Jellied Eels and Zeppelins

by Sue Taylor

  Mum used to make gorgeous soups for us - that’s what kept us going. She would burn some sugar on a spoon and stir it into the soup to thicken and brown it. I also liked Edwards Desiccated Soups. Mum would also make some delicious stews in a huge cast iron cooking pot, which would be simmering on the stove for two days. She would make them with the two penn’orth of pieces (oddments of meat) that she bought on most Saturday nights after 10 o’clock from the butcher’s; she sometimes used to use bacon rind and pearl barley too. We couldn’t afford to waste a thing - ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ was the motto of the time.

  We used to go up to Parade Bakery in St. James’ Street, Walthamstow, for bread sometimes two or three times a week. They weighed every loaf that came off the counter and, if it was under weight, they used to give you what they called a ‘makeweight’ - that’s a piece of cake or bread that was kept on the side. They would cut off a piece to make the weight up. Mum used to say ‘Don’t eat the makeweight!’ but, by the time we got out onto Coppermill Lane, my sister and I had eaten it, ‘cos it was nice and fresh. ‘Have you eaten the makeweight?’ Mum would ask. And we would say ‘No, Mum’ and she used to laugh and say ‘No, I know you didn’t!’ But she knew we had, ‘cos we always did. Sometimes, you used to have a nice big bit. (Makeweights were also used when buying other commodities like beer and ice cream).

  And I can also remember ‘The Toffee Shop’, where they used to make their own cough candy twist and peppermint rock, and you could buy a slab of toffee - separate toffees were more expensive. You could buy Milk Tray loose too - I bought Mum a quarter once for her birthday.

  Before the First World War, when we were quite young, it was Florrie’s and my job to make up the fire on Christmas morning with newspaper, coal and wood, which Dad used to put in our stockings. As for presents, sometimes we just got an orange, but one year, Florrie and I received a stuffed rag doll. On another occasion, when our father was working for Lonco when I was about nine (after World War I), Florrie got a solid chocolate lion and I got a chocolate elephant - they were delicious. Dad used to say ‘Your Christmas dinner is your gift.’ He would say that later to Florrie and her husband, Alf, too when they came to dinner.

  We never had a Christmas tree, but hung up paper chains that we’d made ourselves. For Christmas dinner, we’d eat a cockerel or have a joint of beef if we were lucky. We used to go to a pantomime at the Walthamstow Palace of Varieties, towards the top of the High Street. They used to have lovely pantomimes. We would sit ‘up in the Gods’ and throw our apple cores down whenever there was any cheering. We never went to any Old Time Music Hall - we couldn’t afford it - though Mum used to talk about stars such as Nellie Wallace, Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley.

  I loved to go to the market at Christmas time. Mum used to take us when I was about six or seven. I remember seeing the stalls all lit by gas lamps and helping a dwarf shake papers off the oranges on the fruit and veg stall. He used to earn himself some money by helping out. Loveable fella, he was. He had an extra large head, which he said he wanted to sell for research when he died. I believe that he did.’

  Ethel remembers Marks and Spencer in its early days (the company was founded in 1887):

  ‘When you went into the shop, it was all open in the front, no proper shop-front or anything. There were counters all the way round and it was called Penny Bazaar.

  That’s how Marks and Spencer started. You used to walk in and pick up anything, and everything was a penny; elastic, everything.

  As you walked into a wide front - it used to go narrow at the top - there were all tiles, and then, in the middle… there was… as big as my table… all done in different coloured tiles… an old fashioned penny. That was Marks and Spencer when I was a little tot.

  My Dad worked at Lipton’s for donkeys’ years before the First World War. He used to do parcel deliveries. He used to sit in the kitchen with Tommy Lipton and have a meal. They used to treat him very well. I remember that Dad used to go up to Old Street Station, London, to pick up his van. Then he used to go to the East India Docks mostly, to load up. He would grumble about the dockers. They packed up at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. He used to have to line-up in the queue. Sometimes, when he got to the front to be loaded, they packed up and went home and he would have to wait until the next day. He used to wait for two hours sometimes. Mum would say ‘Your Dad’s come home in a bad mood, be careful what you say!’ He would leave home at 6 o’clock in the morning. He used to be up at 5 o’clock and he often used to work part-time in the evenings too when we were very young.’

  Edwin Turner (2nd from right, front row) with other military police colleagues

  Six

  Zeppelins, Dolls and ‘Spanish Flu’

  The Great War of 1914-18 was the first in which civilians were threatened with the fear of air raids. Ethel was just six when she saw the hydrogen-filled airship, the Zeppelin:

  ‘I can still see that Zeppelin. It was massive and I’ll never forget the droning it made. I remember seeing an airship coming down in flames at Cuffley, Hertfordshire - even though it was miles away, it lit up the sky. I was about five or six then and was holding Dad’s hand when I saw it coming down.

  We was all together when another Zeppelin, came over. Cousin Flo, she was very comical. She had a loud voice and she used to take-off Nellie Wallace, an old music-hall star. She used to have a flower in her hat and she used to dance, Nellie Wallace did. A woman at the biscuit stall in the market used to take her off too - singing and dancing.

  Flo was just turned 14 then and she said ‘Come on you kids, I’m going to dance for you.’ And she pulled out the kitchen table and stood on it and took-off Nellie Wallace and made us kids laugh, to take our minds off it. Afterwards, I remember opening her bag and saying ‘What have you got in there Flo?’ and she gave us all a doughnut to keep us quiet!

  Mum and Dad never actually told us that we were at war. We never had no radios or anything like that and Dad wouldn’t let us read the newspapers.’

  On June 28th 1914, the Austrian Crown Prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Princess Sophia, were assassinated by a Serb while visiting the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. This was the spark that ignited the conflict leading to World War I.

  ‘My Mum told me about the Archduke and his wife being shot and Dad thought that there would be a war.’

  At the start of World War I, Britain’s army consisted solely of volunteers. When the government realised that the war was not going to end quickly, a massive recruitment campaign took place, led by Lord Kitchener.

  Ethel’s father, Edwin, rejoined the army in 1916 after having left to work at Lipton’s shortly after he married.

  ‘Dad didn’t mind being called up, because he said ‘Someone has got to fight this war,’ and I think that he rather liked army life.’

  Ethel still possesses Edwin’s Army Service Corps (ASC) badges and ‘The Soldiers’ Pocket Testament’ he was given with its inscription reading:

  ‘I pray that God’s

  Blessing may rest

  On the Reader and

  The Reading of this

  Little book. November 1914.’

  ‘I’ve also got my father’s baton, which he used when he was a military policeman stationed in Guernsey. It has a leather strap and grooves on the handle, so your hand doesn’t slip. Once he caught three Irish soldiers escaping from barracks after curfew. There was a struggle and Dad hit one of them with his baton. The soldier had to go to hospital, but Dad got away with cuts and bruises.’

  Edwin’s duties also included bringing horses over by boat from Weymouth to the Channel Island, where he and his colleagues trained them before they were shipped off to France to take part in the war. The horses were used to drag equipment and supplies including artillery to the front-line and records show that, by the end of the war, more than eight million horses had been killed in the conflict.

  ‘The horses came over with red tapes in their tails. Dad used to go and sit with them, ‘co
s the crossing was so rough. He said that some of them used to jump about a lot because they got frightened when the sea was rough, especially when the boats passed through The Casquets, where the tides met. It was always very choppy there and the horses used to get sick. I remember Dad telling me that he used to come out on deck sometimes, to get a bit of fresh air and then went back down again for fear of getting washed overboard. He had the horses on the island for so many months, then the officers used to come over and get ‘em and they’d be taken off to France.

  Dad really had a way with animals and he especially loved horses. He told me ‘Never hit a horse, ‘cos they always remember.’

  Dad and his mates also used to keep watch on the Channel for anything unusual. They were away from the fighting.’

  During his spare-time, Edwin and his friends used to sit on the rocks and wait for the ormer tide to come in bringing with it the ormers - edible abalones (marine snails), also called sea-ears, which have flattened, oval-shaped shells with respiratory holes and a mother-of-pearl lining, and are used as a food in the Channel Islands.

  ‘Dad was a very good swimmer and diver and he and his friends used to dive into the water before the shellfish stuck themselves onto the rocks and then they wouldn’t have been able to get them off. The shellfish were like oysters, but with knobbly bits on the outside. They had mother-of-pearl inside and Dad brought us all the shells back. They were different sizes and the fish were delicious when fried.

  He also used to buy lots of tomatoes and grapes from St. Peter Port (Guernsey’s capital) and bring them home for us kids and there were these large biscuits, which looked like dogs’ biscuits, but they tasted lovely too.

  I was about six or seven when Dad has his affair. When he used to come home on leave during the war, he would go straight round to this woman’s and my Mum found out. She went round there and said ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself - you’ve got a husband fighting on the front-line and you’re taking my husband away!’ I think it only lasted for three or four months, but I did lose a certain amount of respect for my father over it. I couldn’t help it. My mother was a good wife to him, she was. She thought the world of my Dad. She looked after us kids ever so well too and never took a day off. And that’s all the thanks that she got.

  On the huge field called The Elms at the back of our flat in Walthamstow, where we used to go and pick up the tennis balls for a penny, there were specially erected tents, where they made mustard gas bombs. My Dad came home on leave once and Florrie and I had just come home from school. Dad asked ‘Where’s your mother?’ and Florrie replied ‘On The Elms making bombs!’ Dad said ‘Right - I’ll make a bomb!’ and he went and dragged her out, shouting ‘You’re not making those sorts of things and you’re not leaving those two kids! I didn’t marry you to go off to work. Get home and look after the girls!’

  A lady up the road took the job and Mum looked after her two children, so she had the four of us and did her little bit that way.’

  With no television or radio to follow the events of the Great War, British families either had to scan the newspapers or watch the Pathé News at the cinema:

  ‘We always used to go on a Friday night. It used to cost threepence to watch the Pathé. My sister and I, when we was younger, we used to go to the Saturday morning pictures - that cost a penny. We would get a comic or an orange when we came out. They always cut the film off at the most exciting part to make sure that you went back the next week. The Carlton Cinema was a lovely cinema opposite the Walthamstow Palace. There was the Sarsaparilla Stall outside, where when we was older, we used to have a glass of sarsaparilla before we went in. St. James Street Cinema was a flea pit. It was known as ‘The Jameos’ and you used to see serials there. We used to pay for ourselves to get into the cinema - a penny. My Dad gave us our ‘Saturday penny’ for washing and drying-up and for cleaning the knives and forks on an emery board. And that penny, or the penny we were given by anyone who came to visit, was split by Dad into two ha’pennies or four farthings.

  We had two money boxes like pillar boxes on our mantelpiece marked ‘F’ for Florrie and ‘E’ for Ethel. We used to put a ha’penny in there every Saturday, but, if we went to the pictures, we’d use the whole penny. With the two farthings we had, we’d get two lots of sweets. Two we saved and two we could spend. Sometimes Mum borrowed our money, but she would always pay us back. I can see her now putting a knife in the slot of the box to get the pennies out. ‘Look girls,’ she would say afterwards, ‘I’m putting it back!’

  When I was two and a half, Mum took me into the post office. I put my hands on the counter and I could just see over the top. She gave me a book just like a pension book and it had 12 spaces in it. Mum said ‘Each one of those spaces is a penny - when you’ve got a bookful, you’ve saved one shilling. That’s your savings book.’ I saved from when I was two and a half to when I got married and I spent it all on my wedding and on some of the furniture, the curtains, lino, the lot - it even paid for my car to the church. My chap hadn’t got it, so I paid it.’

  A souvenir of the silver jubilee

  The King and Queen during the First World War were George V - who succeeded to the throne on the death of Edward VII in 1910 - and Queen Mary, whom he had married in 1893.

  ‘He was very nice, but she was a domineering woman. Queen Mary always seemed very stuck-up and strait-laced. She always had one of those hats on her head and she used to walk with a parasol. The King would do as he was told and always did the right thing.

  Gran (Aunt Polly) and Grandad (paternal) were the caretakers of a big old house in Bramham Gardens, Earls Court, before and for a while during, the First World War. It was a big five-storey house - I can see it now - and Gran and Grandfather lived in the basement. Gran was the cook and Grandfather was the butler. I can remember going down into the kitchen looking for Grandfather once. There was an iron spiral staircase at one end. Grandad was sitting at the top playing ‘The Merry Widow’ on this brass thing like a bicycle wheel, like a hurdy-gurdy. That song has stuck in my mind ever since.

  Grandfather’s nickname for me was ‘Pins and Needles’, because he said that I could never sit down for five minutes (I think it was because of the St. Vitus’s dance I had when I was a baby!).

  Us children weren’t allowed to go upstairs, only when requested by the family. We used to have to curtsey. Gran caught me going upstairs once without permission and she told me off. Right at the very top of the house was the nursery. Gran took me upstairs once and I remember seeing all these dolls in glass cases all the way round.

  Bramham Gardens, Earls Court, London

  It really was like that television programme, ‘Upstairs Downstairs.’ Downstairs there were six bells along the kitchen wall and an electric light up in the ceiling. When they wanted to see anything at close range, they used to pull it down on a pulley, right onto the table, so they could see what they were doing. There was a big butler sink too - it was very posh. Gran used to buy pigs’ chitterlings (the smaller intestines of pigs), put them in salt water, clean ‘em and fill ‘em with sausage meat and cook ‘em for the downstairs’ staff. They were lovely. There was also a real sunken garden full of fuchsias with another big garden further on.

  The German Baron and his family, who owned the house, also owned another at Littlehampton. Grandfather used to stay there for a couple of days to clean the windows and tend to the garden there.

  My sister, Cousin Flo and Cousin Charlie were allowed to stay with Gran and Grandad, but I wasn’t - I suppose I was too young. I was about two years old, when Gran had them for about a week. They were all dressed up - I remember my sister walking up these steps to the front door of the house, with this lovely red outfit on: a red hat with white fur on it and a red coat; and Charlie had a new suit. I stood by the gate, holding my Mum’s hand, watching them.

  I did join them once for a few hours when I must have been about four. It must have been on a Sunday and Gran had bought us girls new hats to go to churc
h in. They were like straw panama hats with white ribbons on the front. Gran had a parrot named Dolly and Charlie was tormenting her. Dolly got so flustered that she tipped her seed all over the floor. As I bent down to pick up the seed, the parrot pecked a big hole in my new hat!

  When war broke out, the Baron had to leave the house, though Gran and Grandad stayed on for a while to sort out the family’s belongings. The family gave my sister a doll… a German doll, beautiful it was. It was dressed in a blue crêpe dress and I can see it now - there was a red ring with a red stone on one of the doll’s fingers, red earrings and a red bracelet, beautiful black curls, a little cloak, a hat and shoes. They used to make lovely faces on dolls years ago, the Germans - natural, beautiful, they were. I was really envious, ‘cos I didn’t get one. They also gave us a pram with a long china handle and a green cover. My sister used to put her doll in it and wouldn’t allow me to push it.’

  The doll was eventually passed down to Florrie’s great granddaughter and when Ethel happened to spot it in her bedroom on a visit, she told the little girl the doll’s story: ‘The dress had faded from its original colour to a pale lavender, but its face was still beautiful. They were astounded that I’d remembered it.

  The German Baron didn’t come back to Bramham Gardens, so he said ‘sell the house,’ so the house was sold and Gran and Grandad went and worked at Philbeach Gardens in the same area, Earls Court.’

  Although rationing during World War I was not as extensive as it was during World War II, food shortages were experienced throughout Britain, especially after the bad harvests of 1916.

  ‘I can remember lining up for potatoes for what seemed like hours, my sister and I, outside Giddens, the greengrocer’s, at about eight in the morning. They were brothers and had a shop at either end of the street. Florrie stood at one end and me at the other. When one of us had to go to school, Mum took her place in the queue. Sometimes, she would try to dodge in, so that she would get two lots, one for us and one for Mrs Dawson next door. I think they used to allow us about two pounds each of potatoes. We used to have the old swedes after that.