Friday Photo #68

A 1930 photo of Joyce in the arms of her maternal grandmother, Anorah.

My Aunt Joyce's life, which began over 95 years ago in an East London terraced house, ended last Sunday evening in a small white room in a Norwich hospital, with my cousin and I by her side. Following a couple of years of steadily declining health, her passing from this world was peaceful.

My cousin has spent much of the last 18 months criss-crossing the Atlantic to care for her mum, while I made regular, though somewhat shorter journeys up and down the M11 to support them both. Latterly my aunt was relocated to a lovely residential care home, just across the Norfolk/Suffolk border, about a mile from my front door. It was by far the longest period she'd spent outside London in her entire life and, unsurprisingly, she didn't care for it much, but it was close enough that I could drop in to see her and report back to my cousin on a regular basis.  

For the first 15 years of my life Joyce, my uncle and my cousin lived upstairs in the same house as us. As a consequence, my cousin and I regard each other as siblings and grew up feeling that we'd each been blessed with an extra set of parents. 

Joyce leaves her daughter, son-in-law and three remarkable grandchildren.

Johnson Mkhalali - Joyce No.2

Friday Photo #64

It's the Spring of 1964 and I've just arrived home after a little rough and tumble down the park at the end of the road, probably instigated by the lad across at No.13 ringing the doorbell and, with all the innocence he could muster, asking Mum '...is Swede playing out?' My shirt hangs loose from beneath a favourite cardigan, one that I will outgrow within a matter of weeks. The wellies are still on and a plaster just above my left knee covers the most recent scrape in a childhood full of scuffs, cuts and grazes. Look at that face though - properly over-excited. The reason? It's right behind me. While I was out, Dad (and probably Uncle Ivor) had installed a full sized swing at the bottom of the garden - a swing! Actually at this point it's just the metal frame cemented into the ground, but the all important hanging bit would materialise shortly afterwards. The swing's arrival was a complete surprise and I'm impishly as pleased as punch about it.

On and off for a handful of young summers, that swing at the end of the garden was central to my world. The frame alone became a mini-chicane as I careered around the garden on a succession of scooters and bikes, it also formed the goalposts for a thousand kickabouts (reducing Mum's grass to a muddy swamp in the process) and it substituted as a Bat-pole for my imaginary adventures as the Caped Crusader. All this in addition to being a, y'know, swing! 

I've no idea (and irritatingly never thought to ask) how Dad acquired this magical plaything that made me the envy of my infant school pals and equally I have absolutely no recollection of it being dug up and removed from the garden a few years down the line, after I'd outgrown it it. The scruffy little scamp in the photo couldn't give a hoot about the details though. What larks he's going to have.

Mice Parade - Swing

Friday Photo #62

I started to seriously look into my family tree over the past winter, in an effort to make sense of the paper trail left by Mum. In the 1980s and 1990s she subscribed to various genealogy newsletters, spent hours poring over dusty documents at Somerset House in London and dragged Dad around endless country graveyards on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, in search of any clues about the life and times of our ancestors. She was keen to share her discoveries with me at the time, but of course I paid scant attention back then. Now that I am interested, there's no-one left to ask. However within a couple of clicks on Ancestry, cross-referred with Mum's handwritten notes, I'd already travelled further back into history than she managed in over 15 years of research. And I've barely scratched the surface.

This is the only known photo of my maternal grandmother's brother Sidney, with whom I share a middle name. He was born on August 30th 1895 and though I found all kinds of information about his parents and siblings with relative ease, Sidney's trail quickly went cold. Then it dawned on me and I turned my attention from birth, marriage and census records, towards an altogether more tragic resource, where I discovered that Sidney, a rifleman, was killed in action in Flanders on Good Friday March 29th 1918, 106 years ago today, and is buried in Arras, Pas-de-Calais.

Guided By Voices - Now to War

Friday Photo #60

Maud, my Maternal Grandmother (Nan), was born in Stratford in the East End of London on January 19th 1893, 131 years ago. She passed away two days before my 16th birthday in 1976. Here Nan is pictured standing between two of her sisters in the early 1920s. On the left of the photo is Beatrice, known to me over 40 years later as emphysema ridden Aunt Beat, who was born in 1897 and died in 1974. To the right is Caroline, Aunt Carrie to me, who enjoyed the longest life of the three sisters, born in 1892 and passing away in 1979. There appear to have been at least a further three siblings in the family, including another sister lost in infancy and a brother Sidney, killed in France during the First World War at just 22 years of age.

This second photo, from the late 1960s, shows (left to right) Beatrice, Carrie and Nan as I knew them.

This Mortal Coil - You and Your Sister

Friday Photo #59

My maternal grandmother remarried late in life and thus Uncle Ted became the only male grandparent figure I'd ever have. He worked at the Leyton Orient football ground (in those days known simply as Orient) in the 1960s and frequently took me with him to home matches. Uncle Ted served in both wars, though, like so many, never discussed the horrors he undoubtedly witnessed - a fuller picture only emerging after his death with the discovery of his photos, papers and medals. Sadly he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1970 and passed away in 1972. Here we are in 1965.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Hammer Song

Friday Photo #58

Half-time in the back garden, circa 1969

As I've mentioned a number of times on these pages, my cousin and I grew up as virtual brother and sister throughout the 1960s and early 1970s - me with my Mum and Dad downstairs, she with her parents upstairs. These days she lives in New York, but we'll be catching up this weekend when she makes a flying visit to see her Mum in London. We're probably a bit too long in the tooth for a kickabout though. 

Parquet Courts - Total Football

Friday Photo #57

Burgoyne Burbidges & Co chemical works in East Ham looms large in my family's history. The company began trading in the Hackney area in 1714, before moving to the East Ham location in 1892. Several aunts and uncles, not to mention both my parents, worked there at one time or other before it closed for good in 1952. The land has been completely redeveloped over the ensuing 70 years, though the original entrance facade on High Street South still remains and I nod to it every time I pass by. Here's Dad aged 22 (looking straight at the camera in the open neck shirt) with some of his colleagues at Burgoynes, shortly before the company closed down. The chap with the tie and Harry Hill collar to Dad's right looks a bit of a character. 

Lee Dorsey - Work Work Work

Friday Photo #56

 

Butlins holiday camp in the mid 1940s. Mum in her teens is second from left at the back. To her right is a family friend, to her left is her cousin Emily with future husband Matt. To Matt's left is Emily's brother Cyril with my maternal grandfather at the end. My maternal grandmother and her sister Carrie (Emily and Cyril's mother) sit smiling broadly at the front of the group. My grandfather and the family friend are the only two people in the photo that I didn't eventually get to know.

Jason Falkner - Holiday

Friday Photo #55

 

Skiers Street, West Ham, circa 1909. The young boy is my maternal grandfather, Sid (Sydney, 1896-1956). In the doorway stands his mother Elizabeth (1866-1946) with her eldest daughter Ada (born 1886). Next to Sid is his younger sister Marie (1902-1971), who I would come to know as Aunt Marie over 50 years later. I'm lucky enough to have a number of family photos taken early in the 20th century, though the majority are stiff studio poses. I don't know the circumstances behind this informal outdoor shot, but it's a real treasure - the framing and detail are remarkable. Skiers Street still exists in the Borough of Newham, though it would be unrecognisable to these ancient relatives, having sustained heavy damage in the Second World War and subsequently been completely rebuilt. 

Brigid Mae Power - Looking at You in a Photo

Friday Photo #54

 

With Mum's side of the family, I'm fortunate to have a well documented photographic trail to follow back through time, as far as the early years of the 20th century - Dad's much less so. Dad was one of seven children, but there are no photos of any of them in the family archive prior to their respective marriages in the 1950s. In my whole life I've only ever seen one photo of my paternal Grandfather, a man who was born in 1889 and passed away three months after I was born in 1960. From what I can gather he didn't attend the wedding ceremonies of any of his offspring, or if he did, he excused himself from the group photos, most of which I have copies of. There are precious few surviving images of my paternal Grandmother, Alice (1890-1967) and all of those were taken by my Dad in her later years. This is Alice in 1964. I have faint memories of her formidable presence at family gatherings, which was in stark contrast to the frailty of my maternal Grandmother.

Green on Red - Alice

Friday Photo #51

There's a weekly feature over on Instagram that's been going on for a very long time, whereby old family photos are dug out and shared every Thursday, using the hashtag #throwbackthursday. It's an interesting way to catch glimpses of a world long gone, via anonymous vintage snapshots and memories. I've contributed to #throwbackthursday most weeks for at least 4 years now and a number of those shots have also graced these pages at one time or another. As a consequence I've plundered dad's boxes of slides and negatives multiple times, yet every now and then I still unearth one I've missed, today's being a prime example. I don't ever remember seeing this photo before a few weeks ago and I have to say that the ancient, over-exposed image caught me emotionally off-guard when I stumbled upon it.

It was taken in 1961. Dad is holding me on the pillar of the wall in the front garden. He's looking up, smiling. And me? I'm clearly loving the thrill of being up there, at just about the height I'd one day reach. These are roughly the respective perspectives Dad and I would have of each other for most of my adult life, after I'd shot past his 5' 10" at around the age of 15 or 16. It's always nice to see a photo of Dad & I together. There aren't that many in the archives, as he was the family photographer, with Mum & I as the frequent subjects. A quick squint on Google Street View shows me that, remarkably, the front garden wall is still standing, albeit in a refurbished state, 62 years later.

Human League - Empire State Human

Friday Photo #50

My aunt, who turned 94 yesterday, has lived alone in East London since my uncle died in 1978 and is the last surviving family member to have known me since birth. She's still cooks all her own meals, does her own housework and washing, all the while keeping her mind active by knitting for England and completing endless wordsearch puzzles. In fact I sent her another half a dozen wordsearch books as a birthday gift, which should hopefully keep her ticking along for a few months. As I've mentioned previously, my aunt, uncle and cousin shared our house in Walthamstow for the first dozen or so years of my life, so I've long considered her as an extra parent and I know that my cousin regarded my own mum in the same way.

Today's photo was taken in the back garden in the early summer of 1963, just prior to my cousin's arrival. My aunt at the back, doing her best to hide her baby bump beneath a baggy pinny, mum in the middle knitting something pink for the forthcoming addition to the family and me in my best bib and tucker at the front. I can only imagine that I must've been bribed to look so angelic!

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Lieutenant Pigeon were an interesting combo. They had a short run of hit singles in the 1970s that your nan would've happily nodded along to, while at the same time some of their b-sides and album fillers displayed a wacky, low budget sense of experimentalism. Here's the quite odd closing track from Mouldy Old Music, their debut LP, released in 1973.

Lieutenant Pigeon - Auntie May

Friday Photo #45

It strikes me that I haven't posted any old family photos in this series for a while. To compensate, here's a real favourite of mine from 1961. There's absolutely nothing that I don't like about this shot. The swan stretching in anticipation, Mum delicately proffering a piece of bread and me craning forward to get a better look at the situation. The whole scene is brilliantly captured by Dad. I'm not certain of the location, but I'd put money on it being somewhere in the vicinity of Wanstead Flats.

Can - Sing Swan Song

Friday Photo #37

For a few days before flying out to New York to visit my cousin, I stayed with her mum in London. While there I ticked off a few odd jobs around her house, took her out for a pub lunch or two and dealt with an unexpected breakdown of her freezer. I also went out alone to walk The Greenway, an embankment footpath that runs from Beckton (where my cousin's dad worked for the North Thames Gas Board in the 1960s & 70s), through East Ham (where her mum has lived alone since losing her husband in the late 1970s), Plaistow (where my dad was born), Stratford (where my mum was born) and on to Victoria Park in Hackney. It also passes directly alongside the church where my mum and dad were married in 1955. The disparate strings of my immediate family, all pulled together over the course of one 4½ walk. 

To the untutored eye, The Greenway looks for all the world like a reclaimed railway track, though this is not the case. My mum, dad, aunt and uncle all traversed The Greenway regularly when they were growing up in the area, but they knew it (and my aunt still refers to it) as The Sewerbank, a slightly less salubrious, but accurate moniker for the manmade embankment that hides the Northern Outfall Sewer. It was re-christened in the 1990s.

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Here's the frankly magnificent 1980 Tom Jones cover, from Rock n Roll's Greatest Failure.

John Otway - Green Green Grass of Home

Friday Photo #30

The first two or three years seemed to pass slowly, perhaps because I was concentrating so much on Mum's health and wellbeing back then, but suddenly it's 15 years ago today that Dad died. Who knows where the time goes. He'd not been in great health for a number of years, though the end came very quickly and unexpectedly. I won't go into it all again now, but I wrote about that day in some detail here. 

The family archive contains many photos of me as a youngster as well as plenty of me with Mum and other relatives. Photos of me with Dad are less plentiful for the simple reason that he was the family photographer. Here's a fun one though, of us in 1964 on a seaside miniature railway, no doubt taken by Mum as she shouted at Dad to make sure I held on! That's us two thirds of the way back, with Dad obeying Mum's instructions to the letter and me smiling at the camera like butter wouldn't melt. 

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Spencer Krug is a prolific Canadian musician, one of those artists whose output, across several simultaneous bands, is a devilishly tricky business to keep up with. I have nothing in the collection by Fifths of Seven or Moonface for instance, but I do own fine albums by Frog Eyes, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake and these guys. If you know only one song by Wolf Parade, it's probably this corker. 

Wolf Parade - You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son

Friday Photo #25

It's April 1967, that's me on the right, sporting a pudding basin haircut and a Batman badge on my tie. In the middle is my cousin, she was three years younger than me then...and still is. On the left is her mum, the aunt I often mention on these pages. My aunt turned 93 two days ago and still lives alone in East London, as she's done since my cousin moved to New York in 1988. This weekend though, the family flies in for a belated birthday celebration and tomorrow evening I'll be driving down to reunite with my cousin, her husband and their three kids, all of whom have grown up considerably since we last saw them in 2017. In fact in the interim, the eldest two have graduated from college, while the youngest starts college herself later this month. Their trip was a relatively last minute affair and though they'll be staying in London for the whole week, I only have a couple of precious days with them all before I have to head back for work. It's going to be emotional.

Sparks - In My Family 

Friday Photo #22

Wanstead Flats in North East London, is a detached slab of the ancient woodland Epping Forest - a 334 acre oasis of green in an otherwise heavily built up area. On Sundays, when we didn't go wandering the streets of Central London, Dad and I would often head over to the Flats. It was his old manor, an area he'd enjoyed walking around as a youngster himself. There we'd kick a ball about, play a few impromptu overs of cricket or just sit at the edge of  Dames Road Pond watching the older kids and their Fathers sailing their model yachts, a very popular weekend activity in that location in those days. After much pleading, Dad eventually brought me my own miniature yacht, made of wood and around 18 inches long, which we took over the Flats one Sunday. It was a thing of beauty, painted a glossy sky blue, with crisp white canvas sails. I was excited - over excited. As soon as Dad sat the yacht on the water and gave it the gentlest push I freaked out. We were at the mercy of the wind, which was the whole point of it for most people, but I was convinced that it was never coming back to shore. It did of course, eventually, but by then I'd made such a colossal fuss that I don't remember Dad ever taking it out with us again. Instead the yacht spent the remainder of my childhood on, and later in, a cupboard in my bedroom, before disappearing from my life completely, in that mysterious way that things do. 

I can't lay my hands on a photo of the yacht in question right at the moment, but here I am, all dressed up in my Sunday best, over the Flats one Sunday morning in 1967. 

Marc Bolan - Over the Flats (Home Demo)

Friday Photo #19

Over a period of many years in the pre-internet days, my Mum patiently attempted to pull together the various strands of our family tree. It was a difficult and longwinded task back then. She visited graveyards, examined ancient registers, scoured censuses and drafted letters to organisations around the country and beyond in an effort to connect the dots between seemingly unconnected names, faces and dates. Whenever I'd go home for a weekend, she'd excitedly tell me of her latest discovery - who was related to who, in what way, where they were born and when they died. I, of course, nodded and smiled, absorbing next to none of her laboriously gleaned discoveries, while probably stuffing a sandwich down my neck before heading off to the pub to meet my chums. Years later, I'm left with Mum's research. Scraps of paper, scribbled notes, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and fading photos. The dots she painstakingly tried to connect now fill several dusty carrier bags. I'm gradually transferring it all onto Ancestry, but I wish I'd taken more notice at the time. It meant as much to Mum then as it does to me now.

This is Alice, my maternal great-Grandmother. She was born in 1856 and died in August 1927, five years before Mum was born. Her husband Charles, my maternal great-Grandfather, pre-deceased her in November 1924 aged 67. They are both interred at Bow cemetery in the East End of London

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Today's tune is an absolute beauty from Tom Waits and contains one of my favourite couplets of his: '...arithmetic arithmetock, turn the hands back on the clock...'

Tom Waits - Alice

Friday Photo(s) #18

One day in the mid-1980's, very quietly, without fuss or announcement, Dad stopped eating meat. Never once, from that moment until he passed away in 2007, did I ever hear him use the word vegetarian to describe himself, yet he never ate meat again. He'd simply finally reached the point where he could no longer square his love of animals with the consumption of dead flesh. He made no big deal of it, felt no obligation to justify his decision and never attempted to persuade anyone else to do the same thing. It was purely a line he felt he could no longer cross. Indeed, Mum continued to be a meat-eater for the rest of her life and it was a further 5 or 6 years until I became a vegetarian.

Dad's love of animals extended well beyond our family pets. Mum's eyes would roll as she'd tell me about car journeys delayed by Dad pulling up to rescue a injured bird (they then drove around for a couple of hours looking for a vet to leave it with) or, in this particular case from 1983, to free a sheep caught in a barbed wire fence on a remote country lane. He wouldn't use any tools to do the job as he neither wanted to accidentally hurt the sheep or damage the fence, so he untangled it painstakingly by hand. The sheep remained calm throughout the lengthy process apparently, seemingly well aware that Dad was friendly and there to help.   

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Today's soundtrack is provided by Welsh guitarist Toby Hay, who has released three albums under his own name, another in tandem with Jim Ghedi plus a number of EPs. 'Sheep Song' is Hay's contribution to the 2020 Tompkins Square compilation album 'Imaginational Anthem Vol. X'. 

Toby Hay - Sheep Song

Friday Photo #17

On the very day that the rules of international travel to and from the USA changed last week, my cousin flew in for a brief four day visit with her Mum, the first time they've been together for a couple of years. I was able to make it down to London for two of those days and I can confirm that it was a joy for all concerned.

On Monday my cousin and I took the tube into town for lunch and a wander around Soho, where we dropped into both the Bowie and Stones pop-up shops as well as Morgan Howell's current outlet on Beak Street. If you don't know Morgan's incredible SuperSizeArt work take a look here (and if you happen to have a wad of money burning a hole in your pocket, one of the T.Rex pieces would look very nice on my wall).

I know that part of town fairly well, but as we came out of the much altered Tottenham Court Road tube station I was unsure exactly where our chosen exit would lead and for a moment couldn't quite get my bearings. Then I looked up.

Wilco - Capitol City