Strictly speaking, I never lived in Penge. I was born in 1956 in Aylesford Avenue, Beckenham. In 1959 my family moved to Cator Road, in the shadow of the Holy Trinity church on the corner of Lennard Road, about a quarter of a mile from Penge East station. Penge became the focus of my life, but the postal address of Cator Road was SE26, and our telephone number began SYD, for Sydenham. And Cator Road was in the municipal borough of Beckenham (in the County of Kent, condemning me to a lifetime of supporting that county’s benighted cricket team), and not in the fiercely independent Urban District of Penge. All became moot in 1965, when the Greater London Council was formed, and Penge and Beckenham were swallowed up by the London Borough of Bromley, but perhaps such vagueness about our roots makes it easier for those of us born in suburbia to move away.
Anyway, it was the square mile of Penge (including Anerley), London’s smallest urban district, that I regarded as my home turf. My parents had been brought up within its boundaries and had met as members of a church in Anerley, where one set of my grandparents still lived. My mother worked in Penge and shopped on and around Penge High Street and, up to the age of thirteen – in other words, the 1960s - I went to school in Penge. So it is Penge that I will write about in this article, which is based on my memories of my childhood during that decade.
Unusually for me, this article contains no illustrations. I have no photographs of my own of Penge. There is a splendid online archive of historic photos of Penge andAnerley, but it is covered in stern messages stating that no one can reproduce them elsewhere, so I won’t. However, there is also online a fascinating 30-minute film profile of Penge, professionally made in 1964 by the Rotary Club. It has a patrician tone – at one point the chairman of the Rotary Club insouciantly drives his Rolls-Royce through an amber traffic light at the Pawleyne Arms junction, and while local residents are filmed speaking we can’t hear what they are saying, only the voiceover from the narrator. At the same time, there is genuine pride at the local council’s recent housing improvements, including the trim low-rise council flats that replaced Victorian slums, and there are some positive shots of black people, presaging Penge’s later multi-culturalism. It is also splendidly evocative, showing familiar and much frequented shops on the high street, a busy Maple Road market day, local parks where I played as a child, sensible pre-flower-power clothes and hairstyles, and splendid action shots of vintage cars, buses and trains.
Home
Our house in Cator Road was relatively new in 1959, having been built some ten years previously on land that had belonged to Holy Trinity church. It was supposed to have once been an orchard, as there were mature apple trees in the garden, but old maps cannot confirm this. It was a big, mock-tudor, middle-class semi, with a bathroom and separate inside toilet (as a child I had no idea that many London houses in the sixties had neither), a proper pantry and a large garden. It did not however have central heating until later in the decade and we relied on coal, delivered by coalmen who carried sacks on their backs through to the coal bunkers in our back garden. Once a year the chimney-sweep came and I waited in the garden for his brush to pop out of the tops of the chimneys. In those pre-supermarket days, my mother ordered groceries from a shop on Parish Lane, and they were delivered on a Saturday morning in a box, that a boy brought through a side alley to the kitchen door. At first, our house had no number, just a name (‘Little Garth’), but later all the houses in the road were renumbered. Across the road from us were other newish houses, including one built on a bomb site, where the only child of the family, a girl about my age, was picked up and taken to school each day by a chauffeur with a peaked cap. The road’s older houses were further north, towards Sydenham.
My bedroom was at the back of the house, facing west, with the massive Crystal Palace television transmitter mast central to the view. On summer Bank Holiday afternoons the drone of motor races from Crystal Palace Park came in through the open windows. My room overlooked Holy Trinity’s vicarage and its huge expanse of lawn, which was never used for anything. A sound of summer (along with the church’s single bell announcing services) was the old vicar mowing that lawn with an ancient petrol mower that cut out every few minutes, leading to long pauses as the vicar stamped on the starting lever to try to get it going again. When he retired, the new vicar bought a new lawnmower, but still never used the lawn for either church or family purposes.
As its name suggests, Cator Road was part of the sprawling Cator estate, established in the late eighteenth century by the wealthy timber merchant John Cator, whose country seat was Beckenham Place. The first dwellings to be built on Cator Road were grand detached houses with extensive gardens and rooms for servants, constructed in the late 1880s on the western side of the road. The first occupants included businessmen, solicitors, architects, senior civil servants and those mysterious folk who ‘lived on their own means’. At the time, there was still farmland between Penge and Sydenham, and the occupants of the houses would have looked out over the fields of Kent House farm, in the distance on Kent House Road. But by the end of the nineteenth century Kent House farm had become a nursing home, and its lands became housing estates and playing fields. In the 1960s, a schoolfriend of mine lived in one of the big houses, which his family afforded partly through his father’s job at the BBC, and partly by letting out rooms to lodgers. When I visited, I wondered at the extensive cellars, the old-style kitchen that retained the bell pushes that once summoned servants, and the huge garden with a gate that opened onto Alexandra Recreation Ground.
Our house had three bedrooms, sufficient for my parents, my sister and me. My father drove off each day in his Hillman Minx to his work as a research chemist in industry (in those days British firms still made things). Before I was born, my mother had taught at a primary school in Penge, and once my sister and I had started school did supply teaching before running a ‘pre-school playgroup’. I played with my toys in my large bedroom (Action Men, Tri-ang OO-gauge train-set, Airfix models, Corgi and Dinky cars and buses, Thunderbirds figures), read endless Enid Blyton adventure books, and played in the garden on swings and ropes that my Father set up on a large evergreen tree. On Saturdays, we usually went to one of the large selection of local parks – Alexandra Park, Beckenham Place Park, Kelsey Park, Sydenham Wells Park and, of course, Crystal Palace Park, among others. Each had its own features, whether distinctive swings and play apparatus, paddling pools, roadways to ride bikes around, ducks to feed, Victorian dinosaurs or simply grassy banks to run up and down. However, my favourite Saturday treat was to go to Waterloo Station while the express trains to Southampton and Bournemouth were still hauled by steam engines. We would watch some trains arrive and leave (the rest of the family bored to death), and then go to the station’s News Theatre to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons and the Pathe News.
And once a year we would have a traditional British seaside summer holiday on the Kent coast. We went to Folkestone, and spent a week or two building sandcastles on its small beach, swimming and playing cricket at the better beach at Greatstone, riding on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch miniature railway, watching Silver City’s Bristol 170 car transporter planes take off and land at Lydd airport, and singing along at the evening variety shows at the East Cliff Hall.
Church
The focus of my parents’ lives was the Anerley society of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church (known as the New Church), and its late Victorian building on Waldegrave Road, off Anerley High Street. I have written previously about my family’s involvement with this small, Non-Conformist denomination, which goes back to soon after the denomination’s foundation in the late eighteenth century. I noted above that my parents had met at the church in Waldegrave Road. Indeed, my Mother had been born and raised in Waldegrave Road, in an imposing house with a flat roof, from which the family watched the Crystal Palace, just a quarter of a mile away, burn down in 1936. My maternal Grandfather (Grandpop) was a clerk in a City insurance company, and took the train each day from Crystal Palace High Level station (now no more). His father, who always described himself as a cook and confectioner, never a baker, had owned a cake shop and bakery on Anerley High Street. My Grandma didn’t work, and she and Grandpop afforded the house by letting out the upper floor. Every Sunday afternoon my sister and I would go to Sunday School at the church, and then walk up Waldegrave Road for tea at our Grandparents house. We all sat round the big kitchen table, off the scullery, and ate sandwich spread, fish paste and chocolate spread sandwiches, followed by cakes. When we left for home, Grandma would give my sister and I a threepenny coin each.
My father, though born in nearby Norbury, was brought up in a big terraced house on Croydon Road, Penge. His father, who was the son of a New Church minister, had owned a small commercial art business in Holborn. By the time I was born he had retired and moved with his wife to Brightlingsea, on the Essex coast near Colchester, and next door to the local New Church building. Visiting them involved an early start and a 70-mile drive through the Blackwall tunnel and along the A12. We would get there to the smell of breakfast toast being prepared on the kitchen range, and later we would help Gan (as we called Grandmother) make scotch pancakes on the range, and would play clock golf on the lawn that Grandpa tended lovingly. Brightlingsea had a part-time fire brigade, summoned by the town’s former air-raid siren sounding the all-clear. It was not a sound I enjoyed.
My parents’ upbringing had been dominated by the New Church, as mine was to be, for my Grandparents had all been life-long members. The Anerley society, as with many Non-Conformist churches, was a one-stop-shop that catered for members’ social as well as spiritual needs (and also, of course, their romantic needs). There was a Sunday School, a youth club, a men’s group and a women’s guild, a church choir and regular Sunday School outings (Chessington Zoo was a favourite), and evening ‘socials’. Indeed, at the age of ten or so, my mother insisted that I took ballroom dancing lessons at Frank and Peggy Spencer’s ‘Penge Palais’ on Royston Road, so that I could join in the dances at the socials. I shuffled around the crowded dancefloor with a succession of unwilling girls, my chances of making it on to Come Dancing non-existent.
In the sixties, there were enough church members for two services each Sunday (morning and evening), and two Sunday School classes in the afternoon. My parents participated fully in the life of the church. My father served on the committee and taught a Sunday School class, as did my mother. Both played piano for Sunday School hymns. Mother was an enthusiastic caterer, and always took the lead with refreshments for socials and outings. The church was a central part of my life as well, until I drifted away in my twenties. By the late 1980s, membership had dropped sufficiently for the building on Waldegrave Road to become a burden, and the congregation moved to a new home in West Wickham, the original church becoming a block of flats.
School
I suppose I must have learnt some things at primary school, but I’m not sure what, or how. My only achievement was to learn my times tables quicker than the rest of my class, a feat attributed by classmates (rightly) to my schoolteacher mother making me recite them every morning at the breakfast table. Otherwise, I was an academic, social and athletic also-ran. However, when I took the eleven-plus exam (which in those carefree days for teachers before OFSTED and league tables, was not prioritised or prepared for), I did well enough to follow my father and uncle at Beckenham and Penge Grammar School for Boys.
But I am getting ahead of myself. My school career began in 1961 at Alexandra Infant School, at the bottom of Kent House Road. Although it wasn’t a particularly old building, my recollection is that the toilets were in an outside block. I received no preparation for going to school (I did not attend nursery, and there were no attempts at familiarising the five-year-old newcomers to their new environment), and I can remember crying on my first day – but not much else.
Today, the safety of pupils travelling to and from school is of overriding concern to parents, but I can remember walking home from the infants school on my own, at least as far as the junction with Lennard Road, where my mother would meet me. Traffic was, of course, much lighter in those days (lines of cars outside schools at home time were non-existent), and child abductors had not been invented. I had to cross Kings Hall Road, but at that time it was still unmade (a requirement of the Cator Estate), and so cars approached the junction slowly.
I also took myself to and from Alexandra Junior School, as it was on Cator Road, a couple of hundred yards from my house. My four years there drifted by. The Headmaster was reputedly a former wartime fighter pilot, and treated pupils misbehaving during assembly as ruthlessly as he would an irritating Messerschmidt – he brought them to the front, put them over his knee and pounded their bottoms with the palm of his hand. I enjoyed music and played in the school’s recorder group. The school had fine playing fields, but sports were not my forte. I collected bubblegum cards, that (like boys’ comics) depicted stories from World War II, and swapped them with classmates. Our playground games were competitive and sometimes bloodthirsty. A popular game was ‘Splits’, in which one boy would try to throw the point of a set of compasses into the grass, and another would attempt to reach it with one leg, while the other remained still. We also played ‘Killer’. A group of boys would stand line abreast while another boy pretended to shoot them dead. All the boys would die; the shooter nominated the boy who simulated being killed the best, and he would become the shooter for the next round.
In the Sixties, the Grammar School was still on Beckenham Road. It was designed and run like a poor boys’ public school (which, of course is what it was), and sported a quadrangle and cloisters (that were out of bounds to pupils). The Headmaster was a Classicist who led the whole school in the hymns at morning assembly. Several of the teachers wore gowns and boys were known only by their surnames – we often did not know each others’ first names. One old teacher took pride in remembering past pupils and asked me if my father had attended the school, which he had, over twenty years previously. My uncle, a few years younger than my father, accurately remembered and mimicked the mannerisms of another teacher, who was still given the same (invertebrate) nickname.
I played the flute (badly) in the school’s junior orchestra and developed a taste for Latin, which pleased the Headmaster. Then, a term into my second year, the school moved lock, stock and barrel to its new site near Eden Park, next to the girls’ Grammar School. Although it remained selective throughout my time there, it took on the egalitarian name of Langley Park School. A year or so after the move, the Headmaster left to become Head of a proper public school. The new Head had little interest in Latin, and did away with the hymns at morning assembly. He also did away with prizes for academic achievement, which I had won two years running. As the seventies went on, my school career slowly sank without trace.
Out and About
My mother had an intimate knowledge of Penge’s pubs. Not that she ever went into them; for her they were destinations on bus routes. A familiar sound of my childhood was mother asking for “One and two halves to the Pawleyne Arms” – or the Robin Hood, or the Rising Sun (on Anerley High Street, near Waldegrave Road). Then, of course it would be “One and two halves to the Crooked Billet” on the return journey. I loved buses as a child, particularly ones that were a bit different. When we went to Beckenham (“One and two halves to the Regal” – cinemas were landmarks too), I gazed wistfully at the Green Line coaches that went to exotic places like Gravesend (where my father worked), though I don’t think I ever travelled on one. I do however remember riding on a trolley bus, perhaps the one that once glided up Anerley High Street to Crystal Palace Parade. Trains were even better; mother told me that she took me at the age of three to see the last steam-hauled ‘Golden Arrow’ boat train roar through Penge, and the next day the first one hauled by an electric locomotive. Sadly, I don’t remember either experience.
But mostly we walked into Penge for routine shopping trips, visiting the same familiar shops: Kennedy’s butcher and fishmonger, Woolworths for bits and pieces, Fosdicks for books and stationery, and if I was very lucky, Irene Stockwell for toys. At the age of nine I bought my first record from Art Nash music shop (‘The Last Time’ by the Rolling Stones, unaware that a year or two before, Bill Wyman had lived in Penge and whiled away time in Art Nash’s). The first supermarkets had opened on the High Street (rather smaller that a modern Tesco Express), but mother did not shop in them.
We would cross the bomb site near the corner of Maple Road (the result of a 1944 doodlebug strike, and still waste land at the end of the Sixties), and go to the market. The main thing I remember mother buying there was slabs of a grim-looking meat and jelly concoction called Fidomeat, which she fed to our cat. Perhaps it was made at the smelly pet food factory on Parish Lane.
Our trips also took in shops away from the High Street. Mother often bought vegetables from a greengrocer on Kent House Road, and we would call into the newsagents on Parish Lane to ‘pay the papers’. A little general store on Parish Lane had a special appeal once a year, for it stocked fireworks in the run up to Guy Fawkes night. In those pre-health and safety days, the fireworks were laid out in open boxes in a back room, and my sister and I would excitedly choose our selection.
We would go out and about with our father too. On Saturday mornings we would go into the family’s bank branch on Anerley High Street, where father took out the cash he needed for the week. Then we would call in at the garage further down the road to fill the Hillman Minx with petrol. Father would say, “Four please”, and the attendant would measure out four gallons.
Penge
‘She dragged herself back to New Zealand, with threats of High Court and revenge,
While his eye it did stray, to the ample bustier, of a novelty dancer from Penge’.
- Richard Thompson
‘I'll
see you there, You'll be seeing me
Early morning in the fog, The
depth of misery
Welcome to Penge’
- John Lydon and Public Image Ltd
If outsiders think at all of Penge, they think of it as these lyrics do, as a caricature of a boring and lifeless suburb, with a silly name. And as the Rotary Club’s 1964 film showed, there was nothing special about Penge, and nothing to keep me there as an adult. But as a child in the Sixties, Penge was my world and had everything I needed, including the freedom to roam its streets on my own. I remember its roads, parks, shops, little factories and peaceful suburban way of life with fond nostalgia. And, best of all, its buses and trains.
