A talk by Richard Purver, illustrated with readings in prose and poetry by Anne Harvey, for the Wandsworth Society)
This is an edited version of the talk given by Richard Purver on behalf of the Fellowship at the request of the Wandsworth Society at their AGM, held at West Side Church, at the corner of Melody Road and Allfarthing Lane, on 24 March 2011. Richard opened the talk by referring to his own family background in the area, his mother Hilda Evershed coming from Wandsworth and his father William Purver from Battersea, and past Fellowship activities held locally, including readings by Anne Harvey of Edward Thomas's poetry, for example at Wandsworth Museum in October 2005 to coincide with the exhibition "Our Country: the Battersea and Wandsworth of Edward Thomas" [PB: does anything survive of this? Images? Commentary?]. A version of this article appeared in the Christmas 2011 Bedside edition of the Wandsworth Society newsletter.
The writer and poet Edward Thomas was born in March 1878 in Lambeth and moved with his parents to Battersea when he was about two. After his marriage to Helen Noble they moved to Kent and then Steep in Hampshire, and finally High Beech in Epping Forest. He was killed in the First World War at the battle of Arras in April 1917. In this talk I would like to concentrate on the idea of locality and the way our lives unfold within surroundings which acquire a lasting meaning for us. In the case of Edward and Helen Thomas they left a record of their memories and experiences and we can still visit the streets and houses where their descriptions and vignettes evoke real lives lived in these particular places in the late Victorian and Edwardian period.
Edward's father and mother Philip Thomas and Mary Townsend were born in South Wales and came to London when Philip obtained a post as a civil servant with the Board of Trade. He was involved in local Liberal politics and gave lectures at Battersea Town Hall for the Battersea Ethical Society. Edward was the eldest of six brothers. The first house the Thomases lived at in Battersea was 49 Wakehurst Road, near to Wandsworth Common. In his posthumously published autobiography, The Childhood of Edward Thomas, Edward talks of his explorations of the varied habitat of the Common and games played there:
A railway ran across the Common in a deep bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley and had somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth now overgrown with grass and gorse heaped up at my side of the cutting from which they had been taken were 'hills' to us... Equal to them in height and steepness, and almost equal as playing grounds, were the hills of snow lining Northcote Road, the principal street, one winter... the Common... was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps.
Edward gives a precise description of the nearby roads and the house itself, explaining that even when new the 'little semi-detached one-storied pale brick houses' had distinguishing features, for example the beginnings of creepers on the wall or flowers in the gardens, and because the people were different:
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... 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... Through the open window... one Mayday, Jack-in-the-Green bounded in to beg a penny, showing white teeth, white eyes, black face, but the rest of him covered and rippling with green leaves. The passage was a playground when it was too wet or too dark to be out of doors. Here, when I had [a brother was old enough to] 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.
Edward Thomas attended the local Board School, Belleville Road as an infant and was admitted to the main school in April 1886, his name appearing in the register in the Welsh form of 'Edwy'. The school of course is still there and housed in the original building. In his autobiography Edward describes his teachers and fellow pupils, the lessons and the games in the playground, remembering
'crawling in and bursting out... We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap'
He tells how boys gathered in large groups for mock battles on the Common and these could become more serious when the local grammar school boys, probably from Emanuel, taunted the 'Boardy Blags', that is blackguards, from the Board School.
The writer and poet Edward Thomas was born in March 1878 in Lambeth and moved with his parents to Battersea when he was about two. After his marriage to Helen Noble they moved to Kent and then Steep in Hampshire, and finally High Beech in Epping Forest. He was killed in the First World War at the battle of Arras in April 1917.
In this talk I would like to concentrate on the idea of locality and the way our lives unfold within surroundings which acquire a lasting meaning for us. In the case of Edward and Helen Thomas they left a record of their memories and experiences and we can still visit the streets and houses where their descriptions and vignettes evoke real lives lived in these particular places in the late Victorian and Edwardian period.
Edward's father and mother Philip Thomas and Mary Townsend were born in South Wales and came to London when Philip obtained a post as a civil servant with the Board of Trade. He was involved in local Liberal politics and gave lectures at Battersea Town Hall for the Battersea Ethical Society. Edward was the eldest of six brothers. The first house the Thomases lived at in Battersea was 49 Wakehurst Road, near to Wandsworth Common. In his posthumously published autobiography, The Childhood of Edward Thomas, Edward talks of his explorations of the varied habitat of the Common and games played there:
A railway ran across the Common in a deep bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley and had somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth now overgrown with grass and gorse heaped up at my side of the cutting from which they had been taken were 'hills' to us... Equal to them in height and steepness, and almost equal as playing grounds, were the hills of snow lining Northcote Road, the principal street, one winter... the Common... was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps.
Edward gives a precise description of the nearby roads and the house itself, explaining that even when new the 'little semi-detached one-storied pale brick houses' had distinguishing features, for example the beginnings of creepers on the wall or flowers in the gardens, and because the people were different:
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... 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... Through the open window... one Mayday, Jack-in-the-Green bounded in to beg a penny, showing white teeth, white eyes, black face, but the rest of him covered and rippling with green leaves. The passage was a playground when it was too wet or too dark to be out of doors. Here, when I had [a brother was old enough to] 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.
Edward Thomas attended the local Board School, Belleville Road, as an infant and was admitted to the main school in April 1886, his name appearing in the register in the Welsh form of 'Edwy'. The school of course is still there and housed in the original building. In his autobiography Edward describes his teachers and fellow pupils, the lessons and the games in the playground, remembering 'crawling in and bursting out... We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap'. He tells how boys gathered in large groups for mock battles on the Common and these could become more serious when the local grammar school boys, probably from Emanuel [PB: More likely to have been Battersea Grammar?], taunted the 'Boardy Blags', that is blackguards, from the Board School.
his first book to him after he died in 1896. The funeral service was conducted by Mr Tarrant at the Unitarian chapel. James Ashcroft Noble and in 1907 his wife Esther, were buried in Wandsworth Cemetery, where the gravestone carries a touching inscription recording the admiration and love of his 'comrades in letters'. We are told that Edward and Helen tended the grave with wildflowers. I came across the tombstone by chance in the 1990s when looking for those of my Evershed ancestors.
Edward was still a student at Oxford when he and Helen married at Fulham Register Office in June 1899 and Helen went to stay with his family at 61 Shelgate Road while expecting their first child Merfyn. Helen would take Merfyn to Clapham Common and enjoyed looking for signs of spring flowers in the large overgrown gardens of the old country houses of bygone city merchants in the surrounding streets. Many children have been born in the houses around us here of course and will have been referred to in private letters and diaries, but we have a published account by Helen of Merfyn's birth at 61 Shelgate Road in her memoir As It Was, with a detailed description of their room at the top of the house as it became vividly memorable to her when the labour started:
I remember standing at the door of our room and seeing it with a new vision — this attic reaching over the whole house, with a large old-fashioned fireplace with hobs at each side, on which a copper kettle always stood. It had a sloping roof, and a dormer window at each end. Half of it was Edward's study, and our sitting-room, where his books, his fishing rods, his clay pipes and walking-sticks were kept, and where he wrote and read, and I had spent such happy hours sewing and reading and dreaming. The other half was our bedroom, with the big bed, the bow-fronted chest of drawers, the low rockingchair, and the large semi-circular dressing-table with a muslin petticoat round it. On the floor was an old faded carpet that had once been gay with bunches of impossible flowers. In the study part was a huge arm-chair... a replica of one that Edward had at Oxford. On the mantelpiece were the brass candlesticks I had given him for his birthday, his tobacco jar, and a miniature of his mother as a young and beautiful girl.
The pictures in the study were two old silhouettes of Welsh ancestors above the plain oak table, which served as a desk; a large photograph of the Vénus Accroupie, which Richard Jefferies so much admired; an old rather ribald ballad, with a coloured picture at the top, which we used to sing to a jolly tune; and a funny old painting on glass of Tintern Abbey. In the bedroom part was a large coloured reproduction of Botticelli's Primavera, and his round Virgin and Child, and a water-colour drawing of my father. I had always loved this room, and on that day every detail of it imprinted itself on my mind for ever. I was content that it should be the birth-room of my first-born... On an oak chest which Edward had made, near to the fireplace, stood the cradle.
It is interesting to compare this passage with Edward Thomas's identification with a similar place in his poem "The Long Small Room". Edward and Helen lived for three months from November 1900 in a 'half-house' or 3-room upper flat at 117 Atheldene Road, a new street in Earlsfield, 'obviously doomed to become a slum' according to Helen, although it had a good sitting-room which they had distempered in a warm French grey. She says there was 'a little kitchen with steps leading from it to a tiny squalid back-yard, used by the downstairs people for keeping ramshackle rabbit hutches and hanging out washing which was always wet and never clean'. The tenants downstairs, whom she regarded as 'terribly poor and degraded' often moved out in the middle of the night to avoid paying the rent. No 117 has now gone. It may be this street which is referred to in an essay of 1902, Recollections of November, in which Edward Thomas contemplates the moon and fragments of nature seen from his room.
They then lived from February to October 1901 at 7 Nightingale Parade, Nightingale Lane in Balham. This was a flat above a parade of shops which is still there on the corner of Blandfield Road, close to where Edward's parents moved to 13 (now No 12) Rusham Road.
Balham and the surrounding district is the explicit setting of Edward Thomas's only novel, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans, published in 1913. The centrepiece of the story is an imagined dwelling, Abercorran House, based on the large old houses with grounds still existing locally, many of which would be knocked down and replaced with new villas:
To-day the jackdaws at least, if ever they fly that way, can probably not distinguish Abercorran Street and Wilderness Street from ordinary streets. For the trees are every one of them gone, and with them the jackdaws. The lilies and carp are no longer in the pond, and there is no pond. I can understand people cutting down trees — it is a trade and brings profit — but not draining a pond in such a garden as the Wilderness and taking all its carp home to fry in the same fat as bloaters, all for the sake of building a house that might just as well have been anywhere else or nowhere at all.
The novel also contains an interesting description of 'Our Country', which seems from its reference to The George Inn to be the area around Merton and Morden, then still a rural location beyond the suburbs, which is also mentioned in The Childhood as a favourite place that Edward and his friends used to walk out to from Battersea. His life-long capacity for walking long distances was shown early in these treks; he also often walked to Wimbledon Common or Richmond Park, sometimes taking the train to Barnes from Clapham Junction in the latter case or to go further afield.
Starting very early on a Sunday on occasions he 'walked to Kingston and back in time for morning service'. Helen later joined him on some of these expeditions.
The theme of another early essay, Broken Memories, is that of walking out across the railway bisecting Wandsworth Common and through the encroaching streets to the fields and woods, and The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans features a detailed description of a typical long road leading north into the suburbs from the London countryside, past building sites fronted with hoardings, a new cemetery and a factory, isolated blocks of new houses, an old inn with a Gypsy's cart outside and then the Victoria Hotel, 'built in the Jubilee year of that sovereign', old cottages and the overgrown gardens of empty or soon to-be-abandoned dwellings:
Beyond the 'Victoria' the road straightened itself after a twist, and was now lined by a hundred houses of one pattern but broken by several branch streets. These were older houses of grey stucco, possessing porches, short flights of steps up to the doors, basements, and the smallest of front gardens packed with neglected laurel, privet, marigold, and chickweed... a man walking [to London] would begin to feel tired, and would turn off the pavement into the road, or else cross to the other side where the scattered new shops and half-built houses had as yet no footway except uneven bare earth. On this side the turnings were full of new houses and pavements, and admitted the eye to views of the welter of slate roofs crowding about the artificial banks of the river which ran as in a pit.
Although Edward Thomas deplored the crowded brick streets of the city he was also fascinated by and saw beauty in them, and despite his move away in 1901 and his role as a chronicler of the countryside in prose and verse, his involvement in the South London suburb he grew up in continued all his life. He visited his family and friends here regularly over the years, and wrote some of his early poems while staying with his parents when stationed near London after enlisting in the Artists' Rifles in July 1915.
Edward and Helen's own children came to know the area in turn through staying with their relatives. Their third child Myfanwy remembered being taken for long walks on Wandsworth Common by her paternal grandfather and the fierce Welsh cook named Emma who occupied the basement of the 'tall, dark house' in Balham.
Another overnight visitor to Rusham Road was the American poet Robert Frost who encouraged Edward Thomas to write poetry after years of producing a series of prose books on a wide variety of subjects as a professional author.
Edward continued his early practice of making natural history notes in his diaries, observing on 8 July 1913, 'Rusham Road: 6-7.15 a.m. one thrush hammering away at one triple cry, message or whatever anyone else likes' and on 1 February 1915, 'How I noticed the one thrush near the tip of poplar 250 yards beyond Nightingale Lane in opening of Rusham Road — he was singing, the only one'. This sentence was adapted for use as the second verse of his poem The Thrush.
As recorded in his War Diary, it was at Rusham Road that Edward had supper with all his brothers on 11 January 1917 and said goodbye to his elder daughter Bronwen and his mother and father the next day, before embarking for France on the 29th. My last quotation is a passage from The Childhood of Edward Thomas, where Edward gives an account of walking to Wimbledon Common with other boys and girls. In it he talks of the paper factory which was located on the river Wandle where it runs parallel to Garratt Lane. The Royal Paper Mills was demolished in 1910 but a nearby road, Esparto Street, carries a reminder in its name, as esparto was a type of grass used in paper-making.
I know you will enjoy this mention of the Wandle because of the great interest your Society has taken in the restoration and management of the river, and perhaps even more the reference to a location with special relevance to where we are meeting tonight:
The three-mile walk was... good in itself, whether we went by Wandsworth, Earlsfield or Wimbledon... Allfarthing Lane was worth going down for its name's sake. We invented explanations and repeated those of our parents. At the top dwelt an old woman in what looked a one-room hut who presumably knew and had something to do with the origin of the queer name. But above all, whichever way we took, the Wandel had to be crossed... best of all was the middle way through Earlsfield, crossing the Wandel at the paper mills. The smell of the mills wafted over a mile and a half on certain still evenings gave me a quiet sort of poetic delight. Hereby the water ran over a steep artificial slant, swift, glittering, and sounding; and sometimes we stayed here and caught minnows instead of going on to Wimbledon. It was the first place where I saw and realized the beauty of bright running water. We paddled with our stockings in our shoes and our shoes tied together and slung over our shoulders. We talked and laughed and shouted and splashed the water. I cannot remember cold or rain or any clouds there'.
I will now ask Anne to finish our talk by reading a small selection of Edward Thomas's poems, starting with one of his most popular, Adlestrop. By the way Anne has published a book, Adlestrop Revisited, about the wide response to the poem from readers and other writers over the years. Adlestrop / Birds' Nests / March / Helen / Good-night'''''
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