibrant multicultural Tooting. Next door Earlsfield is a homely place with lots of coffee shops and hairdressers. Its renowed for its gypsy/traveller heritage which Marc might have appreciated had he lived in the area a bit longer. Connecting it all is a historic route called Garratt Lane, off which the current Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan grew up. This is the valley of the River Wandle, low-lying and fertile but prone to flooding. One story says it got its name because it was only habitable in the summer months. ‘It is flat and low, suitable rather for vegetables than men’ wrote the poet Edward Thomas when he passed through in 1913. A few years earlier, social reformer Charles Booth described it as ‘exceedingly depressing one should suppose to health, as it undoubtedly is to the imagination; a feeling enhanced by the presence of two fever hospitals, two cemeteries, a lunatic asylum and a prison’.  By the time Mark arrived they were all still there, and are still here today! Some of the allotments have been converted to sewage treatment works and a strip of car showrooms, warehouses and light industry are dissected by an intimidating procession of electricity pylons. It’s all a very long way from Carnaby Street and Stoke Newington, but this is where the Feld family; Sid, Phyllis, Harry and Mark came to live in the early sixties.

Their prefab was on a road running alongside the famous Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium where dog racing and speedway were still attracting huge crowds. The local glamour boys at the time were the speedway stars who rode for the Wimbledon Dons. Its unlikely that the thirteen year old Marc was impressed. Their home might have been brand new, with fitted furniture and TV, but being rehoused on the other side of London away from all his friends would have been a huge shock. There’s a certain vibe around here that I feel must have helped kickstart his teenage dream – driving a van, flipping burgers or going to the dog track was definitely a world he needed to get away from. Having said that, the sport crowds might have meant good opportunities for busking, as was the proximity of a cluster of local pubs; The Prince of Wales, The White Lion, The Corner Pin and The Plough, all literally minutes from his front door. According to Mark Paytress, author of ‘Twentieth Century Boy – The Marc Bolan Story’ after leaving school, the teenage dreamer spent a lot of time kicking-back on his own in that prefab – reading, listening to music and planning his escape route whilst the rest of the family were at work. Sid drove a delivery van for the nearby Airfix factory which made model aeroplane kits. Phyllis gave up her job on a fruit stall at Berwick Street market and now worked for the Post Office Savings Bank at Olympia. Brother Harry, with whom he now shared a bedroom had an office job in Wardour Street. 

Over the last seven or eight years I’ve been promoting local history in this area. A great way of doing that is by putting up plaques which are paid for by donations from people who come on my regular guided walks. We called our project ‘Summerstown182’ because the first thing we did was research 182 names on a local First World War memorial. About 25 of them lived in the road into which the Felds moved; indeed many of their relatives were still around. A hugely popular topic on the walks has been Marc’s connection with the area. The prefabs are long gone but I alway liked to stop close to the site of his home to talk about him. The Felds new residence was a highly-desirable Scandinavian-designed ‘Sun Cottage’ prefab. Described in the blurb as ‘20 by 18 feet, containing a lounge, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and all fixtures, fittings and furniture’. Mark Paytress wrote that it was like ‘a luxury caravan with a pointed roof’. Wandsworth Council put sixteen of them up on a site opposite the stadium in 1961. From the mid to late sixties Marc pulled away from the area as he got deeper into the music, drawn to the clubs and boutiques in the West End. It was still very much his family home though and ‘Wimbledon 0697’ was the prefab telephone number used by Marc in July 1967 in an advert in Melody Maker to recruit for his new band ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’. It was also where payment was sent by the BBC the following year after an appearance on John Peel’s ‘Top Gear’ show.

The family connection would however continue for some years. An electoral roll from 1970 shows his parents, Simeon (Sid) and Phyllis still there, at No27 Summerstown, their younger son on the cusp of international fame. They moved a few miles up the road to live on the Ashburton estate in Putney where Sid worked as a caretaker. Marc later bought a property nearby at 142 Upper Richmond Road which was where he and Gloria were driving on the fateful night when he was killed, 16th September 1977.

I’ve met a number of people on my walks who remembered Mark Feld from his early Summerstown days. It was a long time ago, but one person recalled ‘my cousin practising with him at my Auntie’s house on Headworth Street’. Someone did his Mum’s hair in the salon on Aboyne Road. Others spoke of a very well-dressed young man buying cakes in Carter’s bakery. He had a swagger and was often seen with a guitar slung over his shoulder. People reminisce about his brief time at Hillcroft School (now Ernest Bevin College) on local social media, where he appears to have been one of the first Mods. John Ford, who went on to form The Strawbs and have some big hits himself recalls being in the same leaving year there as Mark in 1963 and hanging out at his home in Summerstown.

Another old friend mentioned him being part of a teen band called ‘The Cabinet’. They practised in the youth club at Tranmere Road School (now Earlsfield Primary). Friday night there was ‘Record Night’ and there were regular Sunday morning sessions outside the prefab jamming old Elvis numbers. They performed at wedding receptions on Henry Prince Estate. ‘We got paid about a fiver and all the beer we could drink’. Occasionally they went to a jazz club in the Surrey Tavern pub at the top of Burntwood Lane. Mark’s part-time jobs included washing dishes at the well-loved Wimpy burger bar and a brief stint at Edgar’s menswear shop near Tooting Broadway. Mark Paytress recounts a visit to the local labour exchange ended up with Mark filling in a form stating his profession as ‘a poet’. Quite a few people refer to his modelling and the fact he was always very well-turned out.

He had been featured in an article about the emerging Mod scene in ‘Town’ magazine and must have relished the fact that Tooting was full of tailors shops at the time. His friends recall Mark buying a pair of jodphurs from a riding and saddlery shop on Garratt Lane called Rawle & Son. Its very fondly recollected for having a life-size model of a horse in the window. The boots would have helped with the modelling which was his main source of income around the age of 15. Occasional work with some very well known clothing chains included John Temple and even an appearance in a Littlewoods catalogue. He is remembered as being generous with his clothing, often giving any spare gear to his friends.

Another local memory recalls Mark buying a guitar at ‘The Treasure Chest’- an ‘aladdin’s cave’ run by an eccentric Dutch wheeler-dealer known as ‘The Maniac’. Somewhere that might have been passed on the way to school, it set the pulses of local youths racing – as well as musical equipment, selling ‘air-guns, catapults and harpoons’. Its now a grocery store opposite the Tooting Islamic Centre.

He read avidly, Tolkien, Rimbaud, C.S. Lewis and the mystic poetry of Kahlil Gibran. Second hand bookshops were dotted around Tooting Broadway like the one beside the pie and mash shop on Selkirk Road.  When Andy Ellison visited the prefab to have a chat about Marc joining ‘John’s Children’ he recalled him reading a copy of ‘The Tin Drum’ by Gunter Grass. He also served up mushrooms on toast. 

I’ve been talking about Marc quite a lot on my walks and would probably have tried organising a plaque for him some years ago were it not for a huge redevelopment in this neighbourhood. The old greyhound stadium site opposite where the Felds lived was demolished a few years ago, the site was flattened and is now being transformed into an enormous housing development cradling a new football stadium which has been up and running since November. It’s a fairytale return to the area for AFC Wimbledon who have been exiled for almost thirty years and though he might not have been much of a sports fan, Marc would surely have appreciated the romance. The pub buildings are all still hanging in there, though in different guises; a tile warehouse, a flooring shop and a supermarket. The Corner Pin is the last great survivor, still doing what it says on the tin and joined by a relatively new kid on the block, a very successful micro-brewery called By the Horns.

There is a photo on the ‘Palaces for the People’ Facebook group which is believed to be the Feld prefab. The location would appear to be about half way down the road called Summerstown and very close to the By the Horns brewery. There’s another very good aerial photo of these dwellings alongside the stadium on the cover of a Wimbledon speedway programme. Apparently the Feld homestead was in the middle of the front row. The Sun Cottages disappeared in the early seventies at about the same time as Marc was storming the pop charts. They’ve been replaced by a string of light industrial units which may not last much longer themselves. Its an odd collection; a carpet shop, a car repair unit and somewhere that makes sash windows, rubbing alongside the hipster brewery. Although all has changed quite drastically, I feel the spirit of Marc hangs over this area, never more vividly than on the night of 16 September 2017, the fortieth anniversary of Marc’s death. I had a word with the DJ who had his decks set up outside The Horns and as the pink sun sank over the old dog track, we raised a glass of Hopadelic to the sound of ‘Solid Gold, Easy Action’. I often think about him when I go past that bakery or the pubs that he busked outside. How much better it would be if there was a plaque with his name on it so that everybody could know about this!

One of those pubs I mentioned, The Prince of Wales is now a Tesco Express. It’s a very old building and will survive the changes all around it. Part of it extends seductively behind the main shopfront, beckoning people towards the stadium and the road called Summerstown where the Felds lived. Its overlooked by a terrace with a rather ornate balustrade, adding a nice touch of theatricals. It seems like a great place for a plaque and that’s where we would like to put it. But we need Tesco to agree so are waiting to hear from them. The above visual was created to show them what we would like to do and the words on it have not yet been finalised.

We would love any fans of Marc to come to Summerstown, to visit the area where he spent his early teenage years. The place where he morphed from Mark Feld to Marc Bolan and set out on his path to stardom. We are now planning a ‘Marc Bolan Teenage Dream’ tour. It will happen in mid-September around the time of Marc’s death when a lot of fans often come to London. We’ll meet at Tooting Broadway tube station and I’ll walk everybody round and introduce the to some key locations. There’s a lot of history here, Marc may not have played at the famous Tooting Granada venue, now a bingo hall, but he was around when The Beatles were there in 1963 and he saw The Rolling Stones there the following year.

At the dawn of the age when people were wearing flowers in their hair, I feel sure that Marc would have appreciated our connection with the daffodil. We’ll walk about a mile or so to Summerstown, passing the site of the old nurseries where Peter Barr ‘The Daffodil King’ cultivated the nation’s favourite flower. We celebrated him with a plaque recently and a campaign called ‘Blooming Tooting’ has encouraged people to plant bulbs. Even if we are still living under restrictions, there will be a self-guided walking tour available to download. That’s what I’ve been doing with all my local history walks, with people using them as their lockdown exercise breaks. You can find all the information here https://summerstown182.wordpress.com

We may not be able to put up the plaque as planned due to the current pandemic but we would however like to give Marc Bolan fans the opportunity to contribute to making it happen. If lots of people chip in small amounts then we can all say we were part of it. As soon as we know we have permission, we will publicise the fact and set a Crowdfunder up and try to raise the £500 needed. If normal life has returned, we will try to create an event around the unveiling, as we have done in the past. Some speakers, a poetry recital, maybe even a bit of music up on that terrace. We will of course need a special person to do the unveiling. Who could that be? All suggestions are welcome! We would naturally be delighted if any of Marc’s family were able to be involved or attend. 

I’m very grateful to a local musician called Jack Hardman who approached me a few months ago pointing out that Marc’s connection to the area is still largely unknown. We’ve decided now is the time to really do something. 2021 seems like an appropriate moment, half a century on from those first unforgettable T.Rex Number Ones, not to mention the significant ‘Electric Warrior’ anniversary and the disappearance of those Summerstown prefabs! The old ‘Prince of Wales’ pub is in a prominent place on a roundabout at the junction of the very busy Garratt Lane. A plaque would be seen by so many people, not least all the football fans going to the new stadium. As local residents, it will be a further reason for us to take pride in the area where we live and encourage future generations to have an awareness and appreciation of Marc’s music. 

We intend to keep everyone notified about how this idea progresses but I wanted Marc’s fans all over the world to know that there is another special place, here in a little corner of south west London where his legacy lives on. Whether there is a plaque to look at or not, I really hope you will come to visit and perhaps participate in the proposed ‘Teenage Dream Tour’. In one of his best-known songs, Marc asked ‘Whatever Happened to the Teenage Dream?’ Let me tell you everybody, it is here in Summerstown and ‘Blooming Tooting’ and we can’t wait to share it with you. FLOWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Look out for ‘Marc Bolan’s Tooting Teenage Dream’ Summerstown182 Zoom Talk, happening 7pm, Thursday 25 March. Thanks to everyone on local social media sites whose members contributed their recollections; including ‘I Grew Up in Tooting’. ‘Tooting History Group’, ‘Earlsfield in the 70s/80s’. Mark Paytress’ book ‘Twentieth Century Boy – The Marc Bolan Story’ gives great insights into his time in Summerstown. The ‘Palaces For The People’ website has more about prefabs. We particularly look forward to welcoming members of the Official Marc Bolan Fan Club to ‘Blooming Tooting’!

Raising spirits as we went into lockdown, this spring saw a glorious carpet of historic daffodils emerge all over Tooting and along Garratt Lane. A blast of sunshine cheering people up on their daily exercise and thanks to extensive social media coverage, something everyone was able to share at a difficult time. A beautiful art installation exhibiting at Tooting Market for Wandle Fortnight showed just a small selection of the photos we received. Please try and visit and see if your daffodil is there! NOW EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND TO 31st OCTOBER!

Its hard to explain just how wonderful last year’s Tooting ‘Daffodil Day’ was. On a patch of grass at the entrance to the Aboyne Estate, Garratt Lane, over one hundred people attended the unveiling of a blue plaque celebrating Peter Barr ‘The Daffodil King’ on a glorious September afternoon. With the King Edward VII statue outside Tooting Broadway station garlanded in flowers and clutching a giant daffodil, the Tootopia and Wandle Fortnight festivals in full flow, there was a glorious buzz in the air. Historic daffodil bulbs of the type grown here by Barr had been acquired and The Chair of the Royal Horticultural Society Bulb Committee flew in from Holland to plant the first bulb.

On that occasion and over the next weeks, daffodil bulbs were distributed to the Tooting community; schools, mosques, churches, charities, estates, food banks. Many of these were planted in public spaces like Streatham Cemetery and the Aboyne and Hazelhurst estates. Daffodil fever gripped Tooting and we gave out almost 5,000 bulbs and instructions on how to plant them. We tried to ensure every primary school got a selection but wanted to include some spontaneous drops, so we slung a couple of sacks over our shoulders and went walkabout to find suitable homes. There were some stand-out moments.

Walking past the Al-Muzzamil Mosque we ran into the Imaam who got out his phone to show photos of his spectacular sunflowers. Six months later he texted a picture of the beautiful daffodils they grew. At the United Reformed Church they were serving up lunch at the Graveney Canteen. I got up and said a few words and we handed out bulbs which were as well-received as the tasty dinner. Bulbs were also planted at significant locations in Tooting history. A car-park at Tooting Broadway marks the site of the Drouet’s children’s home cholera outbreak of 1849. It took a really strong daffodil to break through there, but what a view, looking across Garratt Lane at some of the places where Peter Barr once lived.

In November, at the end of a poignant 75^th anniversary ceremony involving nearby Smallwood School, daffodil bulbs were planted at the base of a historic plaque which marks the site of a Second World War V2 bomb which caused extensive damage and loss of life in Hazelhurst and Foss Road. This was done by people who had lived there at the time or lost relatives that day, 19th November 1944.

Streatham Cemetery was carpeted with yellow and has probably never been so awash with daffodils since Peter Barr trialled his flowers there in the 1880s when it was known as Springfield Nursery. Another batch were grown by the Share Community Garden, located on the Springfield Hospital site where planting them gave students the chance to achieve some of their core units working towards gaining their diplomas in horticulture.

Most of the daffodils popped up all over Tooting and beyond as people grew them in their front gardens, on window sills or in many cases in planters or the bases of trees on their street. One was planted outside the Earlsfield home of recently-deceased 100 year old Ralph Norbury, one of the last survivors of Arnhem. Thanks to one and all for the tremendous response to this and to everyone who helped to make it happen. The cost of the plaque itself and the bulbs were paid for entirely by local people attending Summerstown182 historic walks over the previous year. Truly, this was a case of FLOWER TO THE PEOPLE! 

Thankfully the first wave of the greatest spring uprising of daffodils in Tooting for 150 years was fully enjoyed by people before lockdown. People looked out for them and enjoyed them on walks in Streatham Cemetery and Aboyne Estate. As this started we encouraged people to share photos of the Tooting daffodils on social media. I like to think it gave us a bit of light relief at a worrying time. Later, a series of downloadable versions of our local history Walks  enabled people to view the daffodils as part of their daily exercise allowance.

We attracted some great attention with a feature on BBC Radio 4 Gardener’s Question Time where their team visited Peter Barr’s old garden in Garratt Lane, a short walk from Tooting Broadway. There was an article in The Daffodil Society Journal and the Gardens Trust blog. 

Surely it can now be confidently said that as well as being famous for Tooting Bec Lido, St George’s Hospital and Sadiq Khan – Tooting is becoming known for its part in the development of the daffodil. The initiative has been picked up by local schools with gardening and growing projects flourishing at the likes of Fircroft Primary.

‘Blooming Tooting’ doesn’t finish here and there is much more which can be done to promote awareness of this history, including our connection with the Huguenots, William Rollinson, Nelly Roberts and the Exotic Orchid Nursery. Exciting times here on the banks of the Wandle! 

Covid-19 has restricted our ability to promote the initiative with more guided walks but sharing photos of the daffodils was a great way to keep things bubbling along. Thanks to a grant from Wandle Valley Forum, we have now put together a stunning artistic installation showcasing some of these photos. Please come and see it in the world famous Tooting Market!  We are part of Wandle Fortnight. Its sometimes hard to forget Tooting’s Wandle connection but the rich alluvial soils of its valley were perfect for daffodil experimentation and the nurseries extended for a great stretch along Garratt Lane and up Tooting High Street. A great way to explore them is to do a Blooming Tooting tour which is available to download here. 

Tooting Market is hosting this exhibition from Friday 11 September. It will be open from 8am until 1030pm every day, from 9am on Sunday. We are happy to be playing a small part in bringing this precious part of our area, serving the community for over 80 years back to life after the devastating period of lockdown, so do look out for the exhibition when you are in there. A local artist has displayed the photos in a highly imaginative and creative way, evoking the Victorian era with artefacts from the period and utilising the daffodil artwork made by local children and the Tooting community last year in the build up to the plaque unveiling. Indeed this is going to be an ongoing exhibition. Once its time to move on, it will reload with new photos and hopefully set up again somewhere else. We really hope you enjoy it and that it encourages you to grow some daffodils next year and we can do this all over again. 

If anyone would like a fabulous colourful reminder of all this, a beautiful 60x40cm ‘Blooming Tooting’ ready-to-hang canvas print has been kindly donated by Marion Gower of The Streatham Society. The highest bidder for this stunning artwork gets to live the daffodil dream every day. All proceeds will go to Fircroft Primary School gardening project. Closing date 30 September.

 

Something was stirring in south west London on Saturday. It was the eve of Storm Ciara but the skies above the Wandle could not have been bluer, or it’s waters more serene and twinkly as we followed the riverside path from Summerstown to Colliers Wood. This was a road once trodden by Francis Kitz and we were on the ‘Wandle Wake-Up’, kick-starting our celebration of his remarkable life and work.

I first came across him seven years ago. His great granddaughter Lynda was working with me on a project to acknowledge a local Second World War bomb incident. Three of the 36 people killed when a V2 rocket landed on Hazelhurst Road were members of her family. We did them proud, various commemorations and a  plaque at the site of where the bomb landed have recalled that tragic day and those who lost their lives. In our countless email exchanges Lynda told me about the father of one of the victims, another family member of whom she was immensely proud. The more I heard about him, the more I liked the sound of him myself. Francis Kitz was putting himself on the line in a very different way from the Summerstown182 First World War casualties we were researching at the time, but he had my equal respect. I wrote a post on my blog about him and introduced him on my Walks as ‘The Summerstown Anarchist’.

That was probably a bit unfair – Merton was more his orbit and there was much more to Frank than anarchy. What kept the pot boiling was the search for a photo of him. I joined family members in the hunt which has certainly taken us to some interesting places, but he remains elusive. I quite like that, always one step ahead of his pursuers. What clinched the magic though was a day a few years ago when we were driving down Merton High Street and I pointed out one of the locations associated with him. At that precise moment a Sex Pistols song came on the radio – what else but ‘Anarchy in the UK’?

Photo by Madeline Meckiffe

Interest in Kitz fired up again when we met ‘Made in Merton’ last year at the brilliant Merton Heritage Discovery Day. They were demonstrating some great ways of showcasing the beautiful patterns created by Wandle workers to a wider audience. I was blown away by images they had produced of William Morris fabric designs blasted all over a building. They saw what I had written about Frank and wondered if we could do something together and perhaps put up a plaque alongside a community print-making activity. Why not? We planned some walks to raise funds and that’s how we all came to meet up for the ‘Wandle Wake-Up’ and a chance to get up close to some of the locations and places where Frank Kitz had lived and worked.

We set off past Blackshaw Road, heading down Plough Lane towards the Wimbledon Stadium development. It wasn’t mentioned, but thoughts must have been on the events of 1944. Not far beyond the Summerstown Towers was No36 Hazelhurst Road, destroyed by the rocket and where Annie, the mother of Frank’s ten children had lived for 30 years. Our route was overshadowed by the towering blocks and cranes of the Stadium and its frantic construction work. In six months time, if all goes to plan AFC Wimbledon should be back on their home turf after almost three nomadic decades. Their ongoing efforts to raise funds and keep the club owned by its fan base is surely something Kitz would have admired. A dramatic left turn was made as we encountered the Wandle and entered a tranquil and peaceful world, very far removed from the choking traffic and noise on Plough Lane. The path quickly lead us to the dramatic ‘meeting of the waters’ – the spot where the River Graveney emerges from a concrete channel and merges with the River Wandle. One attendee remarked that the previous week they had visited the confluence of the Nile but that this was so much more uplifting.

As always when on a Wandle tour, I couldn’t resist mentioning Eliza James, ‘The Watercress Queen’. Her main fields were a little bit further up the river but beds where this was grown would have been on both sides of the river and a number of other locations close to the Merton Printworks. Frank Kitz would have been very familiar with it and I’m sure well aware of its magic powers.

After negotiating the Wandle Meadow Nature Park, for so long the home of the sewage treatment works, we crossed the river over a bridge dedicated to the late Colliers Wood councillor, Gam Bahadur Gurung. Formerly a Gurkha and fittingly celebrated with some colourful Nepalese prayer flags fixed to the bridge. Just before the Connolly Mill we emerged at the historic Wandle Bank, leading us directly alongside the river to Merton High Street. Here we stopped outside No5, where Lynda’s grandmother was born and she spoke very movingly about Francis Kitz, her great grandfather who had come to live at this address sometime in 1885. It was a very special moment.

We can only touch very briefly here today on the question ‘Who was Frank Kitz?’ but I hope these few words will conjure up some idea of the man himself and perhaps leave you wanting to know more. So, who was Frank Kitz? You could describe him very aptly as a Rebel with a Cause. And what was his cause? A lifetime crusade fighting for the rights of working men, women and children, not just in the South but further afield too: in the North, the Midlands and Wales. In his memoirs Recollections and Reflections, he describes himself as: “an antagonist of the capitalist system who spent the best years of my life in persistent warfare against it”. So, what do we know about him? Well, in spite our very best efforts we have been unable to find a photo of Frank. However, what records do give us, is an insight as to his appearance and personality: ‘A fine burly figure, with a mass of light brown curly hair, blue eyes, rather heavy features, a pleasant, jolly smile’ and ‘A bluff, breezy chap, fond of his beer and jolly company’ and ‘Ebullient and impetuous…’ and ‘One of the wittiest public speakers I have ever known’. Frank Kitz was born in 1849 in Kentish Town, North London. In fact, his real name was Francis Platt, the child of Mary Platt and, we believe, a German émigré. He was brought up in poverty in the West End by his single mother, who was in domestic service, and had to fend for himself at an early age, finding work as an errand boy, porter and messenger. He was fascinated by revolution and it was in his formative years that he witnessed the injustices of society and the stark class divisions of the‘have and have -nots’. It was no surprise that he took the rebellious route he did and championed the causes of the poor. During his tramp around the country he states in his memoirs: ‘I found everywhere the same conditions – the factory with its iron discipline, the mazes of mean streets and insanitary slums for the workers, the enslavement of women and children’.

A dyer by trade, Kitz was employed during the 1880s by William Morris at his Merton Abbey Works. However, he was not just an employee but also a ‘comrade’ helping Morris with propaganda and speeches for the socialist cause. Morris commented: ‘He is certainly somewhat tinged with anarchism… but I like him very much’. Kitz lived his life in poverty and was always a ‘rebel by temperament’. William Morris stated after a visit to Merton: ‘I called on the poor chap at the place where he lived and it fairly gave me the horrors to see how wretchedly off he was, so it isn’t much to wonder at that he takes the line he does’. Frank was a revolutionary who maintained his extreme opinions throughout a lifetime of fierce political activity. His inventiveness, his turn of phrase and way with words made his public speaking so appealing to the crowd. The important point about Kitz, apart from his working-class background is that he LASTED as a revolutionary. He is still as relevant today as he was then. He championed the workers and, with others, helped to lay the foundations of the benefits, rights and freedoms we all enjoy today.

It was fitting at this point that we were joined by David Saxby, historian and archaeologist, who continued a moving eulogy to a dogged and committed campaigner for better working conditions who put the lives of others above any care of his own. David also emphasised the closeness of his relationship with William Morris. If anyone on the ‘Wandle Wake Up’ doubted why we wanted to put up a plaque to Francis Kitz they surely knew now that this rebel was a worthy cause.

Outside the big Sainsbury’s store, Portia stood on a wooden block and told us about ‘Made in Merton’. How they were awarded a grant in 2018 by the Mayor of London for their ‘Stich, Print, Process’ project which celebrated Merton’s textile heritage. They are now going to add a splash of dramatic colour to our plaque unveiling event and we’re thrilled to be partnering them. We were now in the heart of Frank Kitz’s world on the site of the William Morris Printworks and just a stone’s throw from the dye house where he worked his magic. Across the road was the location of the Merton Abbey branch of the Socialist League and the Surrey Labourer’s Union where Frank would have stood up so many times in support of his comrades. Beside the Gourmet kebab house once ran Wandle Road, another of the places where he lived at No23. Just around the corner from that, another address was 97 Deburgh Road. Newspaper cuttings indicate the family were here from at least 1893 and four years later when their fourteen year old son John Walter Kitz was tragically killed in a railway accident at Wimbledon station. Kitz came to this area in 1885, Morris just a few years before that. Very different backgrounds but a shared vision of better lives for workers.

We crossed the Wandle for the second time and wended our way along the riverside park in front of the superstore – our heads spinning as we tried to imagine the busy printworks and also consider the neighbouring presence a few centuries before that of a gigantic medieval priory. We passed one of the original walls of this to be greeted by some early daffodils as we crossed the Pickle Ditch. We were now on the edge of a retail park, choked with Saturday afternoon shoppers. It was quite fitting given the amount of industrial and retail parks in this vicinity that we should now mention Ronnie Lyon, the man credited with inventing them. Overlooking us at every turn, the massive tower from which he once ran his empire was once voted ‘London’s Ugliest Building’. Now re-clad in white, its filling up with people looking for the best view in Collywood and sits a bit more comfortably in its historic surroundings. The Burger King at this juncture was once a Kitz location, ‘Barnes Cottages’ conveniently opposite The Royal Six Bells pub. That’s where Frank, Annie and eight of their children are recorded in the 1891 census, the homes of Wandle workers surrounded by mills, watercress beds and feeding it all, the twists and turns of the ever-present Wandle. Their cottage looked across at what is now Wandle Park, once the site of Wandle Bank House, whose grounds were the scene of idyllic fishing afternoons enjoyed by Horatio Nelson in the company of his mate James Perry. On a little bit further, on the other side of the road is the Holiday Inn Express, the site of yet another Kitz abode called Clare Villas. In spite of everything being so utterly different, as the river flowed past, it was not hard to imagine all the activity in this area and the busy transient lives of those who supported its industry.

We were now firmly on Stane Street and heading towards Tooting. Straight as an arrow, down the old Roman Road. A final Kitz location here on the site of the world famous Tooting Market was in an area called Angel Court, adjoining the old Angel Inn. That’s long gone and currently the home of Iceland. It was in this pub that Lynda’s parents had their wedding reception.

The final leg of our journey took us up Garratt Lane and back to Summerstown. On the way the family recalled how Annie, the mother of Kitz’s children had sold flowers at Streatham Cemetery. I had heard from some elderly residents that the last nursery in this area had been on the corner of Smallwood Road and there’s a passageway behind this that would have been a cut-through to Hazelhurst Road. Easy to imagine Annie making that short journey every day. It was now dark, but a special moment as we looked across at the cemetery gates and tried to imagine Annie there with her flowers. She passed away in 1940, four years before the bomb and is buried in the cemetery.

Frank himself died in 1923, ending up living a few miles further away in Battersea. The last years were tough on him as he struggled to make a living and at odds with his family. Consolation must have been the great esteem and affection in which he was held by his comrades. This poster dating from 1920 advertises ‘a socialist carnival’ including a ‘Historical Revolutionary Dress Contest’ to raise funds for him at Battersea Town Hall. ‘He is now between 70 and 80 years of age and has worked to the last, although weakened and handicapped with his conditions. It is our wish to aid our old Comrade in his dark years and to make his last days as smooth and pleasant as we possibly can’.

Everyone on the ‘Wandle Wake-Up’ Walk came away feeling they are involved in something quite special. Frank Kitz was someone who helped the workers cause at a time when the breakneck pace of the industrial revolution threatened to crush the working man and woman. He did this at great personal sacrifice. He worked on the Wandle and helped create beautiful textiles and fabrics. He is symbolic of many who did a similar job and our plaque salutes all of them. Please look out for details coming soon about the unveiling event which will be accompanied by a ‘Made in Merton’ community craft activity. It will be a day to remember and probably in mid-September to coincide with the Wandle Fortnight. In the meantime, we need to continue raising funds to pay for this plaque and another great walk is planned. Saturday 25th April is the big day and we are calling it ‘Frankie Goes to Collywood’. Join us at 2pm outside Colliers Wood underground station for a historic tour of the area, featuring the site of the William Morris Printworks and Merton Priory. If you enjoy it, please do throw in a few pounds to help us remember Francis Kitz.

A huge thank you to the Kitz family, particularly Lynda, Sylvia and Debbie for so generously sharing so much of their information and research about Francis Kitz. We are also very grateful to David Saxby whose years of research and publications about the Wandle, its industries and its workers have been such an invaluable resource for so many of us. A big shout to everyone who came on the ‘Wandle Wake-Up’ and donated so generously towards this plaque initiative.

https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/made-in-merton-culture-seeds-fund/