Forest Gate and WW1 - on the 110th anniversary of its outbreak

Over the years, we have published various articles on how Forest Gate was impacted by the First World War. On the 110^th anniversary of its outbreak, this post summarises them, with links to the greater details provided in each.

Troops on the battle fronts

Elliott Taylor and Barney Alston published Up The Hammers to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1. It is available from Newham Bookshops and other reliable book retailers. It is the story of the West Ham Battalion (known as the Hammers Brigade) from its establishment in Forest Gate in December 1914 until its demise and amalgamation with other detachments following severe losses in 1918.

Recruitment poster for Hammers Battalion

We published two articles based on it, featuring the lives of Forest Gate soldiers: here and here. The first covered the period until the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916), and the second covered the period until the battalion's disbandment in January 1918.

A significant local figure in the battalion was William Walter Busby of Sherrard Road, a local Congregationalist and scout leader, who was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during the Battle of the Somme and who was killed on the fateful night of 26/27  November that year, when over 170 members of the Battalion were killed at the Battle of Ancre.

Forest Gate's William Walter Busby MC

Other Forest Gate soldiers whose roles were recognised by Taylor and Alston and whose stories we relate included: Bernard Page, Leonard and Alan Holthusen, Gilbert Simpson, Arthur Davies, Alfred Sekles, Private EM Wilding, Private Robert Lee, Hubert Ayres, Joseph Sait, Arnold Hone, Cpl Frederick Hunt, Sgt Harold Joseph Morrison, and 2/Lt George Gemmell.

Their stories and their experiences are summarised in the blog articles but well told in Taylor and Alston’s book.

Cover of Taylor and Alston's book

The home front

We have been fortunate to have access to almost a century of the Godwin Road school logbook, including how the war impacted the school, its pupils, and the wider community. We published details of the impact here, in an article and series of diary entries that featured:

·         Deaths of former Godwin pupils during the conflict;

·         Assistance Godwin pupils gave to the war effort;

·         How war-induced fuel and food shortages impacted Forest Gate;

·         Impact of air raids on the district;

·         Attempts to provide "business as usual" in the school; and

·         The impact of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919 on Godwin.

West Ham borough suffered  2,035 civilian and military deaths during World War 1; the exact number of the Forest Gate death toll is not known.

1915 post Lusitania sinking anti-German riots

Contemporary photo of anti-German East End riots

After the onset of war, the biggest upsurge in anti-German feeling locally came nine months after the outbreak of hostilities; and followed the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915. There was a significant amount of rioting and looting of German premises in both Forest Gate and Manor Park by Forest Gate residents, reported by the Stratford Express.

Stratford Express reports the riots

Extensive extracts from the paper identified locations of the rioting and looting; these included:

·         341 Green Street (now the library)

What is now Green St library attacked

·         Manor Park Broadway

What is now Manor Park library attacked

·         Station Road, Manor Park

·         Romford Road

·         Green Street and

·         Sebert Road

Bonheim's the furriers, Sebert Road attacked

We were also able to identify over a dozen local looters and rioters, successfully prosecuted in Stratford Magistrates Court.

The anti-German riots article can be accessed here.

Conscientious Objectors

We accessed several primary sources, secondary reference sites, and books to find considerable details of 48 Forest Gate people who claimed Conscientious Objector (COs) status during WWI and provided details of them here. On a pro-rata basis, given the total number of COs registered nationally, Forest Gate could have expected to have been home to only eight. It is not entirely clear why the local number would appear to have been so disproportionately high.

We found ten local Quaker COs (John Edwin Davies, Alexander Stewart Fryer, Frank George Hobart, Ernest George Mountford, Reginald William Mountford, George Leonard Pratt, William Ronald Read, Frank Augustus Root, Robert Sandy, and George Alfred Weller). 

Twenty other local COs quoted religious objections as grounds for seeking exemption from military service. Some were Jehovah's Witnesses, but others were members of the Church of England (CofE) and its fundamentally pacifist arm, the International Bible Students' Association (IBSA).

Two of the 48 claimed political objections to fighting (Edmund Howarth and Frederick Thompson, the former described as an "Anarchist/Communist/ Athiest" and the latter as a member of the Independent Labour Party). 

There were four local Absolutists who refused to enlist or undertake any work that could be seen as supporting the war effort. They had a totally torrid time. They were Howarth, Thompson (above), Frank Augustus Root, and George Arthur Weller.

Twenty-one of the Forest Gate 48 served prison sentences because of their CO status - some in several prisons. Fifteen - almost a third of local COs spent time in Wormwood Scrubs, four in Winchester, two in Dartmoor, and one each in Maidstone, Pentonville, Newhaven, and Wakefield, while four spent time in unspecified prisons.

The fate of several Forest Gate WW1 war memorials

About twenty varied war memorials were erected after World War 1 in the Forest Gate area.  As far as is possible to tell, about half of them have subsequently been lost or destroyed. The article chronicling their fate can be accessed here.

About half of the memorials we featured were in churches and synagogues; some have been subsequently lost or destroyed as a result of Second World War bomb damage, while others were not saved when churches and a synagogue were demolished.

War memorial: All Saints church

Forest Gate's major cemeteries have Commonwealth War Grave memorials and about 300 individual graves and plots with headstones.

CWGC memorial Woodgrange Park cemetery

There are a small number of other employment or school-specific memorials to the WW1 fallen, including at St Bonaventure school, the Royal Mail Sorting Office, and one recently installed outside Forest Gate police station.

War memorial outside Forest Gate police station, erected during centenary of war

In all war conflicts, some deeply tragic personal stories illustrate the human cost and suffering of the wider story. This blog has featured two very different case studies, both resulting in devastation and death caused by the “War to end all wars.” One was a love affair that ended in death on a battlefield, and the second was a horrific murder case undoubtedly induced by post-traumatic stress disorder.

The diaries of two local lovers whose affair was extinguished on the battlefields

A decade ago, local resident Paul Holloway self-published an account of a romance between his Forest Gate grandmother, May Larby, and a friend she met while travelling to London to college—fellow Forest Gater Jack Richardson. The book was called There Are No Flowers Here. We published a story summary in two articles, here and here.

May Larby

The romance between the couple, who lived within half a mile of each other, only lasted two years, but May lovingly remembered it for the rest of her life through the precious letters they exchanged during its brief duration.

May’s daughter from her later marriage, Elizabeth, kept these letters, and Paul transcribed and published them on her death, in remembrance of the two women and Jack.

The first episode of the series tells how the couple met and how their friendship blossomed until Jack, having enlisted in the City of London Fusiliers, was sent to the front line in France in early 1915.

Jack Richardson

The second episode of the blog records Jack’s experiences in the trenches until his final message to May:

“While the weather lasts, I think on the whole, I would rather be in the trenches than in billets. I scarcely ever sleep comfortably in town because I expect to be called up with an alarm every night I hear the gunfire; here the guns boom all night and one doesn’t notice it.

"My beloved, these days of sunshine make me feel only a matter of weeks or a month or so before I see you again - I dream of it at night."

Sadly, it was not to be. On Sunday, 25 April 1915, Jack was wounded, having been reconnoitering in front of his trench at night with his sergeant. He died of these wounds on Friday, 7 May 1915, aged 22.

Jack's memorial scroll

May later married Richard Williams and had four children. She became a successful mathematician, was awarded a CBE for her contribution to maths in education, and died in 1986, aged 91. But the memory of that brief affair lingered with her till the end - 70 years on; individual testimony to the lasting grief that the 'war to end all wars' brought to so many.

The 1919 Forest Gate Murders – a Post-Traumatic Distress Syndrome case study

Some of the most horrific local civilian deaths resulting from World War 1 came six months after the cessation of hostilities when four members of the Cornish family were murdered in their home, Stockley Road in April 1919.

The murdered Cornish family

Henry Perry, aka Beckett, was executed by hanging at Pentonville jail on 10 July 1919 for the murders - and so became the last person judicially executed for  Forest Gate-related killings.

Case reported

The story of the killings and subsequent trial is a horrific one, covered on the blog here. Perry, a war veteran, pleaded insanity, but this was dismissed. PTSD was not a well-understood condition at the end of World War 1. “Shell shock” was probably as close an understanding of the condition that existed then, but it was not accepted as a defence.

Henry Perry aka Beckett, as a soldier

In a more enlightened time today, it would be widely accepted that the four Cornish family deaths, along with that of the perpetrator Perry, would be accepted as deaths consequential to the traumas and suffering Perry experienced on the battlefields of Europe.

80th anniversary of Dames Road disaster

Location of the Doodlebug hit on 27 July 1944

27th July 2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the Dames Road disaster - the deadliest air raid hit on Forest Gate during World War 11.

We have covered the Doodlebug bombing of the road - close to the Holly Tree - on this site before, notably here, when we were able to publish all the names of the victims of the disaster for the first time, and  here, where we published a detailed first-hand account of the day's events from the standpoint of a 15-year-old victim family member.

This article combines different perspectives from previous postings to provide a comprehensive account of the event to mark this significant local anniversary.

Cyril Demarne, who would later become West Ham's chief fire officer, was called to assist with the aftermath of the bombing. In his 1980 memoirs, he described the event as " the most horrific thing I have ever witnessed."

Contemporary press reports were significantly affected by wartime censorship imposed on newspapers, which was done to avoid adversely impacting civilian morale and to confuse enemy understanding of the outcome and locations of their V1 attacks.

The Stratford Express account of 4 August (see below) did not identify the exact location of the hit, stating that a "passing vehicle" was wrecked and that there were a number of fatalities, but only mentioned four people. None of this was false, but it certainly wasn't comprehensive.

First press report - Stratford Express - 4 August - vague

Other local newspapers took a further six weeks to publish fuller but conflicting accounts.

The Leytonstone Independent of 15 September reported that 34 people were killed and that the "passing vehicle" was, in fact, a trolley bus.

More accurate newspaper account - seven weeks after the raid, Leytonstone Guardian

The Walthamstow Guardian of the same date devoted a mere 24 words to the worst local bombing of the war when it reported: "At Dames Road, when a bomb fell within a few yards of a trolley bus, 41 people were killed and 24 taken to hospital."

After the conclusion of the war, each borough produced a list of the civilians who had died during the conflict, which was compiled by the Commonwealth Graves Commission. By scrolling through the lists produced by both West Ham and Leytonstone councils (the bomb fell on the borough boundary), we have been able to identify 34 dead - the same number as the Leytonstone Independent had reported - and listed their names, ages, and addresses. 

No similar lists were compiled for casualties, so we have no accurate assessment of how many may have been injured in the attack.

West Ham's book of civilian war deaths

It would appear that the family that was most affected by the disaster was the Blackmans of 323 Billet Road, Walthamstow. Three members were killed: Gladys (aged 34), the wife of Leading Aircraftsman William Blackman, and Jean, aged 10, and Wendy, aged 4, their children.

In October 2020, Sue, the granddaughter of William and Gladys Blackman, contacted us. She said that her grandparents also had two sons, Donald, who survived the attack, and William Jr. (Bill), who was 15 at the time and at work, therefore not in the vicinity of the Doodlebug hit.

Sue sent us an extract from her father, Bill's memoirs (he was 91 at the time) - What a lucky sod I am - which provides a detailed account of the day from his perspective. It can be accessed here.

Bill Blackman aged 15 - around the time of the death of his mother and sisters

Gladys, apparently, was in the habit of taking her children to see their grandmother in Manor Park every Friday afternoon. On the afternoon of 27 July, they were on a trolley bus going home via Forest Gate when the VI missile hit the vehicle on Dames Road.

When he heard the explosion, Bill was working at Wrighton's, a furniture manufacturer near the Crooked Billet roundabout. The firm was beginning to close down for the day, and Bill saw a "huge black mushroom of smoke and debris rising in the sky." Although he was used to the sounds of bombs exploding, he felt particularly uneasy about this blast.

V1 missile, of the knid that hit Dames Road

It was his normal practice to go home on a Friday afternoon and lay the table in preparation for his mum and siblings' return from their family visit.

He did this, as normal, on 27 July but became increasingly uneasy as time went on, and they did not return. After a while, a policeman knocked on the door and asked to speak to one of his parents. Bill explained they were not in the house, so the police left and went to a neighbour. After a while, the neighbour and police officer returned and told Bill that his brother had been injured in a bomb blast and taken to St Mary's hospital in Hackney.

Bill told them that Donald was with his mother and sisters that afternoon. The policeman and neighbour said they would go to the police station to get more details.

15-year-old Bil was left alone in the house for hours until the neighbour returned, ashen-faced. He threw Bill a cigarette and told him to light it to calm down. The neighbour then began to explain the fate of Bill's mother and sisters. "I can remember my brain seemed to shut down momentarily ... I seemed to be in this strange trance-like state for some time before suddenly everything came to life, and I realised what had just happened to me."

Gladys Blackman - Bill's mother, and victim

The neighbours offered Bill a meal and a bed for the night, but he refused both, preferring to sleep in his own bed, alone in the house. They did, however, look after him until his father returned from active service abroad, for which he has always been grateful.

Bill took a month off work, and it was several weeks before his father reached home. Bill describes himself as feeling “comfortably numb” through this time. He spent some of it, accompanied by different adults, travelling the country to explain to relatives the circumstances of the deaths. One of those visits was to his nan, who was in the pub when he called.

Jean Blackman - Bill's sister, and victim

One of Bill’s most painful experiences was having to identify the bodies of his mother and two sisters in the mortuary. He was shown his mother’s face, which only had a few scratches on it, but only some of the clothes of his two sisters.

Bill says he also visited his brother Donald in the hospital, “the only survivor from the bus of 70 passengers.”

Following the funerals of his mother and sisters, Bill described his life as “for probably several weeks just surviving on auto-pilot”. When he eventually returned to work, he was put on “light duties”, working alone in an office essentially as a gatekeeper/receptionist.

When his dad finally arrived home, Bill discovered that he had been misinformed and told that the whole family and their house had been destroyed by a bomb blast. 

This partially explains why it took him so long to return – he thought he was coming home to emptiness. An additional complicating factor, explaining the length of his homecoming, was that he was expected to make his own way and travel arrangements, unaided, in returning from the Egyptian desert.

The War Office made some amends by posting Bill snr locally so that he could return home each evening. Donald was in the hospital for 18 months, recovering from a serious injury before being sent to Switzerland for convalescence. 

91-year old Bill, in 2020

Production at Wrighton’s changed from furniture manufacture to aircraft production until the end of the war. Bill, meanwhile, survived into his 90s, writing a very moving memoir of the dreadful times he experienced after the Dames Road bomb.

Celebration of 150th anniversary of West Ham Park’s opening

Background

Surviving documents relating to the parklands date from the mid-sixteenth century. By 1670, Rooke Hall, later renamed Upton House, was the main house dominating the area.

In 1762, physician and botanist Dr. John Fothergill bought the house (see here for details), enlarged the grounds, built extensive greenhouses, and planted them with rare and exotic botanical species from around the world.

Dr John Fothergill

Unfortunately, 260 years later, the Corporation of London has decided to tear down the last of the greenhouses and cover the area with housing.

Fothergill’s botanical gardens were second only to Kew in importance in England. He recorded the details of his plants in records that survive in the British library and commissioned paintings and drawings, many of Catherine the Great of Russia acquired on his death. They languish, untended, in a small botanical museum on the outskirts of St Petersburg.

Although the greenhouses have gone and the paintings are inaccessible, at least one of Fothergill’s specimens remains in the park—the Gingko Biloba tree (pictured), which he is believed to have planted there in 1763.

Fothergill's Gingko Biloba tree

Upton House was renamed Ham House in the 1780s and eventually acquired by Quaker banker and philanthropist Samuel Gurney in 1812 (see here for details), where he resided for the rest of his life. When he retired from banking in the 1840s, he dedicated his efforts to philanthropy and local land acquisition, and in a piecemeal fashion, he purchased over 30% of the land that is now recognised as Forest Gate.

Samuel Gurney

Gurney’s older sister, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry’s (see here for details) household fell on hard times in the 1820s. Samuel allowed them to live in a house named the Cedars on the edge of his landholding from 1829 until 1844. That house later became a Territorial Army barracks and local headquarters.

Elizabeth Fry

Soon after Gurney died in 1856, his own immediate family faced financial difficulties following the collapse of the bank he once led. His grandson, John, set about disposing of some of the land Gurney had accumulated, which in many ways led to the growth of Forest Gate as the Victorian commuter suburb it largely remains today.

Ham House in its grounds, before demolition in 1872

John Gurney was keen that the 77 acres of his grandfather’s immediate estate should become a public park. He valued it at £25,000 and offered to sell it at half its valuation if local people contributed the other half towards its sale price. A fund was launched to find the money, led by one-time Gurney employee and administrator Gustav Pagenstecher (see here for details). 

Gustav Pagenstecher

The then local authority was unwilling to contribute, and only £2,500 was raised from immediate local sources. Pagenstecher turned his fundraising attention to the Corporation of London, which was already interested in acquiring Epping Forest, including Wanstead Flats, for public use (see here for details).

The Friend, a Quaker publication dated 1 April 1873, explains the Corporation’s interest. It noted, “No parish in London has expanded more rapidly than West Ham. It has seen an increase in population of more than 60% over the last 10 years.”

Gurney and Pagenstecher feared that developers would have bought the land and turned it into housing if it had not become a public park.

The Corporation contributed £10,000 towards purchasing the Park, which was to be open to the public “in perpetuity … at its own expense” from its opening in July 1874. The corporation has run and managed it ever since. Pagenstecher maintained a keen interest and was deputy chairman of its board of trustees from its establishment as a park until he died in 1916. He wrote the first history of the park.

Elements of the history of the park

One of the first things the Corporation did during the acquisition was demolishing Ham House and leaving some of its remnants as a cairn near the park’s main entrance (see photo).

Ham House, before its demolition in 1872

 

 

 

The cairn near the main entrance to the park, all that remains of the house today

The park has many fine features today, including a delightful ornamental garden, children’s play area, bandstands, a café, and pitches and greens for many sports. It is a Grade 11 listed park.

It has often attracted large attendances for special events. The Godwin school diary of 10 September 1895, for example, noted: “The attendance (at school) was good this morning, but owing to the visit of the Lord Mayor and Corporation to West Ham Park, it was greatly affected in the afternoon.”

Entrance to the park, 1907

An Edwardian postcard of the formally laid out park

Another significant turnout was recorded for the Civil Defence Ceremony of Remembrance on 26 September 1943 – see photo below.

Civil Defence ceremony in the park, 1943

Sport has always featured prominently in the park, and Pagenstecher ensured it was well catered for, as indicated in his memoirs:

I’ve always been an enthusiast for cricket. On the Park Management Committee, I used to endeavour to ensure that portions of the Park should be laid out as cricket pitches. I was secretary of Upton Park Cricket Club which dates back as far as 1854 (ed: i.e. some 20 years before the land was formally adopted as public parkland).

Football

West Ham Park is perhaps better known for its unusual football heritage. From 1866, eight years before the grounds were formally designated a park, it hosted Upton Park FC, a club with a couple of unique achievements. It was one of the fifteen clubs competing for the inaugural FA Cup trophy in 1871 and has the distinction of hosting the competition’s first-ever goal, when Upton Park went 1-0 down in the 11^th minute of the game (eventually losing 3-1) to Clapham Rovers, on 11 November that year.

Crest of Upton Park FC

As we approach the 2024 Paris Olympics, Upton Park’s second great claim to football fame comes into view. The club represented GB in the 1900 Paris Olympics and emerged victorious gold medal winners! There is no GB team at this year’s Olympics, so Upton Park’s record as victorious UK footballing Olympians in Paris cannot be matched this summer.

Logo of 2nd Olympiad - Paris 1900

The local area has boasted the strange quirk of having Upton Park FC playing at West Ham Park, while West Ham FC played at Upton Park!

What a hotbed of football this small area of Forest Gate was at the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries. Just a couple hundred yards from West Ham Park is the Old Spotted Dog ground, home to Clapton FC, who boast several impressive achievements. In 1890, they became the first English football team to play in Europe (beating a Belgian X1 7-0) and competed in six (winning five) FA Amateur Cup finals between 1903 and 1928.

Wanstead Park Station celebrates its 130th birthday

9 July is the 130^th anniversary of the opening to passengers of Wanstead Park station and the line it serves. The Barking Riverside to Gospel Oak line, known to many as the “GOBLIN”, and recently christened the “Suffragette line” by TfL, began life in the 1860s, when the western section from Gospel Oak to South Tottenham opened. In 1890 parliament passed an act authoring a new section of line to Barking. This was at the prompting of Sir Courtney Warner, whose family had significant landholdings in Walthamstow. Warner was planning to develop new housing estates there, and the railway would he hoped encourage London’s better-off working-class families to move out to Walthamstow.

A company to build and operate the new line was formed in 1891, with Warner as chairman. Shares were offered to the public, but the Midland Railway Co. and the London Tilbury and Southend Railway had large shareholdings. These two companies connected with the new line at either end. So it was possible to get a train from Wanstead Park, the new station in Forest Gate, directly to East Ham station and connect to Fenchurch Street (Shakespeare Crescent in East Ham was later built over this spur line). Or connections to Kings Cross and St Pancras were possible via South Tottenham.

The Tottenham and Forest Gate Railway bridge over Woodgrange Road 1900s

North-east London had by the 1890s already undergone rapid development, and the railway cut a swathe through existing streets of housing.   The solution was to build the line on a long brick viaduct (hence a popular nick-name - the Chimney Pot line). Many houses were demolished to make way and there was considerable local opposition to the railway, as this article from the Stratford Express shows.

The line officially opened on 1 July 1894 with a passenger service starting a week later on 9 July. While mainly a commuter service, it was also possible to get excursion trains to Southend (hence the very long platform at Wanstead Park). These excursions ran until relatively recent times, and older Forest Gate residents remember the excitement of getting crowded trains from Wanstead Park for a day at the seaside.

The new railway was popular from the start, with a local newspaper reporting that Wanstead Park station was besieged by passengers all day long in the first week of service. The station was named Wanstead Park despite being nowhere near the actual park possibly because it sounded grander than (say) Forest Gate North. Oddly titled stations seem to have been a feature of the line – Walthamstow Queen’s Road is actually in Edinburgh Road, several streets away from Queen’s Road itself. Similarly, Woodgrange Park station is not near any park called Woodgrange.

Advert for the new line July 1894

The early success of the Tottenham and Forest Gate was not sustained. The line does not go directly to any central London terminus (though strangely in the 1940s it ran an all-night service as well as through trains to St Pancras on Sundays and in the middle of the night!) Also, unlike the Shenfield route through Forest Gate station, the line was not electrified in the 1940s. 

For many years it remained a Cinderella service, kept going partly because it was a useful route for the substantial amount of freight coming from the industries and docks of south Essex. In 1963 the line was earmarked for closure under the Beeching plans, but as most of Beeching's proposals for London were not implemented, it remained open. 

Station looking the worse for wear, 1967

Nevertheless it was allowed to fall into a poor state of repair and reliability; by 1980 there was only one train an hour, running between the old terminus of Kentish Town and Barking. The station canopies were gradually demolished, ticket offices were phased out and stations were left unstaffed. In 1981 Gospel Oak became the terminus, but the line continued to be neglected, even after being franchised to Silverlink (a train operating company owned by National Express) in 1997.

Wanstead Park station before the station canopy and platform gas lights were removed in the 1980s

Finally a corner was turned in 2007 when London Overground took over the line.

Since then there has been a marked improvement in services; electrification in 2018 and the introduction of new, longer trains in 2019 has greatly increased the popularity of the line. Proof that if a railway offers what passengers (sorry, customers) want, they will use it.