Edward had been born to Philip Henry and Mary Thomas in lodgings at 10 Upper Lansdowne Rd North (now 14 Lansdowne Gardens)12. They moved to 2 Tremorvah Villas, Battersea and, when Edward was 2 and with his younger brother Ernest, they relocated to this modest semi-detached brick house in Wakehurst Rd.
He wrote of this Wandsworth home,
Our street like three or four others parallel to it was in two halves, running straight up the opposite sides of a slight valley, along the bottom of which ran the principal street of mixed shops and private houses. Our house was low down in the half which ran up westwards to Bolingbroke Grove, the eastern boundary of Wandsworth Common. These little semi-detached one-storied pale brick houses in unbroken lines on both sides of the street had each, even when they were new, something distinguishing them and preventing monotony. The people in them made them different. In addition, some were beginning to be draped in creepers. Some gates stood open, some were shut. One had bushes in the garden, another had flowers, another nothing but dark trodden gravel.
The house above ours, in the next pair, was presumably meant for a doctor, and possessed a coach house which almost looked as if it belonged to us. That was our outward distinction.
Inside from the front door to the back of the house there was as long a passage as possible, the rooms opening out of it. The staircase ran up to a room with an opaque glass window in the door, a second room and two others connected by a door. The rooms downstairs I hardly remember at all — The passage was a playground when it was too wet or too dark to be out of doors. Here, when I had at any rate one brother — probably three or four years old when I was five or six — who could run, we two raced up and down the passage to be pounced upon by the servant out of a doorway and swallowed up in her arms with laughter. Upstairs the room with the glass door was at long intervals occupied by a visitor, such as my father's uncle James or my mother's sister, and I think cards were played there — I and at least one brother slept in one of the two connected bedrooms
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