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Note: H00048
Note: Addresses :-
1916 - 1939 2, Ben Street, Hackney Wick, London.
1939 - 1947 6, The Vale, Woodford Green, Essex.
1947 - 1970 24, The Charter Road, Woodford Green, Essex.
1970 - 1987 12a Palmerston Road, Buckhurst Hill, Essex.
1987 - 2009 2, Madusa Court, Kings Parade, holland on Sea, Essex.
2090 - 2013 Read House, Frinton-on-Sea, Essex - Died 30/04/2013 in Colchester Hospital.
TO MY GRANDCHILDREN
As several of you have asked about our 'beginnings', I shall try to set out what we both know of our early family life. I know little of my forebears beyond my great-grandmother on my mother's side and a Grandmother on my father's side. Granddad Eddie (and I will use this name for him all through, as there are many different references to Granddads) knows very little more on the Lodge side, but has more knowledge of his mother's family and his maternal grandmother. I will relate how we lived as children through to our marriage and where we first set up home together. I have tried to be factual but may have hidden a few skeletons in the cupboard along the way, but here goes. More important than our actual childhoods, I think you might like to know firsthand how changed your lives have been, and even this in view of the fact that we both came from families that fortunately were that little bit better off than the average family in the area that we lived, and of course the panorama of life that I saw through the open door of a street corner-shop is wider than that of Granddad Eddie who lived in "private".
My mother Minnie Margaret Stirk, came of a Scottish father and a London mother. She was one of two children, herself and a brother Richard. Tragedy came to them very young when the family were broken up, and her Mother died at 23. We were always told that her husband had never returned from a sea journey, but a cousin of mine (a daughter of Richard Stirk) told me long ago that he actually went off with another woman and later had a prosperous court shoe making business on Tottenham Court Rd in London. This to me is quite credible as my Mother related that her Mother was one of the few people that the doctor actually certified as dying of a broken heart. As a young child my mother was brought up by her maternal grandmother Cornish and Richard went to live with his father's family until he was 14 and being unhappy he left and came to live with Grandma Cornish and my mother. Their life was poor and they moved from rooms to rooms as the rent became due and at 14 she was apprenticed to a small tailoring business in Hackney Wick run by two Christian ladies, named Bryants. My mother always had a good bearing, blessed with a pretty face and in her scant spare time after working factory hours helped in a Boys and Girls club run by "the ladies of Eton". These well-to-do people from Eton in Berkshire came to Hackney Wick to found a club attached to the Church of St Mary's of Eton to help keep the children off the streets and out of pubs and it is from these ladies that my mother got her style and manners. She met my father through the Club as he used the library supplied by the Eton benefactors.
Now to Granddad Thomson; he was a "late child" of Grandma Thomson, born to her in her forties. I will side track a little to tell you that this Grandma Thomson was a formidable woman, originally from Ealing, and finished her life living with my Auntie Kate in Kensington. I can recall how whenever we visited her I was sat on an hassock at her feet and if at any time I went to move her hand came down hard on my shoulder and with "sit child", I did not dare to move again. It seems that at this time of my father's childhood many Scotsmen must have come down South to get work, and as the Scottish education has always been good, these men seemed to find a good living despite many Londoners being out of work and poor. Her husband died whilst she was pregnant with my Father, and he had been a Scottish Engineer and up to his death had been able to give his family a good life, and all my father's brothers had been to colleges and had a good training.
There is no doubt that Grandma Thomson's circumstances were poorer after she had my father and at one time she became a housekeeper in a big bank in the City where the clerks lived in. When she had enough money she bought a grocery shop in Hackney. Later on when her legs became troublesome she sold this and bought a small corner shop thinking my father would run it but he had ideas of his own. He was a character, stocky build, extremely strong in body and mind and was determined to be well read and educated even if he had to do it himself. He was a real Victorian, prudish with a strong Christian conviction until he was around 40, then he had a row with a Vicar because father would not stand "humbug" or "airs and graces".
My father was apprenticed at 14 to a notable grocery shop in the King's Road, Chelsea and I recall him telling us that his biggest treat was to spend a penny of his wages on the way home on a Friday night for a lump of bread dipped in the gravy that dropped through a tray of steaks being cooked in an open window shop opposite Liverpool Street Station. He really wanted to be a chemist and eventually went to West Ham College evening school and after some time became a foreman dyer for a firm of Dyers and Cleaners. He married at 26 and lived in Penge where he made a good home having been able to buy the COmPlete home of a cousin of his who had emigrated to Australia, and my mother was told by the "Ladies of Eton" that she had married well to have a man with a home and 30/- a week to live on. At the outbreak of the Great War he was running his own laundry and hatting shop in IIford, my mother doing repairs, etc, but he was eventually called up and due to being a Dying Chemist he was seconded to The Geigy Dye works in Manchester, but wore uniform and only had a soldier's pay.
My mother was left with a great struggle, so she moved into a smaller house in Manor Park and by 1916 was expecting twins, my brother John and myself, already having Irene born in 1910 and Jimmie born in 1911.She must have developed a great character and resolve as to the day she died she worshipped my father and put up with his various ventures because from a young man he was determined to work for himself. She herself had a good business brain with sound judgement, and I can always remember her telling us girls to make sure we voted in the elections, as she was sure that one day women would be recognised- how right she was. After the War my father came back to Hackney, took a job for a short while and my mother took over Grandma Thomson's corner shop, as she was now old, the times were hard for everyone in 1920.
Now I will try and describe my life as a child. I was born on the 30th December 1916, a twin to John who sadly lost his life in the Second World War. Although christened Minnie Dorothy, I was always Dolly to the family, being of small build and curly haired and impish. I never considered myself a favourite in the family, my elder sister Irene being the apple of my father's eye and my younger brother Bernard being my mother's pet; he was always excused everything having lost his twin brother at nine months and my mother maintained he suffered from this. I never accepted this logic and just thought that he was a spoilt brat. My earliest memory is of being banged down hard on a wooden bench that ran along the living room wall by "Nurse Sinclair", a woman in the street who attended women in labour for 3/6d. My mother always had a doctor in attendance too, but the poorer women only had Mrs Sinclair who nursed the mother, washed the other children and fed them on the soggiest meat pudding that I have ever tasted-Ugh. I was crying for my mum and was told to be quiet as my mum was upstairs busy. She was having another set of twins, Bernard and Frederick, the latter dying at 9 months old with pneumonia. Irene was about 10 % years old then and when she came from school she had to take the twin babies and John and I hanging on the sides of an enormous bassinette to the park. A long walk to the best part of the park, where the rough children did not play and she kept us there until we were tired and then helped to get us to bed. I can remember the sailor suits we had with a wide brimmed hat and the elastic always cutting into my chin. No wonder Irene did not want children, when at the age of 32, she did eventually marry Uncle David.
Every home had a kitchen range with an open fire one side. There would always be either an enormous rice pudding or bread pudding cooking with a row of baked potatoes which would be covered with all the "cut-offs" from the cheese and ham counter in the shop, so it was easy for Rene to give us a good tea until mum shut the shop and nothing was wasted.
Another vivid recollection was the people who had to live on "outdoor relief". They were out of work, had several children and were very often maimed from the 1 st World War. They were given a voucher for 7/6d for groceries and another for the butcher and these were lodged with the tradesman and the grocer could only sell them bread, tinned milk, margarine and loose jam sold by a cupful from a huge stone jar. The grocer had to keep a tally of their daily purchases and recover his money weekly from the workhouse. If anybody came into the shop and said they were hungry or their children were ailing my mum would give them a bag of split peas and a lump of flank bacon (fat streaky, today you buy it but in those days it was considered unsalable) and she told them how to make a nourishing pea soup adding an Edwards desiccated soup packet. If they refused to do this she would tell them not to bother her, as they were not really hungry! Tough times indeed.
Over the years she became an adviser, a wise listener (and woe-betide us if we repeated anything she had been told in her shop by a customer in trouble). I was about 14 when a woman rushed into the shop and shouted "Thomson, my Elsie has had a baby in this bucket, what shall I do?" I was pushed into the shop parlour, the shop door was closed and off ran Mum home with the woman and helped until the Doctor came. The irony of this story is that the boy who had landed Elsie into trouble was a cousin of Uncle Dave. He was the son of the man for whom Elsie worked and he was made to marry her and lived in Chigwell in fine style by the time she was forty, there is no justice in this world!
Now let me get back to my early days. Work was an ethic in our family as if we sat still at all we were told "not to sit and waste time, get a book and educate yourself". Sunday morning lives on in my memory. When I was about six my father opened a small hatting factory in Walthamstow, which he attended well into the night as some processes needed changing at most odd hours, but the one day he did not go to Walthamstow was Sunday when he gave my mum some help as she opened her shop on that day until 2pm. His first job on a Sunday morning was to oversee our weekly bath and hair wash. This was in a large tin bath in the scullery and he inspected our heads for lice. If he found anything he went to the paraffin tank in the yard and poured a small eggcup of this foul smelling liquid into your scalp and after an hour washed the head again. We all had wonderful heads of hair and he was so proud when he had us all dressed and paraded us to church whilst Mum worked in the shop and between times put a huge joint of beef into the oven ready for a scrumptious roast dinner when she finally shut her shop door. When we came back from church we all had our jobs. The small ones stood on a soapbox and slit up old newspapers ready to wrap the salt up which my elder brother and father sawed from huge blocks of salt. Rene would weigh up 11b and % Ib of sugar and when you were old enough you could help weigh up the soda in brown bags as if you gave a little overweight on that it did not cost as much as sugar did. Then blocks of sunlight soap were out and wrapped ready for the Monday morning "wash trade" as no one could afford a whole bar of soap.
Then the table, already soapy remember, was scrubbed white and a spotless white tablecloth put on. Strange to say my father was most fussy about this and our table manners and after our good dinner, off we were trailed to Sunday school. But Sunday tea was a real treat, my Mum had time to cuddle us and read to us and we would eat up the ice-creams that had not sold in the shop that morning. This ice cream being home made in a round container which had to be turned and turned until it was so hard that my brother Jim's hands would blister. My mother was only sick once in my memory and she stayed in bed one weekend with a terrible chesty cold. A customer told my father to put some hot flannel on her chest and having baked the flannel in the oven he raced upstairs and plonked it straight onto my poor mum's chest. He skinned her and she never forgave him for this. Come dinnertime he made the gravy with Bisto, it had just come in small 1d. packets. He put the whole packet into the gravy tin and we had brown blancmange all over our dinner, he never lived that one down either. He never did anything by halves.
Most customers lived from hand to mouth, coming into the shop perhaps three or four times a day, buying first the breakfast oats and a loaf, then lunch time for their 1d of pickles and a 1d. Oxo cube and again at teatime for a cup of jam for the kids and one rasher of bacon for Dad's tea.
My mum sang "Just a song at twilight" and "Abide with me" every evening as she washed up after we had all been "fed and watered" and put to bed, washed herself and then put out our clean clothes for school the next day. She could never have suffered from insomnia, she must have just fallen into
bed dead beat as she did not shut her shop until 8pm in the week and 9pm on Saturday. She did not do all her own washing, this either being done by an old woman who came in or sent out to laundry. The laundry was a routine. There were three types, bag wash at 1/- for a huge sack of clothes, which was washed complete in the bag and came back wet in the bag. Next there was a smaller bag for 1/-where the washing was emptied from the bag, sorted for whites and coloured and put back in the bag roughly dried, and for 1/6d. You could have a dozen articles "best washed", hand washed and ironed. This dirty laundry had to be left outside the laundry shop by 8a.m. and the boys in the street would earn % d taking the bags and bringing them back after school, my Mother would not let us do this. An old woman used to scrub the house through on a Thursday afternoon when the shop was shut for % day.
My father taught us all to read and write by the time we went to school, so we all had a good start. I can feel the pressure on my thumb and finger now where he held the pencil and guided us. Comics were not allowed in the house and the first real book I read was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a severe tome for a little girl of 9.
In his factory he perfected a process for the whitening and stiffening of Panama hats but of course he never patented his process. However he ran this for some 7 years and then sold out to a firm in Notting Hill on condition that he worked for them for one year and put the process into their works. With this money he bought a second grocery shop and so made my mum's life easier as she stopped serving provisions and handled packet goods and went into haberdashery and sold female articles that the women in those days would never have asked a male shopkeeper for. I can see the fleecy bloomers on a line across her shop.
From then on, we had a good life; my sister Rene went to Pitman's College and became a very efficient secretary. Jim upset my father because he would not go to technical college and insisted on going into the laboratories of W.J.Bush the perfumers. But later in life he earned a diploma in Works Management and had reached that position when he died at 45 with an aneurysm. Such heartbreak for us all again, having lost John my twin in the Second World War.
I followed Rene into Commercial training at Pitman's College and eventually became a secretary in Gathier and Co. I was not boy minded because I was bought up strictly, but did go out with Len Kirk once or twice, as he attended the same church, and we know him today as Uncle Len with Auntie Alice. He became a staunch friend of my elder brother, and that is how we are still in contact because Auntie Doris and Jill went to live with the Kirks when Jim died.
I met Granddad Eddie whilst working in Hackney in my first job near his offices and we eyed one another for a few weeks and then he asked me to go out and I have never been out with anyone else. I will now tell you what Granddad remembers, I am afraid it will not be so wordy, thank god you say, but he lived a very different young life to me.
Granddad Eddie is the second son of Louisa and Lewis Lodge, having an older brother by three years, Lewis. His mother came from a big family named Horsley from Hackney Wick. By coincidence on my side they were related to the Wills family from whom Uncle Dave's mother came, so you see even in the districts in London years ago, members of different families inter-married. My Dad as a boy remembers Granddad Horsley, Dave's Grandfather and Granddad Wilks drinking together and this is where most of the money went. The Horsleys were rope-makers and should have been more comfortable but no wills were made and money went to the wrong people or was drunk away. Nannie Lodge was one of several sisters and two brothers and when we were courting and saving up to get married we visited one or the other of the different families on both sides of his parents on Saturday and Sunday, played cards, or chatted. Everyone was much more social then, not wrapped up in television or too busy to make a cup of tea, there were no cars except for the rich and parties were jolly sing songs and lots of party food.
Granddad`s father Lewis Lodge Snr was born in Bethnal Green, his mother coming from the Ingatestone area. Not a lot is known of Eddie's father's background but we always feel that it must have been a good one as he was always a very superior person, very kind and gentle and a wonderful husband to Eddie's Mother who was a sickly woman, so they did not entertain a great deal so I never knew some of Dad's family.
They lived in Homerton and although they like everyone else were hit by the 30's slump, they were well off compared to many around them, Dad having a good job In-a clothing manufacturers<3lla when I met Granddad Eddie he was always beautifully dressed complete with bowler and rolled umbrella, a gentleman indeed. Granddad spent a lot of his school holidays with Aunties to help his ailing mum, but the Lodge household was one of love and kindness, quietness I had never known in my shop upbringing and we had five years of wonderful courtship before marrying on September 3rd 1939.
I always felt that my mum was determined to get shot of one of her flock, as I was the first to be married. Rene continually breaking her engagement with Dave and going back to him the next year.
As your history books will tell you it was the day when the Second World War was declared, but we made our own history that day. Preparations for the wedding were made in March 1939 and I had beautiful clothes made by Vera Lodge who had a gown shop in Barking. Our reception was to be held in a house in Clapton which had a huge garden and was let out complete with catering for such events. On the Saturday, the Barking family told us that as they felt sure War would be declared on the Sunday they were all going off to relatives in the country because we were all going to be blown to bits or gassed by the Germans. This left me without two of my bridesmaids, so my mum, not to be out done ran around her customers and found a little girl of the right size to borrow and Bernard's girlfriend of that time agreed to be the other missing bridesmaid.
Sunday morning 3rd September dawned, a beautiful day, and I was sent upstairs at 10.30 and told to get ready, and the family was dared to tell me War had actually been declared. When the siren went at 11.a.m they said it was a false alarm. It was not until we were in the church and the warden said we could not have the bells rung as this was to be the sign that the Germans had invaded our coast, that I really knew that ward was declared. However, despite that all our families gave us a wonderful day. Some guests left after the breakfast because they were going off to Didcot and when we had just started the dance at 7pm, we were made to go home by the police.
Eddie had been told not to go off on holiday if war was announced so instead of going on honeymoon we ended up in Eddie's bedroom downstairs in his parent's home.
During the night the sirens went and we heard a noise outside the bedroom door and there was Eddie's Mum shaking like an ashen leaf. Eddie's Dad would not come down, him telling Hitler what he could do, and as Mum was shivering so much we tucked her up in bed between us until the all clear was sounded.
We went to our own home in Woodford after a fortnight and we realised we were not just going to be blown to bits. We felt like a King and Queen as our first house was a little palace and lived there happily for eight years, Peter and Anne being born there, despite terrible ordeals from the bombing.
Granddad and Nannie Thomson lost everything, shops, home and income but fortunately Granddad Thomson had his little weekend bungalow at Hook End, Brentwood and they went to live there until Grandma Thomson got restless as she did not like living in "Private", and missed her customers. They returned to Hackney and bought yet another grocery shop and unfortunately in 1952 she dropped dead with a coronary thrombosis.
My brother John met an Irish girl, Mollie, during his war service and was very happy and intended to open a business with her dad in Omagh but in mysterious circumstances he was found shot dead in a Prisoner of War camp for the Germans and so my parents suffered yet another blow. What really happened we shall never know. Uncle Bernard who was a Commander in the Navy and decorated for his gallantry during the terrible Murmansk run, came back to ship broking but unfortunately took to drink and died a tragic death in h is forties.
Granddad Thomson remarried one of the old customers in the street who had used Mum's shop all her life and they had another 24 years of marriage.
This more or less brings you up to the times when your own parents can write of how they saw their childhoods and how times were in their young days. Like me I do not suppose they will have time or the inclination to do it until they are older as it is not until you get near to that final trumpet call that you feel "I must tell them what it was like".
God Bless you all, love one another and do not quarrel, I have lost all my family and it is so important to hold on to your links and you only have one Mum and one Dad.
TO MY GRANDCHILDREN
Grannies come in many an odd shape and size They are not always thought to be very wise
But listen, my dears, and bide what I say
Look up to the heavens at the dawn of each day Always walk tall and play a straight game
Be kind and loving to your own special mate
You have given so much love to your little Gran Remember everyone of you, I am your "Greatest fan".
No cries, no sobs on this my final day Just all hold hands and shout "lp, pip, hooray".
Dolly
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