40. Life In Paddington

I'm not all that well acquainted with the appalling living conditions of a large number of the more unfortunate and poorer section of the population. While not having the affluent living quarters of yer Royalty, mate, I have been fortunate in being reasonably housed for the past thirty years by Harrow Council. Thus slightly out of touch with conditions that exist throughout this sceptred isle of ours.

Mind you, it wasn't always so and I can claim to have some knowledge of how the other half live, being born and raised in the garden city of England. Paddington.

I lived in the maze of streets swarming with kids, fleas, mice, cats and dogs, on the wrong side of the Harrow Road, which was a ripe attack of acne on the fair skin of the W.2. of the other side towards Kensington Gardens and Marble Arch.

Most families lived in two rooms of the three story tenement houses that comprised the architecture of the area, with the use of one communal bog. We were lucky in having a lavatory to ourselves as we lived down the aery, which was the term for the basement, which had an area surrounded with iron railings.

On one side  were four coal cellars, one of which had been converted into a lavatory and still had the round iron lid in the roof which was the pavement outside. No matter how tightly you fixed the chain that secured it, some bright herb would prise it open sufficiently enough to pour water over you while you were having five minutes meditation.

One of the vivid memories of my youth is the picture of a mate of mine being chased up the road by my old man who was holding up his trousers with one hand while belting my mate with the other. He had poured water down the coal lid thinking I was in the carsy, but the old man had been in occupation when I went down. I think what upset the old man most was the fact that water had dowsed his pipe which he always smoked in the toilet. Liked a bit of comfort, did my dad.

Our street, Westbury Road*, started at Harrow Road and this end was always called the top, and joined Westbourne Terrace North at the other end. This was always called the bottom.

Westbury Road, highlighted yellow running from Harrow Road to then-Westbourne Terrace North, now Bourne Terrace

The top was fairly nondescript having a group of corrugated iron sheds on one side which we called the old tin school, and a large house in which a Jewish family manufactured hair creams and tonics, on the other. 

But the bottom was a colourful kaleidoscope of life, where the basic needs of the populace were catered for by the small shops over which hung all the aromas imaginable. None of your spicy smells of the Orient but the pongs of pure English origin.

Beetroots boiling away in the big open copper in a corner of Harry Smith's greengrocery gave emphasis to the earthy smell of the piles of freshly picked celery stacked in another corner. The feeling of being near to nature was furthered by the steaming heap of horse manure at the side of the shop where 'Arry stabled the large horse with which he conducted the second half of his trade as Greengrocer and Removals.

'Arry, whose complexion was the colour of his beetroots, always wore a cloth cap sideways on his bald head, proclaimed the virtues of his celery in a voice like thunder with -"Do yerselves a favour, gels. Couple of sticks for the old man'll cure his brewers droop better than Robin starch".

Westbourne Terrace North, now Bourne Terrace. Home to Harry Smiths, Olivers etc

From the iron grating in the pavement in front of the bakers wafted the appetizing smell of baking bread. One of the two brothers who ran the shop was homosexual. He delivered loaves by balancing a tray stacked with them on his head, and walked with a hip sway like Mae West's. It was a favourite pastime of the young herbs to try and make him drop them by touching him up as he passed and shouting - "Nancy - Boy". He never did, however, and although he'd shout at them and call them naughty boys, I felt that he thoroughly enjoyed and looked forward to the encounter.

The delicious smell of baking bread unfortunately had to fight for top niff with old Lukey's rag and bone shop next door. A right old pong came from it from the rabbit skins which hung around the walls drying out. He paid a penny for a complete skin and sold them to a furriers, and did a good trade as rabbit was a good cheap tasty meal in those days. When the day of Judgement comes, old Lukey will surely be at hand, in his dirty grey vest and corduroy trousers, to call to account the foul scientists who invented myxamatosis and thus killed his trade.

The inevitable fish and chip shop wafted it's mouth watering odours to blend with the appetizing smell of the pie and eel shop opposite. Both did a roaring trade as most folk lived mainly on a tuppenny bit of fish and a pennorth of chips or a tuppenny meat pie and mash with liquor. It was always called liquor, never gravy.

Evan's Dairy was clinically clean, it had to be as butter was not prepacked but chopped off a large mound on the counter and pounded into the correct size with two butter pats, which were two flat blades of wood. Milk was served, from an open churn with a half pint measure with a long handle and poured into your jug. However it always smelt of stale milk there because the iron cow, which you could get milk from after closing time, was a nozzle set in the door with a handle you pulled, after putting a penny in the slot and if it didn't dribble the milk out in drops would shoot a jet with hurricane force over your boots and on to the pavement.

Evans Dairy - suspect the same business, but not the site Grandad refers to - this one is c3miles further east

Isaac Oliver's hardware store smelt real country and western with it's boxes of Hudsons soap, bundles of firewood chopped from tarry logs, open stone jars of mustard pickles from which he'd ladle a pennorth with a big wooden spoon and slap it into a sheet of newspaper. A wooden barrel of vinegar stood at the back , just out of sight. Isaac always asked if you wanted penny or tuppenny a pint vinegar, not that it made any difference cos it all came from the one barrel.

Charlie Child's tobacconist shop smelt as though someone had set fire to a box of Havana cigars fifty years ago and it had been burning like an Olympic flame ever since.

While Charlie certainly sold cigars, his cliental didn't get beyond 2d. packets of Woodbines in their green paper covers or five Weights. On pay days they lashed out on twenty Players, or Gold Flake or maybe Craven A., all costing elevenpence a packet. He was an avid partaker of snuff, which he sold in half ounces, weighed on a pair of tiny brass scales and wrapped in a screw of paper. Seeing Charlie take a pinch of snuff was a real education. He'd sprinkle a minute quantity along the back of his hand with the care and expertise of the King's gardener sowing a row of sweet peas. Then closing his eyes , applied one nostril to it and drew a breath which made the hairs on his hand stand up straight. Then ditto with the other nostril. His eyes would then slowly open, gradually dilate as his mouth opened, and RAASHOO ! He'd nigh on blast you out the door with a shower of atomised liquorice coloured droplets.

I thought it was a filthy habit, and asked him once why he took it, and he said "It dode half keeb yer dose clear". The main undercoat of smells from these emporiums and others came from the boozer on the corner, The Manor House. The stench of stale beer hung like a shroud over it day and night but this paled into insipidness when you caught a niff of the salty, tangy stench of the Gents at the side. It was merely a walled enclosure without a roof, any flushing system, and only a gulley round the floor to take away thousands of gallons of recycled four ale.

I was visiting Waddesdon Manor**, in Bucks, just recently. This is a National Trust property bequeathed to the nation by the Rothschild family. We enjoy looking at the fabulous treasures all these great houses contain and marvelling at the skill of the untold number of craftsmen who created them. We stood in the Red drawing room at Waddesdon gazing up at the wonderful painting on the ceiling by Jacob de Wit of the Apotheosis of Hercules, while at our feet lay the Savonnerie carpet made for Louis XIV.

Waddesdon Manor

Whilst realising that without the patronage of people as the Rothschilds, treasures such as these would never be available for ordinary people like myself and my family to see, I always feel feel that surely God never meant for people like the Rothschilds to have so much, while people like those who lived down our street had so little.

Then I thought, I don't know, though, perhaps the blokes who used to stand in the bog by the Manor House weren't so bad off after all. Answering the urgent call of nature is a most satisfying sensation and they only had to look up while they were doing it, and they could see a picture created by God, unequalled by man. That of the stars and the sky.

In this they were better off than Baron de Rothschild, who while standing in the Red drawing room, admiring his painting on the ceiling, couldn't have the added pleasure of answering the call of nature at the same time.

Well, not on his Savonnerie carpet, he couldn't.


Notes

* Westbury Road, number 9. As Grandad says, then running from Harrow Road to Westbourne    
  Terrace North. 
 It is  now replaced by Westbourne Grove Open Space, though you can see the line of Westbury Road    running through the centre of the space. See the pictures below.

Westbourne Park Open Space as it is today. The line running top to bottom the route of the former Westbury Road.

Westbourne Park Open Space - the view from then-Westbourne Terrace North, now Bourne Terrace, to Harrow Road - along what was Westbury Road.

A near miss in 1944

For more background on Paddington streets, see here. Familiar Streets - Paddington and Unfamiliar Streets - Paddington A lot of commentary but you will find reference to Harry Smiths and Olivers as both being located on (West)Bourne Terrace, along with lots of pictures of the area. Also try the Facebook group "Paddington. Past Caring".

** For more on Waddesdon Manor see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waddesdon_Manor
https://waddesdon.org.uk/

Odds and Sods - Bonus Post - Hoist By His Own Petard

This story wasn't included in Jennie's compilation, but David has a number of the original Harrow Post publications, and this was amongst them. So, for the first time since it was originally published in 1979, here is "Hoist By His Own Petard".

Ever heard of the saying "Hoist by his own petard" ? 

My interpretation would be "Caught in his own trap" and if what I read in the paper is true, the petards of todays' youth are to be well and truly hoisted. I read that the incidence of the flea is on the increase, owing it is said, to the long hair now worn by the youth of the world, because they don't want to be like dad, is not washed enough, and the grotty tangle of matted rats tails is proving to be an ideal breeding ground for our old mate, the small, wingless, leaping insect (re. Websters dictionary).

The logical sequence of events following such a disclosure, must be the return of the 'short back and sides', possibly even the crew cut and the return of untold hordes of redundant barbers gleefully polishing the scissors and razors, long since discarded.

One thing's for sure, you can't alter nature and no boy is going to wash himself any more than he can possibly help, never has and never will. Thus, in their efforts to be different they will become the same, because if they persist in looking like mum, because they don't want to look like dad, then we shall see the return of two more old friends, the flea comb and Nitty Nora, with her dreaded judgement - "All off". 

The flea comb was as much a necessity as a frying pan in the household when I was a boy, for no matter how much parents preached cleanliness was akin to Godliness, kids in Paddington, and in any other district which housed citizens basking in the affluence of the mightiest Empire the world had ever known, avoided too much washing, as they still do. The homes we lived in were old when the Empire was young and generally housed tribes of Gods' smaller creatures inside the lathe and plaster walls.

So the small black comb, with its rows of fine teeth along both edges, was regularly run through our hair over a sheet of newspaper spread over the table, and any flea unfortunate enough to be unhoused, despatched with the thumb nail pressed on it, when it disintegrated with a resounding crack.

If the thought of the poor man's big game hunt makes you itch, it's because (a) you're too young to know of such conditions, (b) you've forgotten all about them, (c) you've been living in a cloud cuckoo land of hygiene, good food and coloured toilet rolls, or (d) you're just plain finicky. 

Well, you are coming down to earth with a bang, because youthful fashion, which has decreed that every effort must be made to cover their faces and heads with what grows in profusion round their backsides, has resulted in the massing of the legions of the night, once more to march down the walls to invade your bed and keep you company in the wee small hours.

Now and then, school kids of my time, were marshalled for health inspection and paraded in front of a grim female in a starched uniform, who, after testing your eyes (if you had two, you passed) our ears by looking in them with the aid of a torch, and our heart by listening through a stethoscope, like a gully mans' drain plunger, and thumping our scrawny chests with her big red fist, and then ran a large metal comb, which stood in a bowl of Jeyes fluid, through our hair and then delivered her verdict - clean or the dreaded "all off". Thus Nitty Nora, as she was universally known. Should you be one of the unfortunates to receive the thumbs down stigma of 'all off', you were literally branded in public eyes as unclean, for it meant what it said. You were made to go to a barber, who clipped your hair tight to the skin, leaving only a small tuft of hair on top of the forehead, which was known as a knocker, and many a small child went through life with a 'tuppenny' all off and tormented by jeers of his mates who were more fortunate in the diligence of their parents with the flea comb.

Mind you, it seems as though we are to see the return of a lot more things that were commonplace a generation ago, and through no fault at all of the long haired brigade, much as the Alf Garnetts among us would like to blame them for everything from aberrancy to zymosis, which sounds very technical but ain't if you look it up. The world shortage of timber is causing commodities that we take for granted, hard to get, sometimes to disappear entirely and we will have to resort to the make-do efforts that wore unquestioned in the days of the flea comb and Nitty Nora.

People adapt very easily to unavoidable conditions, so eating your fish and chips out of the Evening News won't come as a surprise for long nor will wrapping your sandwiches in a bit of damp cloth to keep them fresh. 

Friends of ours, out for an evening spin the other Sunday, were faced with the harsh realities of life when their car broke down outside a famous hotel in Park Lane, W.1. Not at all awed by the number of stars the hotel merited, they marched up and asked the porter if they could use the phone to call the A.A., and it happened that this regal wallah, who'd probably kept the rain off more famous bonces with his big brolly than you've had hot dinners, was a very matey type and ushered then into the lounge, sumptuous as it was, and suggested they had a drink served while waiting for the breakdown van. Well, after a couple of hours and several drinks, a visit to the toilet was necessary and matey with the top hat and outsize umbrella, who obviously knew that the greatest leveller of all, is not the old man with the scythe but the call to nature, directed them to the bogs. Those palaces of sanitary engineering weren't exactly in the same class as the local pub gents, where you're apt to get your shoes wet if the spreader on the wall suddenly gushes, even had an attendant to dust you down and wipe the beads of perspiration from the brow in cases of difficulty. But hanging on the wall in both ladies and gents, was not the usual toilet roll for the hardy few who couldn't work the bidets, but squares of newspaper threaded through on a bit of string.

Which goes to show that when adversity hits the Nation, we must all make do with what we can, and square up to it with a smile on our face, and we will find that our hardest times are well behind us.