Wedding Bells

On 28th March 1938 Mum and Dad got married. They married in a registry office in contrast to Aunty Mary's wedding a few years later which was a much bigger affair with everyone in morning dress.

Grandma & Grandpa on the right of the picture

I am not entirely sure why they went for a registry office wedding which would have been unusual at the time, other than that they didn't like fuss. My maternal grandmother didn't attend, apparently because she didn't think Dad's family were good enough, the Tookes being more working class and the Blacks more middle class. My father never forgave her for this and it was one of the things he spoke of following my mothers death.

After the wedding the reception took place at Pinoli’s Restaurant (page 9 on link) in Wardour St Soho just down the street from where Dad was working at British Gaumont.

“Wardour-street is long and narrow, like a strip of film … Listen to the men walking away from one of the private cinemas hidden in the gaudy cliffs of offices, where they have seen a new drama on a six-foot screen: the life of the street swirls past them quite unnoticed. Listen to the people in cafes: nothing but celluloid.”

— James A Jones

It was more usual to send telegrams that cards in those days and I have a whole pile of them!

There are no photos of the wedding as having used Dad'syounger brother Eddy, a keen amateur photographer, to take the official photos disaster of some kind or other struck and the photos were a write off.

Wedding over and with a night spent at the Strand Palace Hotel (for which they paid the princely sum of 16 shillings) and a show taken in, the young couple set of for their new adventure. Running an hotel at Sandown on the Isle of Wight.

I think it important to note at the point that this story was pieced together from various snippets of information let fall by my parents over the years. It is almost certainly one of several possible versions of events and other protagonists would have had different perspectives.

Mum's Story - Part 2 After the Great War

So the war was over and things went back to normal. Hilda and Mary walked to school every day across Wimbledon Common. Hilda was, I think, a bit ambivalent about school. She loved history but was not so keen on Maths and some other subjects and left school at 13. Her childhood was also marked by serious illness, possibly pneumonia, for which she was hospitalised and then sent alone to a convalescent home somewhere on the east coast. She said one of the worst things about this was that the home was at the top of the cliff and the beach was at the bottom and she wasn’t well enough to make the climb. In all she was away from home for several months during which time ‘family Closure’ had occurred and she found it difficult to fit in with home life again.

Hilda’s first job was as a kennel maid. She was passionate about dogs so this would have been something she loved. There is a photo taken at the time apparently for publicity purposes that was made into a postcard, unusually for that time was in colour.

At some point she gave up the kennel maid job and went instead to be a housekeeper for her uncle Rog (pronounced to rhyme with log), one of my grandfather’s many siblings.

Rog was a parker superintendent and lived and worked in three parks while my mother was with him, Kennington park near the Oval cricket ground, Ravenscourt Park and finally Dulwich Park.

The lodge where they lived at Kennington was rather interesting as it had been build as a "model house for families" and originally been erected in Hyde Park as part of the 'Great Exhibition' of 1851 and subsequently moved to Kennington. The Park was clearly popular with pram pushing mothers or nannies.

Even the park keepers got to have fun sometimes! all these pictures were taken by my 17 year old mother in 1930.

It was, of course, at Dulwich Park that she met my Dad at the tennis club. The rest, as they say, was history.

Mum's Story Part 1 - The Great War

My mother was born in 1913, 18 months before the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, John Black, was the youngest child of a family of 16, his oldest brother having been born in 1861 with him bringing up the rear in 1883. There was at least one set of twins, but I have to say all those years of child bearing don’t bear thinking about!

His father Alexander, was a Scot who moved to Belgium around 1872 to manage a tannery in the Flemish speaking part of the country. This resulted in my grandfather being born in Belgium and growing up with Flemish as his first language. He spoke English with a accent until his death in 1971.

According to the 1901 census my grandfather had returned to England and was living in Battersea with two of his brothers, Stanley and Ronald known in the family as Rog. By 1911 he was living in Fulham with the same two brothers, his mother Sarah, then 73, and his sister Jessie.

My grandmother, Henrietta Eynon, was the daughter of Anne and Henry Eynon. Henry was a builder based in Fulham, though originally from Tenby in Wales. I believe Hetty, as she was known in the family, was part of her father's second family, his first wife and children having perished in a smallpox outbreak. She had two brothers, Louis and Henry, and it's a bit of a mystery why the firstborn was called Louis and the other two both were named after their father. Also somewhat puzzling is the fact that Louis is spelt the French way rather than Lewis which is the common Welsh spelling. I always thought that it had been changed along the way, but no, the spelling in the early census records is Louis.

I believe this table was commissioned by great-grandfather Henry probably around 1860. Uncle Louis had it after him, then my mother and now me. It's lovely to think of the family sitting round it for 150 or so years.

I am not sure how my grandparents met. But I know my grandmother trained at the Polytechnic in Regent St as a Stenographer and that in his later years my grandfather was a manager in the city office of Grosvenor Chator a paper manufacturer, so perhaps they met via work (this does ring vaguely true in my memory). She was a vivacious redhead who loved to dance, which my grandfather did not! So when they went to dances he would ensure her dance card was full reserving the supper dance for himself and repair to the card room for the duration!

My grandparents' wedding summer 1911 with everyone apart from Grandpa looking rather grim!

John and Hetty married in 1911 in Fulham. Their first child, my mother, was born in February 1913. Amazingly they didn’t have a name prepared - or perhaps they were hoping for a boy! They asked Hetty’s brother Louis, who was to be godfather, to name the child and he choose Hilda, a name my mother hated for the rest of her life (although she was very fond of uncle Louis). She used to tell the story of her naming and, I think, was hurt by it for her whole life and never to the best of my knowledge tried to find out why they couldn’t think of a name. I have wondered if it was a particularly bad birth or my grandmother suffered from post-natal depression, but I guess we will never know now.

Their second child Mary was born 15 months later, in May 1914, as far as I know they managed to name her without outside assistance. It was obvious to me, even as a child, that my Aunty Mary, who I adored, was my grandmother’s favourite, whereas my mother was very close to her father.

Then came the Great War.

My grandfather joined up and was sent to the front in Belgium where he became the unofficial interpreter to the official interpreter. He was not allowed to be an interpreter as he was English rather than Belgian, but as he was posted to the part of Belgium where he grew up he understood the local dialect rather better than the designated official. I have often wondered if his interpreting activity kept him out of the front line and thereby saved his life. He would never talk about the war though, apart from the odd funny story. When, aged 16 or so, and full of Wilfred Owen’s poems, I tried to ask him about it he clammed up completely.

I still have two of the postcards he sent home from the front and reading them always makes me feel emotional

Whilst researching for this blog I have discovered a document which seems to indicate he didn’t sign up until 1917 which is puzzling, you can see it below and it's definitely him as I recognise his handwriting and the address is correct. It also conficcts with the fact that one of the postcards he sent my mother is clearly from 1914/15!

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen

My mother's memories of the war revolve around having some of the Belgian cousins, who were of course refugees, staying with them, together with Grandma Black, who was by all accounts a very scary individual! She also remembers taking cover under the kitchen table when the Zeppelins went over. But in some respects life obviously proceeded as normal as is evidenced by this Christmas Card from 1915.

Dad's Story - Part 2

My grandparents set great store by education and all the children stayed on at school past the minimum leaving age of 14. Dad left school at 16 having taken the school certificate and was successful in obtaining a clerical post.

I haven't a huge amount of detail about dads early career, but I know he worked in the rag trade, then for NCR. At the point he met and married my mother he was working for British Gaumont in their Soho offices, where, on the floor above, John Logie Baird was busy inventing Television.

Cycle-Skating - The New Sport of 1923. The precursor to rolling blading. Men in Paris enjoy this new sport.

I don't think Dad ever tried cycle skating but couldn't resist including this curiosity here.

However, as a young man about town Dad went to see a show every Saturday night until the fateful day when he and his friends realised they had seen everything they considered worth seeing in the whole of the West End.

Holidays were taken in a large gang at Sandown on the Isle of Wight and it was these trips that seeded the idea of a permanent move there. In the meantime Dad was spending a fair amount of his leisure time playing tennis and had joined the local tennis club in Dulwich Park. It was here that he met my mother.

Dad's Story Part 1

My grandmother was only 16 when my father was born

My father Ernest George Tooke was born in South East London in August 1907 an Edwardian, the eldest child of his parents Ernest and Ellen.

Two brothers, Sid and Jack, followed before my grandmother had a break from childbearing caused by the Great War. I know very little about my grandfathers military career other than he was fighting in Greece for part of the time where he suffered from frostbite.

About a year after my grandfathers return from the war the family was completed with the birth of the twins Dorothy and Eddy in 1920.

Back in civvy street my grandfather resumed his work as a London cabby and life went on.

As the eldest of the family and some thirteen years older than the twins my father was in demand for babysitting and got to take the twins in their pram to nearby Brockwell Park on Saturday mornings. Several of his friends were similarly afflicted, but made the best of it by racing the prams by taking them up to the top of the hill in the park, pushing them off, and the pram that reached the bottom first was the winner. Apparently on one, never to be forgotten, occasion the Dad's pram overturned and both babies were tipped out, a story that has entered family legend.

Dad  is holding Eddy — Dad is holding Eddy

Dad and Grandad larking around at the beach

Life wasn't all work however and there were visits to the seaside especially to Great Yarmouth where my Grandfather's family came from, and trips out to the countryside in the taxi. Although as you can see from the above pictures these were not necessarily informal occasions! It would have been very unusual for a working class / lower middle class family to have access to a car in the nineteen twenties and would have added an extra dimension to their childhood experiences.

This was still the heyday of the music hall and this song made famous by Marie LLoyd typifies the era

From 'Those Were the Days' (1934)

Introduction

As I get older I am more drawn to the idea of recording my past, in particular my early childhood. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly it would be so easy to put it off until it's too late, although it is a cliche the years really do fly past faster and faster. Secondly I think it would be interesting for my son, who sadly never met his grandmother and can only just remember his grandfather, to learn a little more about them. Thirdly to give him and any one else who may be interested a flavour of what life was like growing up on the Isle of Wight in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Writing this now, rather than a few years ago, enables me to add video and sound clips to enhance my story in a way that I hope you will find interesting.

Henry Hall & His Orchestra - The Teddy Bear's Picnic (1932) presentation by R 3 T Я 8 T 8 R for the promotion and conservation of the arts and the general preservation of popcultural inheritance - not for commercial use -

Before we get to me, however, it's worth exploring how my family got to be on the Island in the first place. ..

......