Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Spoke to my mum on the weekend-she lived with my nan and extended family in Lytcott Grove; my mum who was only a baby then had been taken for a walk to Streatham and they came home to find half the house and street flattened by a flying bomb. A modern block was built there after the war. Note sure of the date.

Sam

Thanks for identifying the sites of some of the World War II water-tanks.


I believe these water-tanks were lined with bitumen to keep the water in.


I wonder if any home-owners of post-war houses built on the water-tank sites have rising damp problems.

  • 2 weeks later...

I have been re-reading Collier's "Valuation for War Damage" (1945) and I had forgotten how complicated and slow it was to get any money out of the War Damage Commission.


Because of raw material and manpower shortages repairs were often made with insufficient poor quality materials by inexperienced workers.


I would be interested to hear if anyone has had to repair war damage repairs (not only that caused by V1s and V2s).

  • 5 weeks later...

Percy Seymour died on November 17th, 1984. aged around 50. Buried in Camberwell New Cemetary.(right near my parents who knew him well also)

I was a good friend of his for some years.

He had lung cancer which spread to his brain, a fit of coughing caused him to fall off a roof.They took him to Kings College Hospital where tests showed the cancer had spread. They gave him 2 months to live. ..was a longtime heavy smoker of "Boars Head" tobacco.

He was a great guy, very warm hearted & generous.. unlike most of his family though.

To bring the topic back to the V1 & V2 bombs if I may. I am really delighted to see that the web site which I

created www.flyingbombsandrockets.com is being used as a source of reference and has been quoted in posts on this site.

As you may imagine putting together all the data and then setting it up on the web site was as massive job and my objective was always to provide a source of reference for Dulwich and other areas of south London covered.

I had to remove my mail adress from the site last year due to the volume of requests for information I was receiving but if anyone has any questions regarding V1 & V2 bombs in Dulwich I would be happy to help , via this forum.


I am also particulary interested in the V1 that fell on St Thomas More Church In Lordship lane 13th July 1944 as this missile damaged my house in Court lane and I would be very interested to know if anyone knows of any images or has any recollections of this particular incident

  • 1 month later...

Hi all


Great thread.


Id like to add a bit, although not directly to do with E Dulwich.


I was born shortly after the war and grew up in its myths and stories.


It was a long time before the UK began any significant rebuilding and bomb sites littered the streets. They were often fenced off with lines of doors, since they were best suited to survive blasts in houses, and they lay around in their thousands. (Think of that the next time you spend out on a genuine, older, stripped pine wood door!!) They made quite a surreal sight. None of the doors actually opened. The sites were also great "Adventure playgrounds", and my mother often asked us to go the bomb site (In streatham, on the site of the Dunraven school) and pick mint for the sunday meal.


The more eco aware people of today would love those sites; they provided protected environments for plants and wild life.


We were much less supervised than todays kids. No one bothered us. The sites were places where kids could get away from adults. We built "camps" and played with shrapnel, and sometimes, shell casings etc. In central London, there were huge bomb sites. In the mid fifties, my best mate and I would buy Red Rover bus tickets, travel together into London by bus, and spend the day clambering about in deserted sites, in dark archways, cellars etc etc. Then came the first property boom, and it all began to dissapear.


I'm not regretting its dissapearance. However, many people who know only the present day reality of long term peace and high land values etc, cannot conceive of living in a community where homes were something that you lived in all of your life, and land could lay unused without any pressure to develop it, or speculate with it.

  • 1 month later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Latest Discussions

    • In what way? Maybe it just felt more intelligent and considered coming directly after Question Time, which was a barely watchable bun fight.
    • Yes, all this. Totally Sephiroth. The electorate wants to see transformation overnight. That's not possible. But what is possible is leading with the right comms strategy, which isn't cutting through. As I've said before, messaging matters more now than policy, that's the only way to bring the electorate with you. And I worry that that's how Reform's going to get into power.  And the media LOVES Reform. 
    • “There was an excellent discussion on Newscast last night between the BBC Political Editor, the director of the IFS and the director of More In Common - all highly intelligent people with no party political agenda ” I would call this “generous”   Labour should never have made that tax promise because, as with - duh - Brexit, it’s pretending the real world doesn’t exist now. I blame Labour in no small part for this delusion. But the electorate need to cop on as well.  They think they can have everything they want without responsibilities, costs or attachments. The media encourage this  Labour do need to raise taxes. The country needs it.  Now, exactly how it’s done remains to be seen. But if people are just going to go around going “la la laffer curve. Liars! String em up! Vote someone else” then they just aren’t serious people reckoning with the problem yes Labour are more than a year into their term, but after 14 years of what the Tories  did? Whoever takes over, has a major problem 
    • Messaging, messaging, messaging. That's all it boils down to. There are only so many fiscal policies out there, and they're there for the taking, no matter which party you're in. I hate to say it, but Farage gets it right every time. Even when Reform reneges on fiscal policy, it does it with enough confidence and candidness that no one is wringing their hands. Instead, they're quietly admired for their pragmatism. Strangely, it's exactly the same as Labour has done, with its manifesto reverse on income tax, but it's going to bomb.  Blaming the Tories / Brexit / Covid / Putin ... none of it washes with the public anymore  - it wants to be sold a vision of the future, not reminded of the disasters of the past. Labour put itself on the back foot with its 'the tories fucked it all up' stance right at the beginning of its tenure.  All Lammy had to do (as with Reeves and Raynor etc) was say 'mea culpa. We've made a mistake, we'll fix it. Sorry guys, we're on it'. But instead it's 'nothing to see here / it's someone else's fault / I was buying a suit / hadn't been briefed yet'.  And, of course, the press smells blood, which never helps.  Oh! And Reeve's speech on Wednesday was so drab and predictable that even the journalists at the press conference couldn't really be arsed to come up with any challenging questions. 
Home
Events
Sign In

Sign In



Or sign in with one of these services

Search
×
    Search In
×
×
  • Create New...