- RANSOME1.pdf
- RANSOME2.pdf
- RANSOME_TALK_1_WC_red.pdf
- RANSOME_TALK_2_ERR_red.pdf
- DOWN_WITH_THE_FENCES_2_my_sound_1586x1080.mp4
- DOWN_WITH_THE_FENCES_2.pdf
- body_ends_1125x768_black_ends.jpg
- NEW_1_DOWN_WITH_THE_FENCES.pdf
- NEW_2_SPENCER_AND_BUCKMASTER.pdf
- NEW_2B_WRIGSBY.pdf
- NEW_3_CODA.pdf
- Front Page: April 2021
- Front Page: March 2021
- Years
- Links to Videos and Zoom Talks (including Balloon View of the 3rd London General Hospital, 1915 / Drone flight over the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building / Three Island Pond / The Lake / WaterWorld / Hidden History of Loxley Road.
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- The Battle for Plough Green
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- OS_c1871_WC_water_and_pits_150dpi_2024_v1.png
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- Edward Thomas's Wandsworth Common - Part 1 - A birthday walk, Wednesday, 3rd March 2021
- Edward Thomas's Wandsworth Common - Part 2 - In pursuit of spring walk or cycle, Sunday, 21st March 2021
15th May 2021
Beating the Bounds - John Buckmaster et al's perambulation of Battersea Parish, 17 March 1862.
"On Holy Thursday, according to triennial custom, the parochial officers of Battersea, accompanied by a large number of boys taken from the various schools, perambulated the bounds of the parish.
"The muster took place in Battersea-square, about nine o'clock in the morning; and after the boys were formed in procession, with white wands, the parochial officers and others proceeded along the water's edge to Battersea-bridge, and from thence along the river to the Railway Dock, at Nine Elms..."
"Beating the Bounds in Battersea", The Parish Dial, 7 June 1862
The perambulation shown on the contemporary Stanford's 6-inch Library map of 1862. It starts and ends at Battersea Square, near St Mary's church.
(Click on image to enlarge)
I am annotating this account - here's what I have written so far. But do get in touch in the meanwhile if you want to know more, or make a comment.
Friday 7 May 2021
People
Buildings
Schools
Maps
Date
Taking a kite for a walk between the Commons, 1882
(Click on image to enlarge)
With a kite of forty-two inches high, one of our readers took quite a tour on a certain Saturday afternoon during last summer.
A fresh south-westerly breeze was blowing at the time; and, letting up the kite from the College Park footbridge on Wandsworth Common [today's Cat's Back bridge], he ran out to the full tether of the string, which was a mile and a quarter long.
Kite-flying becomes monotonous when the flyer remains stationary, and so our friend started on his travels..."
Date
Edward Thomas's Wandsworth Common | A Birthday Walk, Wednesday 3 March 2021
Wednesday 3 March is the anniversary of the birth of the great "war poet", essayist and novelist Edward Thomas, who came to live at 49 Wakehurst Road when he was two years old in 1880. The family later moved to nearby Shelgate Road (where there is a blue plaque), then Rusham Road. Later, he lived on Nightingale Lane and Atheldene Road, off Garratt Lane.
Edward attended Belleville, at that time a new Board School. But most of his most influential early education took place on and around Wandsworth Common, where the mounds by the railway cutting, or the gorse bushes, or the ponds and lakes made up an alien territory controlled by a guerrilla army of feral children.
Later, as a teenager, he would meet his future wife, Helen, on the Common - she lived at 6 Patten Road in today's Toast Rack. And it was on the Common that they enjoyed their first, intensely passionate kiss.
I have outlined a very short walk from Wakehurst Road to Patten Road, via various places that Edward records in vivid (and sometimes shocking) detail in his "Fragment of Autobiography" (written ?) and other writings, such as The Pursuit of Spring (date).
His remarkable memoir of childhood was not published in his lifetime. Edward Thomas died in 1917 and is buried in the Pas de Calais and [his memoir was not published] for more than 20 years. It remains the most vivid of all memoirs of a late-Victorian childhood spent on and around Wandsworth Common.
A map also shows further places you can visit in the area.
The landscapes of Edward Thomas' childhood had nothing of the sweep of Buchan's Border hills, Haggard's Norfolk acres, or the South African High Veld. They were the scrubby wastes of Wandsworth Common in the 1880s... His early memories were of throwing stones at rats, moorhens... (Kay Dunbar [date))
The received image of Edward Thomas is of a man of the English soil, steeped in country ways from birth, ... The closest Edward came to a green, open space was Wandsworth Common, where this nature-lover watched, with almost hypnotic fascination, as older boys dissected live frogs... " (C.L.S. Bulletin - Issues 122-168 - Page 187. )
THE GRAVE-EYED, rather demure-looking boy with the primitive fishing-rod was in no way more remarkable than the other brats whose jam-jars of sticklebacks and gudgeons proclaimed their common citizenship of the furzy wasteland at Wandsworth. Thrushes' eggs, catapults, tame pigeons and butterfly-nets were the stuff of their dreams; Wandsworth Common was all America and each of them a Christopher Columbus... (John Mitchell, date 1939?)
Send me an email if you want to comment on anything you've seen or read on the site, or would like to know more, or just want to be kept in touch / Philip Boys (aka "HistoryBoys")
And don't delay, join the Friends of Wandsworth Common today.