Wandsworth Common History Project
A talk by Cathy Rowntree, archivist of Honeywell School and Clapham County School
The following is an edited transcript of a talk given on a summer evening to a local audience. Cathy Rowntree, who taught at Honeywell for thirty-nine years and serves as its archivist, covers the school's history before the war, the evacuation experience, the stories of individual evacuees, and the V1 bomb that fell opposite the school in June 1944. She also draws on the history of Clapham County School, which shared many of the same wartime experiences.
I think I've met most people here already. Quite a few of you are former Honeywell parents or pupils, and some of you may have seen my husband Phil and me in the Common Memories film. Phil later came to work at Honeywell. I first joined the school in 1979, though I already knew it well — three of my youngest brothers were pupils there.
Honeywell is a typical London Board School: four storeys, dating from 1891. When it opened it contained three schools under one roof. The Infant School occupied the ground floor, the Girls' School the second floor, the Boys' School the third floor, and science laboratories were added at the top. The school didn't get electricity until the early 1950s — before that, the whole building was lit by gas. Because the school day ran until 4 or 4.30 — later than today's 3.30, since children had two hours for lunch and had to go home to eat — the caretaker would come round to light the gas lights as the afternoons darkened.
In the infants' classroom you can see the tiered seating that was standard throughout the school, so the teacher could see all the children and all the children could see the teacher. The little desks had slates slotted into them for writing practice before the children graduated to pen and ink. The headmistress visible in one photograph — Miss Samuels, or Samuelson — used to bring her dog to school. There was no enforced uniform, because many families couldn't afford it.
The infants' playground was on the lower side of the hill and was shared with the girls, who were trusted not to knock the smaller children over. The boys had the upper playground to themselves, which was just as well — several people have told me about the ferocious games they played up there. The school had to put netting over the windows on that side to stop them being broken, and the netting is still there today.
The photograph of the girls' class shows them doing knitting. Girls' lessons included sewing, cookery, and laundry — skills that might lead to employment as a maid in one of the grander houses around Spencer Park. Boys did woodwork. The science laboratories were in the boys' part of the school, and girls very rarely went up there. Class sizes ran up to sixty. Nobody had a classroom assistant — the concept simply hadn't been invented. Children stayed at school until the leaving age of fourteen, after which they were expected to find work, unless they had won a scholarship to a school like Clapham County in the next road, which offered the possibility of going on to university.
Empire Day — what we would now call Commonwealth Day — was a special occasion. Children paraded with a little orchestra playing, girls in their Guide or Brownie uniforms, and were rewarded with an afternoon's holiday afterwards.
They must have known for some time that war was coming. One of the gas masks I have here is dated 1937 — two years before the children were evacuated. There were two main reasons for the evacuation: the obvious one of getting children away from danger, and the practical one of freeing mothers to do war work, such as munitions, which they couldn't do if they had their children to look after.
Three million children over the age of five were involved in the evacuation programme. The first wave left in September 1939. Many children came home again when nothing immediately happened — some had gone home for Christmas, or their parents had never sent them in the first place, preferring to keep the family together. Some schools stayed open to accommodate those who remained; the wave of children shown in the photograph I'm showing here is actually the second wave of 1940.
When a child was to be evacuated, parents received a form to complete and a list of what the child should take. Priority one was the gas mask, which had to be carried at all times. The accompanying guidance on cleanliness noted, with some delicacy, that after the first evacuation complaints had been made by householders in the receiving areas about the condition of some children, and urged parents to ensure their child arrived "with clean clothes, clean hair, and clean body." Gas masks issued by the Metropolitan Borough of Battersea came in cardboard cases with a reinforced outer — the string on some of them, I've been told, cut painfully into the shoulder. Please don't try putting one on today: they contain asbestos, and every week the children practised wearing them, they were being exposed to it.
Everything else the child took fitted into a small pack: shirts — no T-shirts, which weren't yet in everyday use — knitted pullovers, short trousers for boys, a dress for girls, underwear, handkerchiefs, long socks, perhaps a tie, a few sweets, and a little money. The coins in use until decimalisation in 1971 were the same ones that had been in circulation since Queen Victoria's reign, and teaching children to do money sums in pounds, shillings, and pence was a proper challenge. As it happened, I trained as a teacher, passed my exams in 1968, and was immediately told not to bother teaching money sums because we'd be going decimal in three years.
The three schools at Honeywell all had to be evacuated. The infants were taken by coach to Clapham Junction Station; the girls walked there; the boys walked to Wandsworth Common Station instead. The headmaster later said he had been worried they might be bombed on the way — this was two days before war was actually declared. Nobody — parents, teachers, or children — knew where they were going. Destinations were kept secret until they arrived.
The local paper, the South Western Star, reported shortly afterwards:
The boys of Honeywell Road School are at Bognor, their address being West Leigh School. The lads are billeted with Bognor families and for many it seems to be a second holiday. Our reporter saw Mr Spragg, one of the teachers at Honeywell Road School, on Tuesday afternoon — he had just returned from Bognor to fetch his car and collect various luggage for colleagues on the school staff. "All the boys are happy and at present are spending their time bathing or playing games," said Mr Spragg. "Many have been taken to the pictures or on picnics by the people with whom they are billeted. The people of Bognor are doing all they can to make our stay a comfortable one."
Mr Gray, the headmaster of the school, has sent a message to the parents, pinned on the blackboard at the school entrance. Mrs G and Mrs Jackson, headmistresses respectively of the infants and girls schools at Honeywell Road, have also sent messages stating that the scholars are at Felpham and Middleton near Bognor. The children have sent their individual addresses to their parents.
When the school celebrated its centenary we put out an appeal in the local papers for former pupils, and a number of former evacuees came forward. I want to introduce a few of them.
Gerald Shephard was only six when he was evacuated. His mother was sensible enough to buy him a rucksack for his things. He was billeted in Felpham, where he told us the local school had no room for the infants — so they had their lessons in the ballroom and billiard room of a nearby house. He kept a diary, and the following year, having grown so accustomed to living at the seaside, he wrote about coming back to London for a holiday as though the city were the novelty. His handwriting, for a six or seven-year-old, was remarkable.
Dennis was living in Webs Road at the time of evacuation, where they had no bathroom. In Bognor, his billet had one, so he considered the whole experience rather luxurious and enjoyed himself. By the time he was fourteen the school leaving age called him home, and he found work at a factory on Nile Lane making optical instruments — binoculars and the like — to replace the equipment lost at Dunkirk. He worried constantly that his factory would be a prime target. He couldn't join the army at eighteen because of a hearing problem, but that didn't stop him joining the Clapham Junction Home Guard at seventeen.
Victor still had his evacuation label — the little card tied round a child's neck or coat — and brought it in to show us. He also had a letter sent to him while he was billeted near Bognor Regis, and later, when he was called up, he served in the Army of Occupation in Austria. When he came back at fourteen he became a voluntary firefighter, with a certificate permitting him to enter private properties to rescue people or salvage belongings.
Joan Senior had only been at Honeywell for the infants and had moved to New Malden by the time evacuation came, but years later she came to find us because she had loved her time at the school so much. She told us a great deal about life during the war. She said they always dreaded arriving at school in the morning because they never knew if there would be an empty desk — someone lost in the night. She described the air raid shelters — a special one had been built at her school — where the longest she was ever kept was six hours, because there was an unexploded bomb across the road. You took a little tin with you: an enamel mug, an Oxo cube, and if the man in the shop next door gave you boiling water you had a hot drink. Perhaps a biscuit, a small piece of chocolate, and some Horlicks tablets — athletes still use them, apparently.
At sixteen, young people were required to register with a youth organisation to show they were contributing to the war effort — the Scouts, the Guides, the Boys' or Girls' Brigade. Joan was already in the Girls' Brigade and later became a qualified national coach for bowls. She also gave us one of her most precious possessions: her original wartime identity card. Some of the numbers in those identity cards, she told us, were later incorporated into National Health Service numbers when the NHS was founded.
Clapham County School — now Thomas's School in Broomwood Road — had a parallel wartime story. When their train was evacuated it got as far as Windsor and stopped. They were in good company: Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were also there, and, unknown to anyone at the time, so were the Crown Jewels. Some of the Clapham County girls were in the same Guide troop as the Princess, and one girl wrote about going up to the castle to borrow Princess Elizabeth's handcart so they could go out collecting waste paper for the war effort.
Sally could have gone to university, but at sixteen she was determined to become a journalist. She came home, adapted her school gymslip into a pleated skirt, took the label off her blazer and took in tucks to make it look like a smart jacket, sewed broderie anglaise borrowed from someone's petticoat around the neck of her blouse, and spent nights in the air raid shelter carefully laddering and repairing a bag of old silk stockings so she could wear them. She ended up at the BBC — and on VE Day she was on top of a telephone box in Trafalgar Square reporting for them, only the second woman reporter they had employed. In later years, when she was near retirement, Phil and I visited her at home and she showed us the autograph book she had kept throughout her career. She had collected signatures from Churchill, his wife, and Walt Disney — and Disney had not only signed but sketched a little picture of Mickey Mouse beside it. When it later came up at auction on Bargain Hunt it was expected to make around £2,000. It made £8,000.
Joyce was also heading for university when she was asked to go with the first wave of evacuation to help look after the girls, who already knew her. She agreed, then joined what became the ATS. She had an important secret wartime role, which is documented on YouTube. I still send her the Clapham County old girls' newsletter. She turned a hundred in 2022 and, as far as I know, is still with us. Her best friend was also due to turn a hundred that same year — sadly she died just before she got there.
When the girls came back from Windsor they produced an illuminated scroll to thank the people of Windsor for looking after them, and the Mayor was presented with the original. They returned to a school building that had been operating as an emergency school since 1940, and joined those who had remained in London. But they came back too soon.
After D-Day, Hitler had warned of a secret weapon. Come the summer of 1944, it arrived. A V1 flying bomb fell directly opposite Honeywell School, and the blast shattered windows at both Honeywell and Clapham County. I have the air raid warden's report from that night.
Bridget lived at 89 Honeywell Road. She later wrote her memoirs of her childhood, and this is how she described the evening of 23 June 1944:
Bridget was daydreaming in the garden when her instincts told her to run. Nana was standing at the open door of the cellar stairs, and a big wind picked me up and threw me right down past her onto the hard stone floor. For one last second I could smell the lovely coal smell before all the air and my breath and the world were filled with yellow choking dust. I picked myself up and turned around, and there was Nana with her face all covered in blood telling me "get out, get out." I staggered up the steps and got a shock I'd never quite got over — because where all the walls had been there was now nothing but some thin strips of wood, and all the floors were covered with piles of crumbled plaster and great rags of wallpaper. My legs kept me going forward, out of the blown-off front door and down the two front steps — and then plonk, the bottom half of me was halfway back down the cellar, my legs dangling through the now gaping manhole. My little left finger had caught on the edge and twisted out at an angle and held me there in a sort of biting agony. But my legs were still not going to give up escaping, and I found myself running down the hill. A man came up and asked if I was all right. I just held up my left hand and he jammed the finger back into place. By now the road was full of everyone — like a sort of hysterical rush hour, shouting and screaming and running about, gas escaping, chickens running around in the road.
She carried on down the hill and over the North Side to relations who gave her bread and jam for the shock.
The air raid warden's reports chart the night in detail. The bomb fell at five minutes to seven. Throughout the night wardens sent messages requesting more skips for rubble. By midnight — five hours after the bomb — they had found six bodies. Then, around midnight, they heard crying from under the rubble. They sent for the doctor: we have heard crying, please will the doctor come. It was another hour and a half before they retrieved a little girl of five years old. Two of those who had died were her mother, Enid Smith, who had come to visit because it was to be her twenty-ninth birthday the next day, and her grandmother, who lived in Honeywell Road. The grandfather was already in St James's Hospital.
The child, Virginia, had been paralysed from the waist down and badly injured about the head and body. She had been under the rubble for six and a half hours. During that time she had apparently been telling her rescuers not to worry — the war was going to be over soon. Her father had been in the RAF in India for the previous two and a half years and was granted compassionate repatriation. The doctors eventually said she needed something like a doll's pram to push around and lean on as she relearned to walk. Her father and grandfather went all around London to the big shops and could find nothing. The Daily Sketch ran the story, and a little girl called Doris wrote in to say Virginia could have her pram — and her dolly too.
For years I told Honeywell children on our Victorian walks why the Victorian houses suddenly give way to a postwar estate, and I told them about the bomb. I always said I didn't know what had happened to the baby, but one day I was going to find out. I first came across the story in 1989. I found out what happened to her last year, entirely by chance, through the Clapham County old girls' network. Three girls in my year group — twins and a friend — were talking about their friendship, and one mentioned a friend called Charlie. I recognised the name: Ernie and Charlie were the owners of 63 Broomwood Road, and it was their granddaughter who had been the little girl under the rubble. The woman telling me the story now lives in Australia. I've been in touch with her. The last photograph I have of Virginia was taken last year: she is eighty-three, living happily in a care home, and has two members of her family with her in the picture. She learned to walk again. She married at twenty-one. She had a daughter and a son. A happy ending to the story.
The bomb map shows the intensity of damage around the site, with the epicentre in black. The whole area of Victorian terraces was eventually replaced by a block of flats. Three prefabs were also placed nearby — one of them eventually became our school nursery. The infant playground was used during the war as an ambulance station; a volunteer ambulance driver based there, Hilda Watt, received the MBE for her service.
After the war, with the school leaving age raised to fifteen, Honeywell could no longer accommodate its numbers as separate boys' and girls' schools. The pupils were moved together into the Patriotic Building and the school was renamed Honeywell Secondary School, until Spencer Park Boys' School was built in 1958. The girls followed in 1959, moving to what is now Burntwood School. When Spencer Park eventually closed I was there for the free-for-all of schools collecting equipment, desks, and books. There was a beautiful organ in the chapel, built with donations from parents and friends of both schools, but it was beyond repair. I asked the people in charge whether we could at least have the commemorative plaque from it — and that is how I came to acquire it for Honeywell.
Audience
When the bomb hit and there were all those messages going back and forth — were they being physically taken somewhere?
Cathy
Good question. Messages would normally go by phone, but if the phones broke down they were carried by runners. When sixteen-year-olds registered with a youth organisation, one of the things they might do was act as a runner for the air raid warden — if he had a message, the boy would run or cycle to wherever it needed to go.
Audience
In 1939, with everyone expecting an invasion, why on earth were children evacuated to the South Coast — or only as far as Windsor?
Cathy
In later waves they were moved much further out — to Wales and the West Country. When we did the War Comes Home project and talked to people who had been evacuated individually rather than as school groups, most of them had had less happy experiences. Some were sent to farms and effectively used as free labour. Being evacuated with your school, with teachers you knew, made a considerable difference. Children under five who couldn't go with a school could be taken out privately by their mothers, provided they didn't travel on the same trains as the school evacuations.
Audience
What happened to the prisoners at Wandsworth Prison during the war?
Cathy
They stayed — they weren't conscripted. The Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, on the other hand, was requisitioned. The girls — the orphans — were moved out, and the building was used to hold people who had come to this country and were suspected of being enemy agents. A Colonel Oreste Pinto was among those questioning them to determine whether they were genuine refugees. If anyone was found to be a spy, they were taken across to the prison and executed.
Audience
I remember a group from Beatrix Potter School who got a train from Wandsworth Common Station down to Shamley Green — a recreation of the evacuation journey. People who had actually been evacuated as children came along, including someone who had flown in from Australia. When they arrived, all the ladies in Shamley Green had dressed up in 1940s clothes and laid on a wonderful lunch.
Cathy
We went on that train — it was a fantastic day. What I particularly admire about Beatrix Potter School is that every Remembrance Day they put poppies on the graves in Magdalen Cemetery just opposite. One of the graves says "To a brave soldier, far from home" — it makes me cry every year. There's a large group of Australian graves there from the First World War: the Patriotic Building was used as a hospital during that war, and thousands of men were treated there, mostly casualties from Gallipoli.
Audience
Could you explain the baby's gas mask?
Cathy
The baby's gas mask is very large and heavy. The idea was that you put the baby inside it — ideally they could see through the visor — then the covering came up through the legs and all the strings were pulled tight so no fumes could get in. A parent then had to pump the side continuously to push air in through the filter. From what people have told me who saw it done, babies screamed their heads off.
Cathy thanked her husband Phil for his support throughout the talk, and the staff at Battersea Library — Emma and Sophia — for their help with research.