Another visit to the former Wembley Town Hall (now the Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill), and its wartime history.

Guest post by local istorian Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

The new Wembley Town Hall (Photograph from “The Architect’s Journal”, 26 January 1940)

 

Last September, I wrote about a visit to the former Brent Town Hall during Open House weekend, as part of the 10^th anniversary of the Lycée International’s opening in Wembley. In December, they kindly invited me back for a tour of parts of the building which weren’t included during the public open day, particularly the basement. You may think this would not be of much interest, but please read on, as I uncover some of Wembley Town Hall’s wartime secrets!

 

The start of work on the new Town Hall, for the combined Urban Districts of Wembley and Kingsbury, was reported in the “Wembley News” on 23 July 1937: ‘The first sod of the site in Forty Lane, where Wembley’s new Town Hall is to be built, was cut on Tuesday morning by Councillor H. Gauntlett, Chairman of the Town Hall Committee.’ This photograph shows a surveyor setting out the site for where the basement of the building would be, a few weeks later:

 

A surveyor at work on the Town Hall site, 31 August 1937.

 

Although the outbreak of the Second World War was still two years away, the potential threat from German rearmament, and Hitler’s territorial ambitions, was already realised. The original plans for the Town Hall, prepared by the architect Clifford Strange, were amended to include a reinforced concrete roof for the basement areas, which could be used as shelters in the event of air raids.

The basement had a “secret tunnel”, linking it to the gardens alongside Forty Lane. It is shown on the original plans as a ‘fresh air intake duct’, and that may well have been its purpose, allowing air into the underground area which included the Town Hall’s boiler room. But it was also big enough to allow people to walk along, in single file, if the building had been bombed and staff sheltering there could not escape through the normal exit. I was able to walk along it a short way, before it dipped down and was flooded!

 

                The doorway to the “secret tunnel”, and inside the tunnel itself.

 

War was declared on 3 September 1939, after Germany’s invasion of Poland, and by the end of the year staff had moved into the new Town Hall, and an Air Raid Precautions control room had been set up in the basement. A telephone exchange, linked to Wembley’s eighty A.R.P. warden posts and other wartime emergency services, was manned 24-hours a day throughout the war, with a staff room beside it where the Council volunteers operating it could rest when not on the switchboard. These were still marked on a post-war basement plan.

 

Extract from a Town Hall basement plan, with exchange arrowed.

 

But did the basement exchange have a wider wartime use than just for local A.R.P. services? In her commentary on the building in a book about the Lycée in 2015, Mireille Rebaté, the Head of School, wrote that it ‘played a major role as a secret communication hub during the Second World War.’ I’m not sure what her source of information was for that statement, but I do know from research on the Borough of Wembley’s Distinguished Visitors Book that a range of senior military figures came to the Town Hall during the war, and that their visits were not reported publicly in the local newspaper! Here is a small selection of their signatures in the book:

 

Some of the military “top brass” who visited Wembley Town Hall in WW2.

 

One of the reasons I looked through the Distinguished Visitors Book was to see whether Winston Churchill had ever visited the Town Hall, as the Lycée was named after him. His signature was not in the book, but in May 1943 an “All Star Ball” was held in the Grand Hall to raise money for a wartime charity fronted by his wife. Mrs Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund benefitted when around three hundred residents paid to join stars of film and stage at the ball. The stars signed lots of autographs, in return for a one shilling donation towards the fund for each, and hosted an auction of celebrity items. However, as the “Wembley News” reported, ‘The cigar box, autographed and presented by Mr Winston Churchill, was withdrawn, owing to its reserve price not being reached.’

 

Newspaper advert for the “All Star Ball”, and Clementine Churchill addressing the crowd at a Wembley Stadium wartime charity football match for her “Aid to Russia” Fund.

 

The Town Hall basement would not have been large enough to shelter all the Council’s staff, so a large space with a reinforced roof was created under the Grand Hall. According to Muriel Lander, who was a 17-year-old typist in the Borough’s legal department when they moved to Forty Lane from offices in St John’s Road at the end of 1939, it was ‘a vast, steel-doored bomb shelter.’ She told a “Wembley Observer” reporter in 1996 that they had to go down to the shelter when a whistle was blown to warn of a possible air raid. ‘A lot of the older Council staff were scared, but I took it in a light-hearted way because I was so young.’

 

Muriel Lander (right) and her typist colleagues at the Town Hall during WW2.
(Brent Archives – “Wembley Observer” newspaper microfilms)

 

Muriel also recalled that she and her colleagues had to take a turn at fire watching, because of the risk from German incendiary bombs. If you were on that duty, you slept fully-clothed on a Z-bed in your office, and when the sirens sounded an air raid warning, you ran up to the Town Hall roof and stood by with a hose, in case a fire bomb landed on the building.

 

The large shelter at the Town Hall was also available for local residents or passers-by to use, accessed by the service road from Kings Drive. The service road, at the back of the main office building, was used for deliveries, including coal or coke to fire the boilers, which would have been tipped through large manholes down into the basement fuel store beside the boiler room. The service road ended at a building, which was literally “the end of the road” for some Wembley residents, the Borough’s mortuary!

 

Plan of the Wembley Town Hall mortuary building.

 

The National Health Service was not set up until 1948, so that when the Town Hall was built it was Wembley Council’s Medical Officer of Health who had responsibility for carrying out post mortems, when deaths in the borough required them. My visit did not include the mortuary, as it is no longer there!

 

Something else no longer there is the entrance (or exit?) of the “secret tunnel”, at the Forty Lane end. It has been blocked off, and no one now knows where exactly it came out. You can’t go very far along the tunnel from the basement, because its lower section is flooded, but it still had to be checked (by a French Security Service frogman!) before the then French President, François Hollande, came to officially open the Lycée in September 2015.

 

François Hollande at the official opening of the Lycée in 2015.
(Courtesy of the Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill)

 

The photograph above is from the book about the building, “Un Espace d’Histoire & de Futur” (a blend of heritage and future). I found my visit to the former Town Hall’s basement, and its links to local World War Two history, very interesting, and I hope you have enjoyed reading about it too.

 

Philip Grant.

“The Beggars Roost” plaque comes home to Kingsbury

Guest post by Philip Grant, local historian

Thirteen months ago I posed the question ‘Where was “The Beggars Roost”?’ in a local history guest blog LINK. I was writing about a photograph I had been sent by a lady in Nashville, Tennessee, of a hand-painted coat of arms she had bought in a charity shop there. It appeared to have been created for Wembley’s A.R.P. (Air Raid Precaution) Warden Post 12 during the Second World War.

I still don’t know exactly where Post 12 was located, or why it was named “The Beggars Roost”, but further research has suggested that it was probably somewhere in the Roe Green area of Kingsbury (though not in Roe Green Village itself, whose wardens had Post 11). However, last summer an amazing piece of generosity happened – Cheryl, who had bought the plaque for her own home, decided that its proper place was back in Wembley, so that people here could see and enjoy the coat of arms in its historical context. 

Cheryl donated the plaque to Brent Museum, and it now forms the centrepiece of a small exhibition which has just opened at Kingsbury Library:

A.R.P. – Wembley’s Air Raid Wardens in the Second World War.

For the past few months I have been working with Alison, a Brent Museum volunteer, and Museum staff, to put this exhibition together. It includes objects and pictures from the Brent collections, and some loaned by fellow Wembley History Society members, and tells the story of Wembley’s A.R.P. Service (wardens, first aid and rescue teams) from 1938 to 1945.

It is a story of thousands of local men and women who gave their time, and in some cases their lives, to help protect their neighbours from German bombing raids. 

This was a very difficult period in our history, and one that those of us born after 1945, including young people to whom it is just something that happened long ago, could benefit from understanding better. Residents whose families have come to our area in recent decades, sometimes from countries which themselves have suffered war, could also see that people here have had that experience too. One of the air raids that the A.R.P. Service had to deal with, and which is pictured in the exhibition, happened within sight of Kingsbury Library.

The exhibition will be on display every day, during library opening hours, until around the end of May 2018. I will be giving a “coffee morning” talk, linked with the exhibition, at Kingsbury Library (522-524 Kingsbury Road, London NW9) on Tuesday 24 April, 11am to 12noon.

I hope that you will take the opportunity to visit Kingsbury Library, to enjoy one or both events. This is the official Brent poster for them:

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For anyone who would like to know more about this subject, but won't be able to attend Philip's talk on 24 April, there is an online local history article available on the Brent Archives website LINK

Where was “The Beggars Roost”? – a Wembley mystery

Many thanks to Philip Grant for this fascinating guest blog. My late older brother, David, had a lifelong passion for motorbikes that probably started with the 'Wembley Lions.

 

You were probably living in Wembley during the Second World War, more than seventy years ago, or have talked to someone who was, if you can answer this question. But even if neither applies to you, you may still be interested to know why I am asking.

I deal with email local history enquiries on behalf of Wembley History Society, and they sometimes set some fascinating puzzles. One arrived recently from a lady in the United States. She was looking around a Goodwill store (charity shop), and saw a very attractive coat of arms, hand-painted on a wooden plaque. She bought it, took it home, and then began to wonder what it was, and the story behind it.

The name “Wembley” was almost certainly a place, and she found out that the letters “ARP” stood for Air Raid Precautions, in Britain during the Second World War. By searching online, she discovered that there was someone she could contact who might know more about the history of Wembley at that time, so she sent me a photo of her plaque.

A.R.P. Post 12 Plaque, from Cheryl Hutton

 I have no doubt that this home-made coat of arms came from “our” Wembley, as the lion in the top right quarter is copied from the badge of the “Wembley Lions” motorcycle speedway team. They were based at Wembley Stadium, and were hugely popular during the 1930’s, when they were national champions several times. 
 

The blue and yellow quarter below it shows an air raid warden’s helmet, gas mask and rattle, so there can be little doubt that the plaque was first made for, and probably displayed at, ARP Post 12, in Sector 8 / 9 of the Borough of Wembley. But where was this, and why did the wardens call their base ‘the Beggars Roost”? Is the chicken (or “rooster”) a clue, and who is the beggar above it on the plaque? I don’t know, and would certainly welcome any information that readers, or anyone they can forward this article to who might be able to help, could provide.

Eighty years ago the Borough of Wembley was a separate local government area, with a population of just over 100,000 people. Even before the war, the local Council was making A.R.P plans, and starting to build public air raid shelters, in response to the threat from Germany. After war broke out, a full-scale air raid wardens service was mobilised, which at its height had 2,500 wardens, 95% of them unpaid volunteers. 

I know, from an elderly neighbour (the son of a warden), that the A.R.P. post for our 1930's-built estate was in the requisitioned garage of a local bungalow. His father was one of the first on the scene when a German "parachute mine" hit a row of shops in Kingsbury Road one night in September 1940, killing two mothers, a baby boy and a seven year old girl, in the flats above. This is an official "war damage" photo of the scene, taken the following day, which shows the sort of event that the wardens had to deal with (thankfully, not too often!).

Bombed shops and flats in Kingsbury Road, 1940

As well as the A.R.P. wardens, first aid and rescue teams were also organised. After the bombing raids started in earnest, in August 1940, nearly all civilians had to undertake "fire watching" duties (around 7,500 of the c. 9,000 bombs which fell in the Wembley area between 1940 and 1945 were incendiaries), so around 25,000 Wembley people in total were engaged in some form of Civil Defence work during the war. The Borough lost 149 civilians killed in air raids, including several A.R.P. wardens, with over 400 more seriously injured.

The “Beggars Roost” plaque, which somehow found its way to the U.S.A. after the war, is a reminder that the bombing of civilians, horrible as it is, is not just something that happens in far-away places like Syria or Yemen. It happened in Wembley as well, and the volunteer men and women of A.R.P. Post 12, and others like it, did their best to protect their neighbours from such atrocities. I hope that, perhaps with your help, I can find out more about them.

Philip Grant.