Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter, Newsletter-80-August-2018
A WANDSWORTH RAMBLE
The Past is a strange land, most strange. Edward Thomas, Parting
In the early 1980s I had enjoyed reading In Pursuit of Spring, Edward Thomas's creative account of a bicycle ride from Wandsworth Common to Cothelstone Hill in the Quantocks. Journeys make archetypal themes and this one does not disappoint. Thomas looks at the landscape with an artists' eye, selecting topographical elements and describing them often in terse and pared down terms, frequently with a restrained warmth of familiarity. Gentle lyricism delights throughout and it is no surprise that this work led on, with Frost's encouragement, into his claiming of the poetic form as his distinctive metier.
In 1913, contemporaneously with Thomas's preparation of In Pursuit, W H Hudson, after reading The Happy-Go-Lucky-Morgans had written to Edward Garnett on 29 Dec, He is essentially a poet — and this book shows it, I think, more than any of the others. You noticed probably in reading the book that every person described in it — are one and all just Edward Thomas. But then he adds perceptively: A poet trying to write prose fiction often does this'.
Both In Pursuit and his poems contain journeys of his mind and developing perceptions, his pausing to gaze and reflect, his telling choice of illuminating detail, his backwards as well as forwards perspectives — all written with poignant poetic poise, balance and verbal draughtsmanship. On rereading it in 2014 I was keen to reimagine and map out the described route. Working through the text, I identified every road, village, town, pub and topographical feature he mentioned and used this schedule to work out the route on modern OS maps. I gave a copy of In Pursuit of Spring to my poet son Edward, with a collection pre-World War 1 OS maps of the route. These, I conjectured, would have been close to those familiar to Thomas on his cycle rides and walking explorations.
Following this, over a June weekend in 2016, I drove the route described while Edward cycled it, his partner Claire, a student in cartography, acting as navigator. We covered the route as meticulously as possible, pausing for refreshment and wild camping on two of the three nights. We walked the last three miles, with Edward pushing his bike because the chain had broken just before the end. It was an exhilarating and intriguing journey.2
`Letters from W.H. Hudson to Edward Garnett, Dent 1925 2 Edward presented me with a framed reproduction of the Victorian south of England onto which he had glued a section of his broken chain to outline ET's In Pursuit route. This inspired a larger version, mounted on two 1913 OS maps, contemporaneous with Thomas's exploratory bike rides, now in the Edward Thomas Study Centre, in Petersfield Museum.
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Having got the 'shape' of the route, I returned in Spring 1917 to some of the many points along the road indicated in the text which Edward Thomas had, it seemed to me, paused, gazed and marked as notable — for example Silent Pool, Dean Hill before Salisbury, Brook Farm in Wiltshire, the final view towards his beloved Wales from Cothelstone Hill in Somerset. This time I wanted to sketch and photograph these places, to somehow 'get into' the landscape that had inspired the writer and which he so fluently described. The resultant series of works done in acrylic and oil pastels I exhibited at our local art trail last October and, before Easter 2018, at Petersfield Museum, courtesy of the Edward Thomas Fellowship.
Friend Wendy Britton, currently Chair of Bristol Ramblers, has joined me in working at another level of engagement. We are devising and testing a series of 4 — 7-mile walks from points along the route. This will take the reader further 'into' the text, literally sharing and examining the viewpoint of the writer. These are circular walks, opening up chosen sections of the road to see points identified by Thomas and exploring their setting. If, in creating a circular walk, we are obliged to go off piste from the 1913 text, it is quite probable we will be walking related paths and lanes he explored on his numerous hikes across the terrain. I hope I shall find more about that when I undertake a further journey, into both the text and Thomas's engagement with the landscape, by an examination of his notebooks recording his preparatory field work for In Pursuit. These are housed in New York's Berg Library. This is an open project and I have yet to give shape to the resulting study.
It will take time to fine tune the walks and to work out how to present my material in appropriate form. Below, I submit, as a tentative starting point of our walks, the one centring on Wandsworth, the epicentre of Edward Thomas's young life and the setting-off point, in Nightingale Lane, for the journey. It moves through the remembered streets and locations of his childhood territory; each place is well documented in his writing and those of Helen and others.
The walk covers aspects of his early life — he says My waking life was divided between home, school and the streets and neighbouring common.3 For anyone seeking a fuller impression of this, a reading of The Childhood of Edward Thomas is indispensable and a reading of Helen's As it was will be richly rewarding.
It was only as I literally concluded writing up my walk that I came across John Haskey's account of the walk of 28 May 2012 led by Richard Purver and Anne Harvey.4 John writes, Of course, the homes where Edward lived, and the other houses we were to visit, did not fall in a convenient straight line or in a perfect circle; so, understandably, the chosen route took in places in an order which was geographically efficient, rather than chronologically accurate! However, the walk below reverses that order.
1. The walk starts from Clapham Junction station; if arriving by train, leave the station by the St John's main entrance, walk through the car park and down Junction Approach to Falcon Rd. Up to the early 19th century, Battersea was essentially a largely rural district. The coach road from London to Portsmouth ran down, slightly to the south, of what is now Lavender Hill. In the 17th century Wandsworth village was a refuge for persecuted Huguenots who fled France after Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They established in the village, among other resourceful industrial projects, the cultivation asparagus and lavender — hence the street name of Lavender Hill. Other such names in the area are the former Lavender Lodge with its 500-foot garden on St John's Rd (gone by 1913), Lavender Gardens and Lavender Sweep. To the west of
3 The Childhood of Edward Thomas (CET), written in 1913 and first published by Faber in 1938. Ch 1 Infancy 4 This is in ETF Newsletter 69, Jan 2013 and the walk was part of a series of the Wandsworth Heritage Festival
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the north side of the Common is Huguenot Place and a Huguenot burial ground, known as Mount Nod cemetery. In The Icknield Way Thomas created the character of the Oxford-educated A.A. Bishopstone, the head of a vagrant family which perishes in tragic misery. In the deceased man's diary which he 'finds' he reads various statements of a philosophical nature and quotations from many sources, often mirroring, unsurprisingly, Thomas's own thinking. At one point he has Bishopstone write, "The road northwards out of Arundel leads to Heaven"; to which he had added, "So does Lavender Hill.". Given Thomas's warm recollection of his youthful years in Battersea, this has the ring of a very personal conviction. [5]
Development came with the construction of the railway in 1838 and of its associated interchange in 1863. Around the junction grew railway-related industries and the workforce slum housing. Civic amenities, more genteel housing and a regional shopping district were created to the south of Lavender Hill. Green spaces such as Wandsworth Common were saved from development. Reckoned at 6,000 in 1840, the Battersea population increased 28-fold by the time Thomas wrote In Pursuit of Spring. In the latter he shows little fondness for Clapham Junction and its impersonal multitudes surging around on their shopping, business or leisure concerns: I am not fond of crowds — The crowd that I dislike most is the crowd near Clapham Junction on a Saturday afternoon. Though born and bred a Clapham Junction man, I have become indifferently so. Perhaps I ought to call my feeling fear: alarm comes first followed rapidly by dislike — It is a disintegrated crowd, rather suspicious and shy perhaps, where few know, or could guess much about, the others. [6] Helen, perhaps with warmer feelings, remembers that Clapham Junction was often a stage on her homeward journeys with Edward after their courting walks in places like Wimbledon and Merton.
2. Walk down Falcon Rd.
Falcon Rd was a main thoroughfare, leading to crossroads and the junction of Lavender Hill and St John's Hill off to the right. The latter would have led to the Unitarian Chapel, attended by the Thomas family — reluctantly by Edward — and the private John's Hill House School he attended after Board School. The Falcon Inn on the left, built as a hotel and pub in 1882, was preceded by an inn dating back to 1733 and possibly much earlier. It had been by the Falcon Brook (previously named the Hydeburn brook) and faced the former turnpike road.
Until 1733 the Battersea Manor was held by the St Johns of Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire. They became Viscounts Bolingbroke, whose armorial bearings carried falcon wings which probably explains the name Falcon Rd and that of the pub. The St John and Bolingbroke family are commemorated by the names of various streets in the Wandsworth area.
The mention of Lydiard Tregoze, brings to mind Thomas's intense love for Wiltshire. He compiled The Woodland Life in 18977, collected from previously-published articles, his nature diaries and notebooks. He moves through the seasons, describing their changes with delicate and minute observations. Chapter 2, describing Spring, is entitled Lydiard Tregoze and recounts its meadows, pools, fields and coppices which he had explored in his visits to Swindon relatives. Displaying his extensive knowledge, in this chapter alone he comments on twenty-five flower types, plus fungi, moss and lichen, ten tree species, the animals rabbit, dog and ferret, and eleven types of bird. Later, in the South Country he wrote, with his deep curiosity about names (so evident in In Pursuit of Spring), if only those poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and house.8 He creates a list of them and in this lyrical litany is the St John family estate of Lydiard Tregoze. The frontage of Debenhams across Lavender Hill declares its origins as Arding & Hobbs. This was the company's flagship emporium, built in 1884 and remodelled after a fire in 1909. The owners had shrewdly anticipated high profits from the rapid retail and domestic developments
5 The Icknield Way, Constable 1916 Ch IX Streatley to Sparsholt p245
6 In Pursuit of Spring, Thomas Nelson 1914 (IPOS) Ch 6 The Avon, the Biss, the Frome
7 The Woodland Life, Blackwood, 1897
8 The South Country, Dent, 1932 edition Ch IX, p153
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that would follow on from the building of Clapham Junction. The store would have been familiar to Wandsworth residents like the Thomas family.
3. Cross Lavender Hill and go down St John's Rd. On walking down these streets, a view of the late Victorian houses can be gained by looking up above the shop fronts. Croosh Alley on the left gives a partial glimpse into a past world with its setts, courtyard and bordering trees. The Victorian shops were established to meet the needs of the local population. A directory of 1893 lists a great variety touching on all aspects of life — dining rooms, builders, warehouses, cheesemongers, grocers, butchers and greengrocers. There was even a sculptor and an umbrella manufacturer as well as a 'medieval smiths'. Business relating to the near-defunct farming in the area include corn merchants and dairymen9.
In the past couple of decades, the area has been extensively gentrified, the shops showing the pervasive influence of prevailing consumer fashions. Currently there are wine shops, a homeopathic practice, abundant outlets for coffee or for chic items, eating places, hair stylists and quick food joints. The shops gradually give way to domestic terraces.
4. Cross Battersea Rise and on to Northcote Rd where Thomas, in his Childhood notes, says that one winter there were playing grounds of the hills of snow lining Northcote Road, the principal street — 10. This runs to the south in a shallow valley, flanked by parallel roads which rise gently on either side. Continue down Northcote Rd and, seventh on the right, turn up Wakehurst Rd, taking the short walk up to number 49 on the right.11 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 1 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 bedrooms13
9 Neal's Farm stood on the west side of the railway, Burntwood and Springfield farms lay on ET's ride down Burntood Lane 10 CET Ch 1 Infancy 11 As a further example of gentrification, the current house price for this property is £1,300,00. 61 Shelgate Rd is valued at £2,525,000, 13 Rusham Rd at £3,282,000 and 6 Patten Rd at £3,474,000 12 This is located to the right of Wandsworth Rd nearer Vauxhall Bridge 13 CET Ch 1 Infancy
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5. Return to the junction with Northcote Rd and cross it to go up the other half of Wakehurst Rd. On the right, looming above all else, is the redbrick pile of Bellville School. This was Edward Thomas's first school. It is a substantial three-storeyed block, still retaining a large asphalt playground with its original London brick wall as in Thomas's day.
"Then I entered the lowest class of a large suburban board school — Here began a lifelong preoccupation and love of maps, reaching into his life as an army instructor in Hare Hall, Essex: What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coast lines with red, and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herringbone fashion. I never tired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland. The line of the Hebrides I think I actually loved."
14 Looking at the school's large windows it is easy to imagine Thomas's statement: We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap. Thomas graduated from the Infants to the Junior section in 1886, staying till early 1888. His father, solicitous for his elder son's future, then moved him to the private St John's Hill House School, from where he went, aged 12, to Battersea Grammar School and, at 15, to St Pauls, London.
6. Turn left long Webb's Rd where the houses are larger and have a less confined air than in Wakehurst Rd. After a line of shops on the right, cross and turn up Shelgate Rd. Walk up to 61 From 1888 this was the second Thomas family home in the area. It bears a blue plaque.
While we were in [Wakehurst Rd] my mother presented me with four brothers at intervals of two years — Being thus seven in family we move to a large house in one of the roads parallel to the old one — the new house had charm Its size allowed an empty room for us to play in, and a box room — [which] was dark and housed a wooden box containing inexhaustible treasures — chiefly old books, old magazines, old photographs of unknown people. 15 So the ever-growing family had moved to this three-storeyed terraced house for its greater space and it was the birthplace of the youngest boy Julian, his favourite among his brothers. Julian was to accompany Edward on some of his cycling explorations for In Pursuit of Spring. Edward's first writings as a teenage author were completed here, consisting of articles springing from his observations of the natural world, some curated into his first book The Woodland Life. Such early writing mentions nature rambles on Wandsworth Common as well as in Wimbledon, Richmond, Merton and Swindon. It was from this house that Edward courted Helen, visiting her father James Ashcroft Noble at The Grove, Balham, and later at Patten Rd. From here, too, he went up to Lincoln College, Oxford and it remained home until he and Helen married and moved to Earslfield and later to 7 Nightingale Parade. Before that, in this home in January 1900 Merfyn was born up in the dormered attic which the recently married couple had made their own, half study and sitting room, half bedroom. Helen describes the scene vividly at the end of As it was.
7. Carry on up to Leathwaite Rd, turn right and go back down Wakehurst Rd and up to Bolingbroke Grove and Wandsworth Common which can be glimpsed in the distance. Bolingbroke House, an old red brick three-storey mansion in what was called Five Houses Lane, was on the left at the end of Wakehurst Rd. It became a hospital for the artisanal and middle classes in 1880 (it still houses Bolingbroke Medical Centre) and the greater part became, in 2012, Bolingbroke Academy. Thomas was aware as a lad, of the ever-increasing housing and civic developments, devouring boyhood haunts and semi-rural land. Though greatly interested in houses, homes and buildings, real and imagined, he had an ambivalent relationship with London's relentless growth which
14 CET Ch 1 Infancy 15 CET Ch 4 Books and School friends
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colonised some of these childhood-cherished places; on the other hand, his home streets were a playground almost equal to the Common.16 On Bolingbroke Grove he remembers vividly being a smaller hanger-on of a swelling army of scores of older Board School boys hurling stones at the nearby grammar school students and armed with wooden swords and pikes, or daggers, shields, pistols, bows, arrows and with horns and trumpets, splitting into groups and hunting each other among the front gardens or pretending to be Sioux, Mohicans, or Hurons. Clearly, unlike today's parentally-supervised activities, Thomas enjoyed adult-free exploits, so necessary for working through hazards and risks, discovering small joys, creating a bank of treasured childhood memories.
8. Cross Bolingbroke Grove on to Wandsworth Common, taking the path left, parallel to the Grove and the railway line. Disraeli's 1875 Public Health Act enabled councils and pressure groups such as the Commons Preservation Society (very active in Wandsworth) to raise funding for the development of previous common land into recreational spaces for the urban population. In 1871 the Wandsworth Common Act prompted the purchase of land from Lord Spencer not only for the park but for building plots.17 Subsequent legislation, such as the 1881 Open Spaces Act, confirmed this trend. The Common exercised a powerful influence on Thomas. The first stirrings of interest in the natural world began here, it was the crucible of his passionate curiosity about plants, trees and birdlife — all of which he shared with his brothers, with Helen and, later, with his children. It was an emotional firewall between a land that he loved and the erosion of urban sprawl. He writes with relish of the games and activities, such as fishing, smoking, hoop bowling and day-long explorations: The Common — offered many temptations to more irregular games and aimless rovings. For it was an uneven piece of never cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with rainfall, had been hollowed out, perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places — 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 who wore steep yellow paths by running up and down them.18 Children experience a place where they can rove, alone or with other youngsters, as somehow 'their own.' In The Happy go Lucky Morgans,19 (created in large part out of the writer's personal memories and feelings) Arthur must surely be referring possessively to Wandsworth Common as Our Country, which Arthur/Edward Thomas enjoyed along with Richmond Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves. The young Edward and Helen often strolled the Common and she writes it was here, walking in early Spring, while walking on the Common, very happy, talking of what we had been reading, what doing, what thinking, walking as usual hand in hand, she became aware her affection for Edward had become love. On parting, it was sealed with their first kiss. 20 9. Walk down the path running next to Bolingbroke Grove. Thomas says this was lined with venerable elms 21 — not now, though. Follow the path; it is bordered with ash, chestnut oak and acer trees. It leads to a pond with two small islands, edged by willows and alive with mallards, geese and the occasional heron (plus a warning not to feed them, thus encouraging rats). The
16 CET Ch 2 First schooldays 17 Spencer Park with its middle-class homes lies north of the Common. Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, 3rd Viscount St John (1732 — 1787) married Lady Diana Spencer of the Marlborough family. It was not a happy marriage and was dissolved but it links the landowners around Wandsworth Common. 18 CET Ch 1 Infancy 19 THGLM Ch XX The Poet's spring at Lydiard Constantine 20 Helen Thomas, As it Was, (AIW) Ch 2 21 IPOS, Ch 2 London to Guildford
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areas of uncut grass have allowed a rich variety of wildflowers and shrubs to thrive and it is easy to understand why Thomas was so excited by the Common and all he found in it.
10. Cross over the grass on to a broader path along a copse of silver birch on the left. Veer right on to the broad path which runs straight towards the railway bridge ahead. Cross this and go through the alleyway lying head between the houses. This emerges on Baskerville Rd. Walk left, noting the generous gardens of the houses over the road. Patten Rd is on the right; walk down to No. 6 This section of the walk has taken us on the route Edward Thomas would have walked to see his mentor James Ashcroft Noble, a Liberal journalist, critic and writer and, subsequently, to call on Helen. Patten Rd is a wider street than those of the Thomas homes, indicating wealthier residents. They are spacious, semi-detached residences with pillared porches, fretted gable ends and ornate plaster embellishments; each has a basement, two storeys and an attic. Helen says this home was in a better neighbourhood [than 15 The Grove 22, their first Wandsworth home to the east of this location] with a garden carved out of an old cherry orchard with several fruit trees.23 At the time of writing there are two cherry trees in the front garden. The family had moved from Liverpool to The Grove in 1892 and it was here Edward first visited Noble. W G Tarrant, the hymnologist, writer and minister of the Wandsworth Unitarian Chapel attended by Noble, had asked the latter to help young Edward work on his writings in preparation for possible publication. Helen says this shy and constrained lad responded to the genial kindness and interest of her father between whom there developed a fondness.
From 1895, several of Edward's articles were accepted by a weekly paper of which Noble was co-editor and in the Globe. Under his guidance, The Woodland Life was prepared for publication in 1897 which, Noble having died in 1896, he inscribed to the memory of James Ashcroft Noble. In November 1895, Noble wrote to Thomas, I think that when you get to know my Helen she might make a very nice friend for you. She is a few months older than you, but she is in many ways younger than her years, and she loves Nature and beautiful things just as you do, though in some ways she is not as clever as the others [her sisters Irene, Susan and Mary]24 One day, Noble said to the youth, "Here's Helen dying for the country and a good walker; why LI don't you take her and show her some of the places you know?" — It was from this house that we set off for our first walk to Merton.25 The walks continued throughout their life together.
11. Retrace your steps to Baskerville Rd and walk to the right. At the end is Routh Rd; at No.3 there is plaque to David Lloyd George, counted as a friend by Edward Thomas's Liberal father.
Turn left and walk through another alleyway back to the Common. Walk right, alongside the pond on the left Thomas says of this ornamental pond — Empty it was, and the sodden bed did not improve the look of the Common — flat by nature, flatter by recent art. The gorse was in bloom amidst a patchwork of turf, gravel and puddle.26 Today's pond belies that description; much thought and care has been invested in this small two-part lake and its setting. Continue walking right, along the avenue lined with acacia, lime, sycamore and a variety of other trees. The path will take you to Bellevue Rd and The Hope on the opposite side. This road links Burntwood Lane down on the right and Nightingale Lane just over the railway bridge on the left. Thomas gives 21 March 1913 as the starting date of his In Pursuit of Spring Quantock-bound journey. He first cycles along these roads flanking the Common before turning left at the bottom
22 The house was destroyed by a flying bomb in 1944. 23 AIW, Ch 1 In Search of Spring 24 James Ashcroft Noble to Edward Thomas, 30 November 1895. National Library of Wales, 22919B, f41v, f42. Quoted with permission in the January 2005 ETF Newsletter 53 by Kedrun Laurie: The Schooling of Helen Noble 25 AIW, Ch 1 In Search of Spring 26 IPOS, Ch 2 London to Guildford
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on to Garratt Lane, bound for South Wimbledon, Merton and the rest of his Spring pursuit. He says this stretch of road was tame; it was at once artificial and artless, and touched with beauty only by the strong wind and by the subdued brightness due to the rain — with its not quite lusty grass, the hard, dull gravel, the shining puddles and sharp green buds. He notes nostalgically at the top of Burntwood Lane the blackbird's shrubbery, the lawn, the big elm, or oak, and the few dozen fruit trees, of one or two larger and older houses surviving — The almond, the mulberry, the apple trees in these gardens have a menaced or actually caged loveliness, as of a creature detained from some world far from ours, if they are not, as in some cases they are, the lost angels of ruined paradises. From this road he could see the Wimbledon Electricity Works'', the Lunatic Asylum,28 playfields awaiting housing development and sorry unprotected elms which have one hour of prettiness, when the leaf-buds are as big as peas on the little side sprays low down. Then on a Saturday — or a Sunday, when the path is darkened by adults in their best clothes and children come and pick the sprays in bunches instead of primroses. For there are no primroses, no celandine, no dandelions outside the fence in Burntwood Lane.29
12. Turn left towards the railway bridge onto Nightingale Lane. Cross the end of Bolingbroke Grove and, two roads up on the left, is Rusham Rd. Walk up and on the right-hand side and at the corner with Sudbrooke Rd is 13 (now 12) Rusham Rd or Rusham gate. Three steps lead up to a fine garden embracing three sides of this impressive house and to the front door in the gable end. Thomas's parents moved here in 1902, after Edward, with Helen, had left home, and it was a source of pride to his father as an outward sign of his self-betterment and improving status. Edward Thomas, when staying here from Steep, was visited by family and friends, Robert Frost amongst them. He enjoined friends to write to him at this address and he put it at the head of many of his own letters. From this house he set off for his Quantock-bound cycle ride. While billeted here in 1915, some of his early poems were written. His War Diary poignantly records on 11 January 1917, Said goodbye to Helen, Mervyn and Baba. Bronwen to Rusham Road . . . . Supper at Rusham Road with all my brothers." After this his father, who had a problematic relationship with his eldest son, accompanied him to the station for his last journey which took him back to the army and to France, saying, "I wish you had more belief in your cause to support you." And when Edward died, and perhaps writing with pride in his sadness at his son's death, from here he wrote to The Times to reveal, against Edward's wishes, that the poet Edward Eastaway was indeed Edward Thomas. Helen stayed here for a time after Edward's death and it was here that Philip Henry Thomas died in 1920.
13. To conclude the walk, continue up to Thurleigh Rd, and right up Montholme Rd, left on Broomwood Rd and right onto Northcote Rd and back up to Clapham Junction.
Benedict Mackay
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27 A Local Authority project, the Durnsford Road power station in Wimbledon opened in 1899, energetically promoted by engineer William Henry Preece (1834 — 1913), a telecommunications pioneer.
28 Surrey County Lunatic Asylum opened in 1841, designed for 294 patients, chiefly paupers from rural Surrey, and was remodelled in later years. Built to fashionable ideas, it was constructed along a long central corridor with wards for differently afflicted patients running at right angles; these included an Annexe for Idiot Children. It was surrounded by farmland and kitchen gardens. It was transferred to Middlesex County Council c 1889
29 IPOS Ch 2 London to Guildford 3° See War Diary, accompanying The Childhood of Edward Thomas, Faber 1983 edition
My thanks to Richard Emeny for answering graciously my many questions and to Gillian McGrandles and Emma Anthony of the Wandsworth Heritage Service in Battersea Library for assisting me with research
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