Air Raid Warning

Peggy Vanderkar was studying at Chelsea College of Physical Education when the Second World War was started.

I was at 111, the Solkhorn family home, when war was declared on 3^rd September 1939. Immediately after the solemn declaration by Chamberlain the Germany had ignored the warning about invading Poland……  “ and so I declare that this country is at war with Germany,” there was an air raid warning. We were all reduced to laughter at the sight of lady air raid wardens dressed in tin hats and ankle socks. It was a sunny day and we decided to go for a walk on the Wandsworth Common, but were immediately sent back to collect our gas masks! Air Raid wardens did wonderful things during the war.

The Working Class Tea

For the Edwardian working-class meals were very different to their rich counterparts. J. Rey in ‘The Whole Art of Dinning’ published in 1914, enlightens us:

The Working Class Tea

"The tea of the English working-class is the most eccentric of meals and one of the greatest injuries a gourmet could possibly conceive (accordingly to ideas of Brillat-Savarin); for with the tea they partake of various kinds of salted meat and dried fish, such as ‘corned-beef,’ kippers, bloaters, red herrings, winkles, shrimps, pickles, watercresses, cucumber, lettuce jam or marmalade, bread and butter, and cake, This incongruous kind of food may, no doubt, be quite nice and tasty for this class of people, but it must shock any one endowed with refined epicurean  instinct.’

The Traction Engine

One of my favourite books is ‘Before the lamps went out,’ by Esme Wingfield-Stratford, his account of growing up in Edwardian England. Here he recalls the advent of the Traction Engine.

“But mechanical transport had begun to have its say on the roads; the most familiar and pleasant sound of all being a contented chugging and puffing, that never seemed to stop and hardly to go on. If one went to investigate, which was as often as one was allowed, one would be rewarded with the majestic approach of a traction engine – a spectacle of joy to me, but of fear and grievance to certain of my elders. For the traction engine in those days signified the intrusion of the iron horse upon the quiet ways sacred to the flesh and blood species.

Horses in these days will plod their way among a spate of furiously honking motors with the placidity of cows, but then all the authorities’ appeared  to be agreed that the mere sight of one of these belching monsters was enough to make then shy, bolt, and involve their human cargo in probably fatal accidents.”

Pumping the Church Organ

Jessie Lintern was the daughter of a United Free Church minister in Scotland, in the 1930’s she was bought up to go to church and her brother was given an important task for some reward.

"At Colmonell, my brother was given the task of pumping the organ, for which he received a copper or two and a bag of sweets from the organist, who kept a post office and grocery store three miles away. He was hidden from view by a curtain which shut off the stairs to the pulpit, and there he settled down with his ‘Wizard’ or ‘Hotspur’ as his father began the sermon.

One memorable Sunday he was so engrossed in the doings of Roy of the Rovers that, oblivious of the sermon’s end and the announcement of the final hymn, and that the organist was sitting with hands poised above the keyboard, he failed to put the pump into operation. Silence reigned, until the organist hissed loudly, “Blow, Jimmy, blow.” The bag of sweets rolled under the curtain, my father glared down at his son, and with a mighty surge of air the organ sounded forth! "  

A Second Hand Morris Cowley

Hazel Rolf recalls her experience growing up when her father purchased a used Morris Cowley in 1931

“Dad bought a second hand Morris Cowley car for thirty pounds and we sometimes went in it from Reading to Chertsey on Sundays to visit my Grandma and aunts.

The first time we planned to go we were all waiting in the drive and the car would not start. Dad worked on it for a while and then fetched a neighbour: eventually they got it going but we were about two hours late. The number of the car was MO 3311: it was brown with a rain hood and celluloid window frames to slot in.  As it was a lengthy job getting the hood up and the windows fixed, it had to be raining very hard before Dad would stop and see to it. Later Dad bought a second hand Morris Oxford saloon, No: PX 8961, which was entirely enclosed so more comfortable.”

The Telephone

The telephone in the thirties was a new invention. Mr. R. Cunningham recalls his childhood in Glasgow and his parents installing their new communication device.

                        

“In the early thirties a cousin of my father persuaded him to install a telephone in our house. Being a senior technician in the telephone department of the Post Office, the cousin had the installation carried out quickly. My parents decided it should go in the dinning room – the least used public room – and it was stood on a two-tier table beside the fireplace, with the directory on the lower shelf and an armchair beside it.

 The instrument had a long stem and a large mouthpiece at its head and the receiver set in the cradle just below, with a long cord to let it reach the ear. We children and the housemaid were taught how to answer it and, if we had to call someone else to the phone, not to put the receiving back in its cradle but to lay it on the table. “

Going to the Commodore in Hammersmith

Denis Thompson remembers his childhood and the enjoyment he got from the variety of entertainment offered at the Cinema in the Thirties.

"During the thirties the cinema really came into its own, following the movie craze at that time on the other side of the Atlantic. Up to 1936 I lived in Chiswick, West London, and a year or two prior to that the largest cinema in London - the Commodore -   opened just across the borough in Hammersmith, with the showing of the original ‘Show Boat’ film starring Paul Robeson. The next and larger cinema to open was the Odeon in Hammersmith Broadway about a year later. However, that place of entertainment was soon eclipsed in size by the opening of the country’s largest cinema in Kilburn, North London, with seats for about four thousand.

It is almost unbelievable when I recall that in those days my mother and I used to go to the Commodore at midday on Saturday and for 6d admission we enjoyed the following entertainment,

From midday until 1pm you sat (very quietly) and listen to Joseph Muscant and his orchestra doing a live radio broadcast for the B.B.C. from the stage. After that we saw screened the main film, news reel, and forthcoming attractions. In the interval Harry Davidson played the organ, finally, there would be nearly an hour long stage show, usually one of the top bands of the era. I realise how fortunate I was as I was able tosee most of the leading bands of that day, such as, Jack Payne, Jack Hylton, Harry Roy, Roy Fox, not to mention big bands from America: Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians."