After the War Was Over E-Book

Jill Quaife

• Herausgeber: Dolman Scott Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 445

Beschreibung

This book is a series of vignettes about the life and times of a child growing up in East Sussex in the years after the Second World War.
It covers the transition from war to peace and the child’s transition from schoolgirl to young adult. At first there is austerity, boarding-school and the social changes of the postwar Labour government, and then a growing sense of freedom as wartime restrictions begin to be relaxed, goods and services become more available and opportunities for travel in Western Europe open up.
The very personal story culminates with the girl’s job as secretary to an eccentric former diplomat who was one of the key figures in the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, and her experiences working with him and his family in London, Rome and South America.

Leseprobe

AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER 1945-1972

A sequel to A Wartime Childhood

JILL QUAIFE

Published by Jill Quaife 2021

Copyright © Jill Quaife 2021

Cover design by Jane Atherfold www.janeatherfold.co.uk

Jill Quaife is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Nor can it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

Printed by

Dolman Scott Ltd

www.dolmanscott.co.uk

In memory of ARMANDO who loved this period

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Setting the Scene

I: St. Leonards after the war

II: Bomb damage and reconstruction in Hastings and St. Leonards

III: Postwar railways

IV: West St. Leonards

V: The National Health Service

VI: The Alice Ottley School after the war

VII: Oaklands

VIII: The cold: The historically cold winter of 1946-47

IX: The cold in Worcester; The Beaumonts’ farm

X: 1950s dentistry

XI: Food and the shortage of it

XII: St. Oswald’s Lodge

XIII: 1951: Family events

XIV: The Festival of Britain; The 1951 General Election; Confirmation

XV: The death of the King

XVI: The move to Weybridge, 1953

XVII: Weybridge in the 1950s; The Coronation; GCE O-Levels

XVIII: Half term holidays

XIX: The Continent in 1947-48

XX: Continental travel

XXI: Northamptonshire holidays; Paris in 1949

XXII: The south of France, 1951

XXIII: The next severe winter at school, 1952-53; New Baskerville

XXIV: The VIth form

XXV: Reflections on my schooldays; Oxford exams; My determination not to go to university

XXVI: Career choices; Lack of careers advice at school

XXVII: Leaving school

XXVIII: Freedom at last

XXIX: The summer at home

XXX: Death of my uncle; The Galloway history; Giving up Little Orchard and leaving Sussex

XXXI: The Queen’s Secretarial College

XXXII: First job

XXXIII: The Suez crisis and Hungarian uprising; Leaving my job; Spain

XXXIV: Italy

XXXV: Farm secretary

XXXVI: Rome

XXXVII: Sir Eugen Millington-Drake and the dream job

XXXVIII: Early days

XXXIX: The household

XXXX: London

XXXXI: Aunt Jessie

XXXXII: Evelyn Stuart

XXXXIII: The cold winter of 1962-63

XXXXIV: Sir Eugen’s book

XXXXV: South America (1)

XXXXVI: South America (2)

XXXXVII: The Macnaghten Library

XXXXVIII: Iran

XXXXVIX: The end

Foreword

In 2012 my godsons were doing the Second World War at school and were told to ask grandparents, godparents or anyone who remembered those days what life was like for children during the war years. They asked me and I wrote down some recollections and they developed into a memoir called A Wartime Childhood. This covered my family’s life in Sussex where we come from, at Kew where we had a flat, and at Worcester where I was sent to boarding-school aged four, one of the darkest times of my life.

I sent the memoir to some friends and extended family members, and some of them said I ought to go on and write about my life after the war, so during the lockdowns in 2020-21 I did and this is the result. I had two reasons for doing it. The first was to remember my husband, Armando, who loved the 1960s and 70s when we were young and London was the place to be and I know he would have encouraged me to do it. The second was to give the memoir to my godsons, my idea being that it might survive and be handed down and be of interest to their grandchildren.

While now it is just another collection of memories such as anyone of my age may have, in a hundred years’ time it might add something to our descendants’ knowledge of 20th century life. I shan’t know whether that happens and it probably won’t, but if it does I should be happy and if it doesn’t I have still enjoyed writing the memoir and I hope a few other people may enjoy reading it.

Though broadly chronological it is really a series of vignettes which can be dipped into – and out of! Roughly the last third, about my job with Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, the British Minister at Montevideo during the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, was not part of the original memoir but was written for an author who was planning a book about the chief personalities involved in the battle and its aftermath and wanted some background information about Sir Eugen, and as this was such an important part of my life I added it to the main text.

The views and opinions expressed are my own. I have tried to check all facts but if there are any errors I can only apologise for them. I am very grateful for the help and support I have received from Tristan Millington-Drake who read the part of the memoir relating to his family; from Jane Atherfold who designed the cover; and from Richard Chalmers of Dolman Scott who oversaw the whole project.

Jill Quaife [email protected]

Introduction: Setting the Scene

The immediate postwar years were years of real austerity, not the perceived austerity of the early 21st century but real grinding hardship for many people. Despite the hype generated by the media in an attempt to destabilise the Cameron-Clegg coalition what is called austerity now, which for swathes of the population means having only one, or even no, foreign holiday a year instead of two or more, bears no relation to the real austerity of the second half of the 1940s. On top of it all, there was a Labour government, with the privations that implied.

The election of Labour in July 1945 was totally unexpected, at least by my family, who were shocked, and it was indeed the beginning of a very dark time, the effects of which have never really gone away and keep rearing their heads up even 70 years later. There would have been privations anyway, whoever had won the election, as although we had won the war we had, as the cliché says, lost the peace, and for people of a conservative persuasion a socialist government made that even worse.

The introduction of the Welfare State, the formation of the National Health Service, and the nationalisation of strategic industries were things which were to have a profound effect on everyone. In my family’s case my mother’s mother had not been left well off when my grandfather died and most of what she had was tied up in shares in the old Southern Railway Company, which was nationalised along with the three other big railway companies to form British Railways, later British Rail. The shareholders received what many felt was derisory compensation, and there was much lamentation about this round the dining-table at Little Orchard, my grandparents’ house at St. Leonards. I didn’t understand it but I had seen Mr. Churchill cheered through the streets of Worcester and I ‘knew’ that Labour was not a good thing. At home my father read the Manchester Guardian, when it really was the Manchester Guardian, a different paper from today’s ’Grauniad’, as well as The Times, and he said Clement Attlee was the best prime minister we had ever had, but he was nevertheless a dark blue Conservative and so were my whole family.

The State aimed to control the supply of everything, or as much as it could. That is now an outmoded concept and no successful modern democratic country propounds it, but it was very fashionable at the time, though probably it was already out of date even then. Years of socialism in Russia had not made that country prosper and were ultimately to lead to the break-up of its empire, as will happen in China (though not, alas, in our time) because such countries are too big and diverse to be run as one entity, but left-leaning political parties in Western Europe hankered after the control that socialist governments have over their populations.

In some ways therefore the postwar years, at least the late 1940s, were more dreary than the war years themselves and seemingly endless. In the war even as children we knew it would end one day, and when it did there would be huge celebrations and that was something to look forward to as we knew we would win. In reality, when the celebrations were over, austerity looked likely to go on for ever. All the things we had been promised ‘when things come down’ didn’t materialise. Things don’t ‘come down’, they just go up more slowly, as we very soon realised. There were shortages of everything, especially food. Bread was now rationed which it had not been in the war, and meat remained rationed until 1954, nine years after VE Day. Fuel, which largely meant coal, which powered both industry and domestic heating, was often in short supply, its production in the 1950s hampered by strikes which had not happened in the war. The shortage of paper continued into peacetime and at school our textbooks were dog-eared, scribbled over and often falling apart which no parents would put up with for a moment now but ours knew that we were lucky to have books at all. There were also some of the hardest winters in a generation, not to mention fog, not the low cloud that is often called fog today but real suffocating pea-soupers so thick that people walked in front of cars with torches to guide the driver.

Internationally America was the most important country in the world and everyone wanted to go to America, to have American things, to speak with an American accent. It was, as the young say today, ‘cool’. The equivalent of that expression then was ‘wizard’ or even the hilarious ‘wizard prang’, RAF expressions left over from the war. America and Russia between them had divided up Europe, resulting in the Cold War. Against that, it was in those years that the foundations of the European Union were laid, with the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, as a bulwark against both Russia and America, though Britain was a latecomer to the organisation and now years later is loosening its ties with its own continent and seeking closer ones with America, while America is becoming increasingly isolationist. It’s crazy.

On the domestic front my father’s secret organisation at Hughenden Manor, aka Hillside, had moved to Bushy Park in Middlesex, next door to the large American base there, and as he could reach that by bus from Kew we returned to live at our flat in the Mortlake Road, but we still spent a great deal of time in Sussex as we had in the war. The difference was that instead of being escapes from bombs or mercy dashes to support my grandparents in one crisis or another our stays were now for pure pleasure. The summers, as if to make up for the grim grey winters, were warm and sunny, the beaches were open, and we were free.

The 1940s gave way to the 50s and though that decade is derided for being stuffy and unstylish by people who weren’t there, for those who grew up during it it seemed like a golden age after what we had been through in the war. Churchill had returned to government, a lot of wartime restrictions were lifted, bombed sites were gradually rebuilt on, travel opportunities opened up and we could go all over Western Europe by train.

Then came the 60s and those who mock the 50s have nothing more to complain about!

This is the story of what happened to me in that era.

I St. Leonards after the war

The bride and bridegroom are staring at the camera, expressions of panic in their eyes. They are standing on a dais, the bride’s train cascading down the steps like at a royal wedding, in the studio of Warschawski at 20 Grand Parade, St. Leonards where they have been driven from their reception for the wedding photographs, wedding photography in 1935 not having reached the pinnacle of technological sophistication it has today. They are my parents. The resulting pictures were so bad that Warschawski didn’t charge for them, and the only good one of the wedding was the one that appeared in the Hastings and St. Leonards Observer taken by its own photographer as my parents left the church.

On the first day of the summer holidays in 1945, on an afternoon at the end of July, it was my turn to stare startled into Warschawski’s lens for the ritual annual photograph, and being dragged off to his studio that day is my first memory of St. Leonards after the war. Warschawski himself had died in 1935 but the business was inherited by a former employee who continued to use the name and my family continued to refer to him as ‘Warschawski’.

Warschawski photographed everyone in Hastings and three generations of my family including all my Bulley cousins. My grandparents at Battle had photographs of Anne and Ursula in his distinctive style in the drawing-room but none of me, as I couldn’t help noticing! Probably they thought mine weren’t good enough as I was not photogenic, but they kept them, albeit shut away in a drawer! The ordeal by camera happened every summer holidays, but if Warschawski couldn’t ‘do’ me on the day of arrival I was free to go to the beach as soon as we got to my grandmother’s and then I would ask my uncle if it was low tide and he would look at the tide table in the Observer. Before I learnt to swim, and even after I did, I only liked bathing at low tide as I was frightened of being out of my depth and I loved running out on the smooth wet sand and into ankle-deep water, but real swimmers had to wade out for about a mile and a half before the water was above their knees.

We would go down to the front via Maze Hill, excitement mounting the nearer we got to the sea, and stop at the newsagents on the corner opposite the Royal Victoria Hotel, which sold everything necessary for a traditional bucket and spade holiday, to buy rope-soled sandals for the shingle beach.

If there were too many people on St. Leonards beach we would get the bus to Bridge Way at Bulverhythe and cross the railway on the footbridge by the old Southern Railway carriage sheds there and have that beach to ourselves. That was near the ‘subterranean forest’, an outcrop of flat-topped rocks covered with the remains of prehistoric trees and exposed at low tide when I used to hop about on them and peer into the little pools left by the receding water. It was clearly visible from the Victoria to Hastings railway line when the tide was out and we often saw it from the train.

At certain times of the year at exceptional low tides you can also now see signs of the remains of the Amsterdam, a cargo ship of the Dutch East India Company which sank off the coast here in rough weather in 1749 on her way to Java on her maiden voyage. If she had survived she would have been one of a number of similar ships which serviced the Dutch settlements and garrisons in the East Indies, carrying guns, building materials for the colony’s development projects, and the money to pay for them, on the outward voyages, and the oriental spices, china and silks so desired in Europe on the way back. Much of her cargo is known to be still on board her and as she was on her outward voyage this is assumed to include gold and silver coins which is the real cause of the interest in her, never mind her historic importance, though a great deal of silver was removed by the authorities straight after the shipwreck.

If it was high tide we would go to the old St. Leonards Bathing Pool at West St. Leonards which was almost on the beach so it was the next best thing. The heyday of the pool and of other lidos along the coast was the period between the wars. After the war their popularity gradually declined as more people were able to go abroad. By the late 1940s and early 50s when we used to go there the place was almost empty which suited my mother, and me, too, as I didn’t want to be closely observed while attempting to swim and looking, as my mother once wrote on a postcard to someone, like a large frog. When it was really doing badly it was turned into a holiday camp which lowered the tone of West St. Leonards, which had always struggled anyway, and we didn’t use it any more.

In 1947 the installation of a miniature railway along the front to the camp did something to offset the decline of the area, at least for me as I loved trains and so was enchanted, but local residents were not enchanted and thanks to their complaints the railway was moved back along the front to the Old Town in Hastings, where it still operates. The engine was a reduced-size replica of the Royal Scot and after being exported to America and later returned home it is still working, on the miniature railway at the Royal Victoria Country Park at Netley in Hampshire.

If it was too cold to bathe my mother and I occasionally played tennis, or in my case tried to, on the public courts in Gensing Gardens. Before she was married tennis had been my mother’s life. She played at the Green Lawn Tennis Club in St. Leonards, which still exists, and won a lot of tournaments, but as an amateur she couldn’t receive monetary prizes. But even in those days there were ways of getting round it! Winners were given vouchers ‘to the value of’, and with one that my mother got for £5 she bought a very large, heavy and handsome Sheffield plate tea tray, later valued at £3,000!

Hastings produced a number of very good players in the interwar years, including my mother’s friend Phoebe Holcroft Watson, who won the Ladies’ Doubles at Wimbledon twice, in 1928 and 1929. When my mother got married and moved to London she stopped playing but she still followed the game closely in the press, went to Wimbledon and throughout my early childhood looked forward to the time when I would take up the sport and love it as much as she did and be as good at it as her. In my innocence I looked forward to that, too, as she talked about it so much and was certain that tennis was in my genes. But, alas, it wasn’t, as these sessions in Gensing Gardens showed, and it was a let-down both for her and me when we realised this.

It had never occurred to either of us that I simply would not be able to play. For one thing being very thin I had weak wrists and my mother had unaccountably bought me a full-sized racquet which was too heavy for me when everyone else my age at school had junior Slazenger or Dunlop ones, but the real problem was that I never realised that you had to keep your eye on the ball. Years later on summer Sunday afternoons at Weybridge, where my parents moved in 1953, we would hear our neighbour Ciaran Purcell coaching his son at cricket in the garden and repeating time and again ‘Keep your eye on the ball, Patrick!’ and it was only then that it suddenly dawned on me that that was what you had to do in tennis, too! No teacher or coach at school had ever told me that and my eyes were always riveted on my opponent to try and guess what she was going to do and though I would take an almighty swipe at the ball when it approached me it always passed harmlessly above or below my racquet while I was still looking at the girl on the other side of the net.

Gensing Gardens had a pond where I sailed a model yacht I had been given which my uncle, with his love of sailing, named Mischief after a famous ocean racing yacht and America’s Cup contender in 1881, and I liked that much better than tennis, though I was almost as bad at it. This was before radio-controlled model boats and there was no means of steering poor Mischief or of getting her back if she stopped in the middle of the pond, as she usually did. Eventually a long string was attached to her stern so that I could haul her in but this was very infra dig and I was mortified at doing it in front of other people.

II Bomb damage and reconstruction in Hastings and St. Leonards

There were bombed sites all over the borough, Hastings having been one of the two most bombed places in Sussex (the other was Eastbourne), but by this time we were so used to them that we hardly noticed them, knowing that in due course they would be built on once more though we didn’t know that what went up on them would in some cases be so monstrously ugly and out of place.

The nearest damage to my grandmother’s house in Brittany Road was sustained by St. John’s Church, on the corner of Brittany Road and Dane Road, where my parents had been married and I myself christened. St. John’s was restored to its former state and reopened in 1951, and this was achievable because it wasn’t totally destroyed, unlike St. Leonard’s, the Parish Church, on the front in the heart of ‘Burton’s St. Leonards’, that part of the town designed and built in the 1800s by the architect James Burton, the father of the more famous Decimus, who also had a hand in its development. Old St. Leonard’s Church was obliterated in 1944 by a flying bomb which had been hit by gunfire from an RAF fighter over the Channel and damaged but continued flying. It came in from the sea at a height of about 25 feet and was heading straight for Marine Court, the controversial 1930s block of flats on the front built to look like an ocean liner, but it suddenly veered to the west and crashed on the doorstep of St. Leonard’s, demolishing it completely.

Mercifully it was a Saturday night and the church was empty so there were no human casualties, but the church itself was a casualty because it was old and loved, and was replaced by a modern structure designed by Giles and Adrian Gilbert Scott and built of dun-coloured brick completely out of character with the surrounding white-stuccoed Regency houses and the graceful Burton colonnade along the front. My paternal grandmother’s family worshipped at the old church when they lived at Wyncliffe, a big house on the cliff above West St. Leonards station. The church, old and new, was and is almost unique in England, and certainly on the south coast, in being built north to south instead of east to west as most churches are, and as it is elevated you get the impression on coming out of the main south doors that the sea comes right up to the bottom of the steps. It is now a listed building, one of only a few churches to be granted that status since the war. It is also a blot on the landscape.

The trouble with modern architecture is that if you dump an ultra-modern, or even mildly modern, building down in the middle of a lot of traditional ones it loses impact itself and at the same time detracts from the pleasant aspect of the older ones. Marine Court is another example of this in St. Leonards. Modern buildings only work when they are not set cheek by jowl with older ones. That is why the Sydney Opera House is such a success. Had it been built in the middle of the city, with other buildings all round it, it would have been a different matter. Guildford Cathedral, in itself very ugly, is in the same category, sitting on the top of Stag Hill in splendid isolation, and so is the Sainsbury’s with roof sails at the entrance to Plymouth, which is greatly enhanced by being on a large open site at the bottom of a hill so that you see the whole effect of it as you come down the A38 into the city. But the impact of another interesting modern Sainsbury’s in south London (now demolished) was lost because it was fitted tightly into the middle of a row of 19th century terraced houses that came right up against it on either side.

Of the many regrettable postwar buildings in Hastings those that appeared while we were still there included the flats built by the LCC on the east side of Warrior Square and the new Plummers department store, a typical 1940s eyesore especially when seen from the main coast road at the back where it is a carbuncle in the middle of Robertson Terrace. One wonders how the Council sanctioned these and other monstrosities, like the former College of Further Education in Archery Road and the tax office in London Road opposite Gensing Gardens, though the tax office, a 1960s square box, was not built as a result of war damage but was a postwar redevelopment of the site on which an abattoir had previously stood. In my childhood we often saw cattle grazing in the field behind the building which sloped steeply down to the parapet above the tunnel at the west end of Warrior Square station and I was delighted to see what I thought was a country scene in the middle of the town. That was until I discovered what the site was really used for, and it seems amazing that an abattoir should have been tolerated in the midst of a then smart residential area.

Lower down London Road was the Regal Cinema where in the Christmas holidays of 1949 I was taken to see Little Women, the classic version with the young Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and the even younger Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Margaret O’Brien was the same age as me and I had already seen and admired her in Our Vines have Tender Grapes, and imagined myself being a film star like her. I loved the scenes of a New England Christmas in the snow in Little Women and I still remember that it was snowing in St. Leonards when we came out of the cinema at dusk and that somehow seemed magical and as if the film carried on into real life, especially when we got home to the log fire, lamplight and crumpet tea at Little Orchard.

The very first film I saw was Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1944, to which my parents had to take me because they had no one to leave me with. We saw it at the little cinema in Battle and as I was much too young it was enough to put me off Shakespeare for life, or at least until I was old enough to rediscover him through Verdi’s Shakespeare operas. Doing King Lear for O-Level English didn’t help either. The little cinema in Battle is now an auctioneer’s but still has the original canopy on the front and traces of its art deco decoration inside. The Regal in St. Leonards was pulled down in the 1960s and replaced by a supremely undistinguished red brick office block.

On the front another eyesore of a different kind was the twisted metal framework which was all that remained of St. Leonards Pier. In this case its demise was due to the war but not to enemy action and was because the pier had been cut in two in 1940 to deter enemy forces from gaining access to the town by landing on the seaward end, and it had rusted away ever since until it was finally removed by the Council in 1961. In stormy weather it looked particularly sinister, starkly black against the angry sea and lowering grey sky. Sometimes at low tide I ventured among the debris where jagged bits of metal poked through the sand, and I was not stopped by my mother, neither of us having any idea that it might be dangerous!

Hastings Pier survived the war but when it reopened afterwards about the only entertainment it offered was ‘What the butler saw’ penny-in-the-slot machines. Over the years it deteriorated, fell into the hands of rogue foreign owners, was closed down and suffered a catastrophic fire. There seemed to be a happy ending because after years of trying the Council finally managed to repossess it and it was restored by public subscription and reopened in 2016 in a new minimalist guise, light and airy with a glass pavilion suitable for weddings, and in November 2017 was awarded the Stirling Prize for the best new building in the UK by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The following month, unbelievably, the pier company went into administration and the pier was to close in 2019, a huge let-down and disappointment for the local people who had so staunchly supported its regeneration*.

Across the road from the pier was the White Rock Pavilion as it was then called (now, more boringly, it is simply the White Rock Theatre) with its clean cream walls and mock Della Robbia medallions set into the stucco. There my parents had seen and heard some of the premier musicians and opera singers of their day, and actors and comedians who later became famous and started their careers there in revues put on by the Fol-de-Rols, a seaside music hall company which was still going in the 1950s and early 60s when I was just grown up. Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Leslie Crowther, Jack Warner and his sisters Elsie and Doris Walters (‘Gert and Daisy’ of radio fame), who were to my parents’ generation what television personalities were to later ones, all appeared with the Fol-de-Rols.

After the war children’s films were shown at the Pavilion on Saturday mornings and I longed to go but I didn’t have anyone to go with and I knew all the other children would and was too shy to go by myself. I wanted my mother to come with me but she wouldn’t, probably foreseeing that she would be the only adult which would have been embarrassing for her as it would have indicated that she had a child who couldn’t manage by itself. She said I could go alone which was strange as although it might have been good for my self-confidence confidence was not a thing encouraged in children by parents and teachers and I’m sure it was the last thing my parents wanted me to have. It was something that you were supposed to acquire magically when you left school but until then too much of it was seen as a potential source of trouble.

The lower promenade was nicknamed Bottle Alley because the bottoms of thousands of glass bottles had been embedded in the concrete walls by Sidney Little, the ‘Concrete King’, who had built a lot of things out of reinforced concrete in Hastings and was ahead of his time. In spite of being natives of the town my family never mentioned him and I only heard of him many years afterwards, when he began to get the recognition, albeit posthumous, that he deserved. Bottle Alley was part of the sea defences and although at a lower level below the seafront it is a modern counterpart to the Burton arcade above. Sidney Little built both the St. Leonards Bathing Pool at West St. Leonards and the White Rock Baths further east along the front. He also built the underground car parks on the front and these were the first underground ones built anywhere in the UK. In the 2000s the old ironmonger in Bexhill Road, now retired, a character if ever there was one and the repository of many stories of the St. Leonards of bygone days, told me that when he was a boy he and his friends would open the hatch which is still visible in the wall at the entrance to the underground car park at the east end of Marine Court, scramble through and go all over subterranean St. Leonards and Hastings.

The car parks, now needed much more than they were in the 1930s, have long since been closed!

__________* In the spring of 2021, Covid restrictions having been partially lifted, the pier has reopened again.

III Postwar railways

As we still went down to Sussex so often, railways continued to play a very important part in our lives. They had served Britain valiantly in the war but were now run down and had not been invested in for years. Despite that, our journeys became much more civilised than they had been. Pullman cars returned, those elegant art deco chocolate and cream dining-cars with the little rose pink-shaded lamps on the tables and Victorian girls’ names (e.g. Gladys, Hermione, Dorothy etc.) depicted in large gilt lettering on the side of the car. We always looked at the name of the car to see if we had been on it before, as we often had. Even if we were not having a meal the stewards, in their starched white monkey jackets with blue lapels, would come through the train to the first class compartments and bring us toast like none I have ever encountered anywhere else, dripping with melted butter, and little slabs of cherry Genoa cake, which also has never tasted the same, or as delicious, anywhere since. As my father had remained in the Army he still had first class travel warrants for us which we continued to take entirely for granted. Years later in the 1960s when we were living at Weybridge the booking office clerk at the station, an old Southern Railway hand, told us that before the war there were four people at Victoria running the Southern Railway’s catering services and doing a superb job, then with nationalisation there were 40 making a mess of it and by the 60s there was an army of people making such a mess of it that the services stopped! There must be a moral here, perhaps that it is no good creating large numbers of jobs that can be done better by fewer people at less expense (a view which would get me lynched in some quarters today!).

The Hastings trains ‘terminated’, in modern parlance, at Ore, the station beyond Hastings itself, and when we returned to London, if it was a Sunday evening and my father was with us, we would have a taxi to Ore and get on the train there in order to be sure of being able to have the coupé. This was a private room at one end of the Pullman car with a glass door shutting it off from the corridor and four hugely heavy highly upholstered and comfortable armchairs around the table where you could lunch or dine in style away from everyone else. The rolling-stock was old, mostly dating from before the war, and although it didn’t stand up well in several serious crashes in the 40s and 50s to look at the carriages you would think they were massively solid and strong.

With the coming of peace the Pullman Car Company was able to reinstate its two flagship trains, as they would now be called, the Brighton Belle and the Bournemouth Belle, and introduce a new one, the Devon Belle. They were trains made up entirely of Pullman cars and in the case of the Devon Belle had an observation car at the back from which you could watch the rails appearing from beneath you and then disappearing into the distance, which was an amazing sensation, later experienced again in Italy on the great and much lamented Settebello between Rome and Milan. The Settebello also had an observation car at the front, with the driver’s cab above and behind it so that passengers could have the same view as the driver, which was if anything even more amazing than the rear view. In its day the Settebello offered a style of luxury high-speed travel unrivalled anywhere in the world, but it was withdrawn from service in 1984.

The Brighton Belle meant the Brighton Pavilion, where my mother took me one summer holidays when I had discovered Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels, in one of which the Pavilion features prominently, but the Bournemouth Belle meant Southampton, the home of Ordnance Survey, with which my father was closely connected as Military Survey, of which his organisatio n was a part, came under its umbrella and it was run by Sapper officers until it was civilianized in 1974. My parents had moved to Southampton the year after they were married and although they would never have told me so I knew I was conceived there which I’m sure accounts for the special feeling I have always had for the place!

The first time I went on the Bournemouth Belle was when at one half term my mother applied to the Southern Region of British Rail for passes to visit the Western Docks at Southampton as I also was into Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazon books and fascinated by everything to do with sailing and boats, including ocean liners. There was no security then and you could do that, although nobody did and I can’t think how my mother found out about it. I was thrilled and I still remember walking along the dockside, on a dreary wet morning, amongst the dockers and the great cranes, dodging piles of steel cables, with the huge sides of the liners towering above us, one of them a pink one of the Union Castle Line, whose famous slogan, seen in their posters on every big railway station, was ‘Every Thursday afternoon at 4 o’clock’ and then in smaller letters underneath ‘a mailship leaves Southampton for Cape Town’.

I dreamed of the day when I would go on a big liner myself, to somewhere like South Africa or South America. In the meantime I had to content myself with pressing my nose to the glass of the shipping office windows in Lower Regent Street and Cockspur Street which displayed miniature models of liners’ cabins, perfect in every detail. Luckily when I did go on a big liner it was still in the days when they went on actual voyages, not cruises, and were full of real travellers, not tourists. They were people who had jobs overseas and a real reason for being on board. But by the last time I came home from Argentina by sea in the late 1960s Royal Mail Lines, who were losing money because of the withdrawal of many British firms from South America in the changing pattern of overseas trading, were trying to offset the loss by marketing the round trip to the River Plate as a cruise to a whole new group of older mostly retired people with money to spare and no special interest in the area they were visiting, who changed the character of the voyage completely. The poor things were repaid for their custom by having to endure ten days moored next door to the frigorifico on the Riachuelo, the infamously noxious river through the industrial slums of Buenos Aires, which was not the average cruise destination.

The Devon Belle was really exciting because it meant a much longer journey, plus the observation car, and we went on it several times in the years after the war, returning to Colaton Raleigh each summer to see Auntie Marjorie and Uncle Harold, who had taken us in when we had to leave Sussex in 1944, and their daughters Phyl and Glad and Phyl’s husband Frank Wheaton. We no longer did the two last legs of the journey on the tiny branch lines via Tipton St. John and Newton Poppleford, as my mother and I had done in the war, but were met at Sidmouth Junction (now no longer a junction and renamed Feniton) by Roy Burrows, who was still the Colaton Raleigh taxi driver and was a special friend of mine because he bred golden labradors and used to let me see and handle the puppies. Often as we drove through the village on the way to Wayside, Auntie Marjorie’s house, we would meet Frank on his tractor and my father would stop the car and get out and Frank would get off his tractor and they would have a great reunion in the middle of the village street and would quickly gravitate to the Otter, the village pub which conveniently was owned by Frank’s mother, and we would know we wouldn’t see my father again till (a late) supper time.

One year Auntie Marjorie couldn’t have us at Wayside so we stayed with Mrs. Pearcey, who lived in the village and let rooms. I loved this for two reasons, one she kept rabbits, my favourite animals after dogs (luckily I was so innocent that I didn’t realise what she did with them even when she sent me a pair of rabbit fur gloves for Christmas!) and two her house had no electricity and was entirely lit by oil lamps with their soft romantic light which conjured up the feeling of the ‘old days’ to which I was irresistibly drawn. But while we were there mains electricity was installed, a dreadful blow! Rosemary, Mrs. Pearcey’s daughter, who was a little older than me, was very excited and rushed round the house switching all the lights on and off. I on the other hand was devastated.

IV West St. Leonards

Our family history was tied up with West St. Leonards, where the old bathing pool was. Peter Jenkins, my great-grandfather, by profession a stonemason, had his office there in the Bexhill Road. He built much of Hastings and St. Leonards in the late 19th century, was the largest employer in the area and also the largest ratepayer owing to the number of properties he built and let out, according to his obituary in the Hastings Observer on 28th June 1899. Behind his office was a depot which is now Electro Studios but was previously known for many years as Grosvenor Works.

Research is ongoing into the history of this building which has a number of interesting features including a large cellar accessed by two shallow ramps like those in modern multi-storey car parks. This has given rise to the suggestion that horses were stabled in the cellar. It is known, from photographs of his men with them, that Peter Jenkins used draught-horses for haulage so this seems feasible.

In the late 19th century when horses were the main means of transport there were hundreds of thousands of them working in every sector of industry and commerce, 27,826 of them used by the railways alone in 1893 according to Simon Bradley’s magisterial work The Railways (2016), and to save space in urban locations many were kept either underground or in what were literally multi-storey stables like multi-storey car parks today. A famous four-storeyed example of the latter was built by the Great Western Railway next door to Paddington Station and as Simon Bradley says it is still in existence but subsumed into St. Mary’s Hospital where numerous recent royal babies have been born, unaware that they entered the world through a car park.

From Grosvenor Works went the men and materials to build some of the most important buildings in Hastings and East Sussex, among them the old Empire Theatre, designed by Edmund Runtz and believed to be the first theatre in the world to have a cantilevered dress circle, the Hastings Waterworks with its distinctive red and cream brickwork in the high Victorian style, Crowhurst railway station, and many others.

When Peter Jenkins died in 1899 the building business was closed but Grosvenor Works remained in the family and was let to a succession of tenants with a variety of occupations. During the Second World War and for many years afterwards it was let to someone who made radio equipment for the government and later telephone parts for the Post Office, but when British Telecom was formed the manufacture of these was outsourced to China where they were mass produced more cheaply and the bottom dropped out of his market. He then retired after being a model tenant for many years and assigned the lease to a woman who sadly turned out not to be a model tenant and allowed the building to fall into disrepair, failing to carry out even basic repairs and maintenance which was required under the terms of the full repairing lease she had and defaulting on the rent and on insurance repayments, costing the Trustees many thousands of pounds in lost revenue and legal costs.

The case ended in a High Court judgment against the tenant, but judges have no power to make the miscreants actually pay and this tenant never did so. The bailiffs were called to evict her but most considerately they rang her up to find out when would be a convenient time to come and do it. Naturally there never was a convenient time but she cleared off of her own accord in the end, having caused us the maximum amount of trouble and stress over a long period.

By then I had inherited the building and my agents, having received a derisory offer from someone they knew who was planning to knock the building down and make a fortune out of redeveloping the site for housing, advised me to sell. I rejected that out of hand and I was justified because the artist Colin Booth, who lived in St. Leonards, had been eyeing up the building for some time, and approached me with a plan. This was to divide it into artists’ studios and let them to local artists who would do them up to their own specifications and at their own expense in return for a rent holiday. This brought the building back to life as Electro Studios and Colin was its saviour. Suddenly it wasn’t this near-derelict shell but a thriving studio complex as it is today, with a group of artists working in diverse fields and a gallery in which a series of exhibitions is held every year from April to October.

Since the old bathing pool was demolished the site opposite the studios has lain empty, and is a very much appreciated green open space, one of the few left in St. Leonards, a godsend for parents with young children, dog walkers, joggers and many other groups of people. It is also a breeding ground for the important bee orchid (Ophrys apiera) and in June and July turns into a beautiful wild flower meadow of the kind the government is trying to promote. But plans for its redevelopment are always surfacing, so far none of them viable and, with one exception, all of them objectionable to the majority of local residents. The exception was a plan to turn the site into a marina from the same maverick naval architect who had earlier proposed an inland marina on Priory Meadow (the Central Cricket Ground) with a canal down Harold Place to the sea. That would have been a project of national importance, transforming the town and lifting its profile above that of many other towns in England. A marina on the bathing pool site would have had a similar effect, but both plans were turned down by the Council as very few councils have the courage to back anything truly aspirational and on Priory Meadow we knew they would go for the downmarket shopping centre that is there now. At the time of the Priory Meadow plan, in 1998, I spoke to the naval architect, and he expressed himself very freely about what he saw as the Council’s criminal lack of support for his idea!

His project was not as impracticable as it sounds as the cricket ground had in fact been a lake years ago and there is still a spring which floods the shopping centre regularly in the winter. On the bathing pool site, as the Council has no money to develop it, anything built there would have to pay for itself, which would almost certainly mean handing it over to a developer for housing. A later plan, for a slipway, was also dismissed because the men of the Hastings fishing fleet said it wouldn’t work on that part of the coast owing to the shingle drift, and they should know, having to launch their boats from the beach as they do (the largest fishing fleet in the UK which does this), but one can’t help feeling that with energy and determination, and as technology advances, the difficulties might be overcome.

A storm water tank was built under the western half of the site in 1999, which precludes building on that part, and the whole site has been declared a flood plain which should preclude building on any of it. One can only hope that it will and that the Council won’t try to override the regulations when they see an opportunity to levy more council tax from new housing, an understandably great temptation as they have a constant need to raise the money to pay for the vast array of social services for which councils are responsible in the modern world. A compromise, which would satisfy local residents and earn the Council their gratitude, would be to spend a little money on tidying up and landscaping the site, perhaps allowing for some low-level commercial activity in the form of a food outlet such as the pop-up café which is there now and which thrives in that setting.

V The National Health Service

The establishment of the National Health Service was widely welcomed by the majority but for some elderly people like my grandmother it had some unfortunate and obviously unintended consequences. Our family doctor, Arthur Brodribb, who had brought me into the world, had retired and been succeeded by his son, Harold. I kept out of Harold’s way and he never had to treat me, but my grandmother needed his services regularly. His home and surgery were one minute’s walk away from Little Orchard, on the corner of Brittany Road and Charles Road West, but my grandmother, approaching 80, a much older age then than it is now, with angina and severe arthritis, couldn’t walk down, and then back up, the steep hill in Brittany Road to reach this house and Arthur always called on her, so the first time she needed his son after the advent of the NHS she rang up to ask him to call as usual and his wife, whom she knew, though not as well as she did the rest of the family, asked her, briskly and impersonally, if she had a temperature. My grandmother can’t ever have taken her temperature in her life and didn’t own a thermometer so had no idea whether she had a temperature or not, but as she couldn’t prove that she had Harold’s wife said he couldn’t call.

My mother remonstrated with Harold, and the visits were reinstated. Whether it was a ruling by the health service or a rule imposed by this particular practice I don’t think my mother ever found out but there must be many illnesses and conditions which don’t manifest themselves by a temperature. My grandmother had no one around her who had a car as in those days many people didn’t, and as she was a family friend of the doctor’s parents, indeed his mother Violet was her closest friend in St. Leonards, and doctors did make house calls all the time (and continued to do so for private patients, which my grandmother was, for very many years until recently) it was unkind and thoughtless, though probably unintentional, and the sort of thing that turned some older people against the National Health Service in its early days. There were two reasons behind the formation of the NHS, one obviously to improve healthcare for the nation but the other to provide jobs for servicemen and women returning from the war and many of these positions were non-medical, some of them entirely bureaucratic. Harold, like his father, was a wonderful doctor; it was then as it is now the bureaucracy behind the service which let it down.