A Changing World
Home, family and working life in the mid 20th century
Terence Kearey
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2012 Terence Kearey
Published by Memoirs
MEMOIRS BOOKS
25 Market Place, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 2NX
info@memoirsbooks.co.uk
A companion volume to
History, Heroism and Home, A Distance Travelled and Country Ways
Without limiting rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior permission from both the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
Cover Design Ray Lipscombe
ISBN: 978-1-908223-59-3
Contents
Chapter 2 Public health and housing
Introduction
This is the story of life in an English town and an English community as seen through the eyes of an ordinary English family – my own. It focuses on the years from the 1930s through to the 1960s. It covers a period when the country was changing perhaps faster that it ever has before or since. From a familiar world in which life was simple and expectations modest, values were maintained and the community spirit prevailed, we were plunged into the chaos of war at a time when most people could all too clearly recall the horror of the preceding one. Never have the British people pulled together so strongly as they did in the war years, but with peacetime in the 1940s came unexpected challenges – economic strife, a slackening of social mores and moral codes and a new materialism. With these changes came new attitudes to work and its rewards which would greatly hamper our recovery.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the help of Peter Clark’s Hope and Glory and David Thomson’s England in the Twentieth Century, which were both kept at my elbow as I wrote this book to give a national picture. The Harrow Observer information desk has been most obliging, having to put up with my frequent requests. The Harrow Museum and Historical Centre supplied numerous elusive facts. Thankfully, Harrow and Petworth libraries did their best to supply day-to-day answers and Wikipedia was always there to fill in the gaps.
I hope this book will encourage others to record their memories so that later generations will better understand what has gone before and what efforts others have made to develop a continuity of time and place.
However hard I have tried to be fair, reasonable and factual, it is inevitable that some events and statements have been missed and others misinterpreted or even misrepresented. For all such errors, I apologise.
CHAPTER ONE
NORTH HARROW
As the years pass, most people’s thoughts turn to home – not where they live, but where they were born. Many remember carefree days filled with fun and laughter. My earliest reflections are thus happy days shared with my brother, who was eleven months older than I.
As I cast my mind back, I compose a picture of a semi-detached house: flowered borders, lawn and trees, boxed in by a privet hedge. The house stands on a slight bend in the road, almost opposite four lock-up garages. It was there that I spent my first twenty-three years with my parents, until I too became married and started my own family, taking part in another full circle of life.
As I look back, I’m grateful I was raised by parents who provided a stable upbringing during wartime austerity. Our community was, in the main, lower middle-class. There was no unemployment and very little serious crime – it was a society wedded to law and order. As I relate my story, I hope my words impart to you why my reminiscences are happy ones and how English society has changed to a less open and friendly place, wedded to possessions and self-aggrandizement.
In 1933, as a newly married couple, my parents went to live in a rented house in Sudbury, a suburb of Wembley, not far from Harrow-on-the-Hill. A year later my brother Stanley was born. Contemplating an increase in the family and needing a larger garden, they moved house. The Garden Suburb of North Harrow was the popular choice and houses for sale or rent were quickly being snapped up. By the time my parents occupied number 31 Cumberland Road, the town had been completed, including cinema, schools and church.
The Kearey family had a new house in a new town. It was the same year King George V and Queen Mary celebrated their Silver Jubilee. From 1950 onwards, British society, grounded in Victorian standards, gradually relaxed its rigid behaviour. All over the country, imperceptibly, one’s routines and habits became less formal, simpler and more casual. My father would have called it sloppy, lazy and scruffy, but then he was a disciplinarian. In reality, Britain was aping the fashions of America, shown to us by the cinema projector; folk went to the cinema at least once a week and we children supplemented that with a visit to Saturday morning pictures, relishing Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey and Bronco Billy.
Over the next fifteen years, separate starched collars gave way to attached soft collars. The introduction of blue jeans made everyone a cowboy. Hot pants became outerwear and country accents were found preferable to the Queen’s English. Television replaced cards, draughts, cribbage, snakes and ladders and tiddly-winks and dancing apart made jive and jitterbugging a craze. Square dancing and Cecil Sharp gave way to be-bop and Bill Haley. Coffee replaced, grammar schools were pronounced outdated and comprehensive schools were the new face of education. The Scouts, Boys’ Brigade and Church Lads were ‘old hat’. The Union Jack was consigned to the attic, steam trains became historical curiosities, camping was seen as suspect and steamed puddings bad for your health. Trouser belts became essential, while braces were used only on teeth. Socks no longer needed suspenders and contraceptive sheaths were used for their intended purpose instead of for keeping your rifle barrel clean and dry.
The age-old habit of walking on the kerbside when taking a lady out was forgotten, as was assisting her up the stairs, offering her your seat and dutifully holding your umbrella over her when it rained.
North Harrow did not have any grand houses. Its best properties lined the Pinner Road leading to Harrow. They had an extra living room and bedroom above, were detached and designed in a similar style to all the rest of the town. If North Harrow had no houses for the very rich, neither did it have houses for the very poor. All the houses were similar. Some streets had a better place on the map, close to the park. Others had trees. Those that backed on to the railway, were positioned next to the shops or linked to the council houses, had a disadvantage. But in the main, all were very much like each other and there was very little to separate each individual family.
The first railway to be opened locally, in 1837, was the London & Birmingham Railway, later to be called the London & North Western. It ran from Euston to Boxmore, passing through Harrow Station, later renamed Harrow & Wealdstone.
A second line, the Metropolitan, from Paddington to Farringdon, was in operation by 1863, the first underground railway. Over the next twenty years it was extended, linking up with the District Railway and the Inner Circle in 1884. Branch lines were run from Baker Street to Swiss Cottage in 1868 and from Willesden to Harrow in 1880. This was extended to Pinner five years later and a station built there within the year. It took a further twelve years to push the track to Chesham, Chalfont, Watford, Amersham and Aylesbury.
By the turn of the century, the railway stretched over fifty miles, from central London out to Buckinghamshire. It was electrified by 1905 and by 1927 North Harrow Station was up and running. The electric Metropolitan District line, inaugurated in 1904, operated between Park Royal and Roxeth with a halt at Rayners Lane. The company was not slow in planning the purchase of additional land for more lines, sidings and depots. This land was negotiated on the principle that the land could be used for other purposes. In the event it was used for housing. The first housing estates were built at Wembley and Pinner in the early 1900s. A few years later more land was let go all along the line, though this process was brought to a halt by the First World War.
The outbreak of war did not stop the railway company’s publicity department continuing to operate until its operations were temporarily closed down. Its declared aim was to publicise the line and open up the area to development. It adopted the brand name of Metro-Land for an advertising brochure. It continued publication for another twelve years, until the Metropolitan Railway ceased trading as an independent company and became part of London Transport.
In January 1919, a property company called the Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited (MRCE) was set up to manage and develop the railway’s holdings. It was this company’s policy to plan and build residential estates all along the line, including Pinner, North Harrow, Rayners Lane, Northwick Park and Eastcote. The scale of the enterprise required the services of local property developers, who were allowed to build to their own specifications. To advertise the housing projects, all the railway’s route maps, timetables and station posters carried detailed accounts of the sites, plans and local facilities. This was done under the slogans ‘a better way of life’ and ‘rural traditions with civilized progress’. This marketing ploy worked and the houses were soon snapped up, not just for owner-occupation but by investors buying property to rent.
Horse tramways were laid at the end of the nineteenth century. By 1897, electric tramways were being operated; a number of tramway companies formed the Tramways and Light Railway Association. It wasn’t long before the Omnibus Owners’ Association was formed, to look after the interests of horse-drawn public transport. In the 1920s and 30s all three forms of public transport – buses, trolleybuses and trains – operated in and around London. The Road Traffic Act 1930 regulated road transport.