From loo to The Louvre as Sudbury brightened up in homage to Covid19 workers & volunteers

From Paul Lorber

Following on from Philip Grant’s excellent Wembley history series - especially the last one about Sudbury, perhaps I can provide an update on Butler’s Green.

A very large part of Sudbury was originally massive green open space called the Sudbury Common with a large number of farms being established over the years.

John Copland who was a Purser (Sort of accountant/purchase manager) on British Navy ships and served during Horatio Nelson’s time at the Battle of the Nile acquired a property called Crabbs House on what is now Barham Park. Over the next 40 years he continued to acquire land in the area and at his death in 1843 (he is buried in a vault in Kensal Green cemetery) he owned around 350 acres  of  land stretching from the Triangle in Wembley all the way to the bottom of Harrow on the Hill - this must have also included what is now Butler's Green.

At some point in the 1870s that part was acquired by William Perkin when he moved into Sudbury near to the present Methodist Church.

Sir William Perkin (he was Knighted in Early 1900s) is probably Sudbury’s most famous person in the world.

As a young boy he was very keen to pursue scientific education. While experimenting with tar (residue of coal) trying to create a substitute for anodyne he accidentally created a purple liquid substance. When trying it on some cloths he realised that he actually created a first synthetic dye for colouring cloth. Following a few more experiments, tests and refinements his dye product turned out to be much more reliable and longer lasting than natural dyes used at the time.

He set up a factory in Greenford and started manufacturing dyes as a business. It was a big success and young William is claimed to be the founder of the modern clothing industry which his colour dyes revolutionised.

In the 1870s when he moved to Sudbury the population was tiny and most of the land was still open fields. Like in other nearby places the population explosion came as part of the arrival of the Railways with the Sudbury & Harrow Road station opened in 1903 and Sudbury Town a year later.

Sir William Perkin died in 1907 and the land that is now Butler's Green was purchased by Wembley District Council in 1920 from the Trustees of his Estate. As Philip mentioned in his article it was renamed Butlers Green after Edwin Butler who became the first Mayor of the newly formed Wembley Borough Council in 1937.

He only became the 1st Mayor because Titus Barham who was due to be the “Charter Mayor” and who paid £4,000 for the mace and chains of office (over £250,000 in today’s money) died on the very day he was due to take up the his office.

I am one of the Trustees of Barham Community Library based in Barham Park. Philip Grant has kindly presented a number of his history talks in our library and we hope for more in the future. We are always keen to help local people learn of the local history of our area but also to pursue improvements with a bit of art.

Despite its important local history Butlers Green has been somewhat neglected in recent years. 

We therefore decided to bring a bit of colour to the area by creating a Thank You Mural to all the workers and volunteers who continued to support our community during the Covid 19 crisis, on hoarding erected around a disused toilet block.

The Mural was designed by Alessandra Grasso, who is Barham Community Library ‘artist in residence’ with the help of her sister Francesca and others.

The idea was supported by Sudbury Town Residents Association and Daniels Estate Agents. It has been paid by a small Love Where You Live Grant and donations from local people.

Barham Community Library and Sudbury Town Residents Association plan more murals to brighten up the Sudbury area and are identifying more sites and raising funds.

Artists Alessandra on the left and Francesca on the right.

The disused toilet block is leased by Brent to U.K. Power Networks. Hoardings had to be placed on 3 sides as the brickwork is cracking up.

They were painted white with fading paint and a bit unsightly.

We decided on a colourful makeover with people, animals and flowers. Young children passing by love the animals and the overall reaction was positive.

We also painted other bits and provided a Notice Board for local history and local information.

We asked the Council to improve the outlook of the 2nd disused toilet next door which is also unsightly.

The bear in the picture is our mascot ‘Titus Bear’ after Titus Barham. The bear was part of the Barham Coat of Arms.

Vaccines – and a little piece of Sudbury’s history

A special guest post by Philip Grant

In recent months, vaccines have been in the news – both the quest for a vaccine to protect against Covid-19, and the threat to the fight against common diseases across the world caused by the pandemic’s disruption of vaccination programmes. The news sometimes reminds me about stories from local history that may not be well known, and this is one of them. Some readers may find parts of this article upsetting, but I hope the information in it will help your understanding of issues around science and health.

Smallpox was an infectious disease of humans, which had existed since prehistoric times. Caused by a virus, it killed up to 30% of people who caught it, and left those who survived badly scarred and often blinded. It is estimated to have killed around 400,000 people across Europe every year in the 18^th century. At the time, it was usual for scientists to give discoveries names derived from the Latin language. Vaccine comes from the Latin word Vacca, a cow. 

1. A milkmaid at work, in the 1890s. (From an old book of pre-WW1 country photographs)

Edward Jenner was a doctor in Gloucestershire, who realised a rumour, that milkmaids who had caught cowpox did not get smallpox, was not just an “old wives’ tale”. He experimented in 1796, by giving pus from a cowpox blister to an 8-year old boy, then exposing him to smallpox. The boy was immune to the more serious disease. Further tests of this method also proved successful, and vaccination was born. Many were horrified by the practice and opposed it, as this satirical cartoon from 1802 (supposedly published by the Anti-Vaccine Society) illustrates.

 2. A cartoon, lampooning Edward Jenner's inoculations, and their imagined results! (From the internet)

Moving on a century, Sudbury was a small village with a number of farms. Some of these had become dairy farms during Victorian times, but one small farm, Poplars, was to have a different use. The British Institute for Preventive Medicine had been set up as a charity in 1891, and its first laboratory was in Great Russell Street. German medical researchers, the previous year, had found that antibodies to fight human diseases could be made by infecting guinea pigs. To produce these in quantity required larger animals, and by 1894 the Institute had bought Poplars Farm, quite easily reached by train from Euston, to Sudbury and Wembley Station.

3. A postcard view of the centre of Sudbury village, c.1900. (Brent Archives online image 10831)

The Institute undertook scientific research into the causes, prevention and treatment of disease (like that set up by Louis Pasteur in Paris, in 1887), and produced vaccines and antitoxins to help prevent or cure diseases. In Sudbury, they kept healthy horses in the fields, which were infected with disease bacteria. As their bodies produced the antibody serum, it was drained from them. The horses were put down when they became unwell from the infection. Tom the pony (pictured below) was used in this way to help produce Britain's first diphtheria anti-toxin.

4. Tom the pony, at Poplars Farm, and a vial of diphtheria anti-toxin, c.1895. (Images from the internet)

Diphtheria was once a common contagious disease, which particularly affected the young, and could be fatal. When Willesden’s Medical Officer reported ‘a most decided improvement in the matter of Infant Mortality’ in 1887 (only 55.2% of total deaths in the district had been infants aged 0-5, compared to 62.5% the previous year!), measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and diphtheria had been significant causes of death. Alfred Salter was a bacteriologist who worked at Poplars Farm in the 1890s, and wrote a paper for “The Lancet” on the diphtheria antitoxin.

Salter had been a brilliant young medical student at Guy’s Hospital, and had to defend the work that he did for the Institute (renamed the Jenner Institute for Preventive Medicine in 1898). It’s activities at Sudbury brought protests from the National Anti-Vivisection Society, but his response was that thousands of human lives were saved through the use of their anti-toxins, and that the horses were put out of their misery quickly once symptoms developed.

Although this is an “aside” from my main theme, Alfred Salter left the Institute after he got married in 1900. He set up a medical practice in Bermondsey, and worked with his wife to fight against poverty and poor living conditions in that area. He served as a Labour M.P. for West Bermondsey between 1922 and 1945, and his wife, Ada, became the first woman Mayor in London, actively using her role to promote green socialist policies in their borough.

5. The site of Poplars Farm, on an extract from George H. Ward’s map of Wembley, 1908. (Brent Archives)

The work of the Institute continued in Sudbury, including the production of the first anti-rabies vaccine, but change was coming to the area. The District Railway (now Piccadilly Line) opened in 1903, and the Great Central Railway began building a branch line that would run through the Poplars Farm fields. In 1903, the Institute moved to a different farm, in Elstree, where it was renamed the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, after one of its founders, Dr Joseph Lister. The land and its main house, The Poplars, was sold. 

6. The Poplars, with a "For Sale" sign outside it, c.1904. (Brent Archives online image 528)

Now, I have to correct the normally reliable local history book, “A History of Wembley” (written by Wembley History Society members, and published by Brent Libraries in 1979)! It says that the house was ‘once used by Dr Martin, a vivisectionist, and the home of the Epizootic Abortion Committee.’ Dr Charles Martin was appointed Director of the Institute in 1903, so would have been involved in selling Poplars Farm. There were probably reports in the “Harrow Observer” of anti-vivisection protests then (during lockdown, I can’t check that), but there is no evidence that Dr Martin was a vivisectionist. He may have been a member of the Government’s Board of Agriculture committee, which investigated the tick-borne cattle disease of that name!

The Poplars was bought by Edwin Butler, who had a small shop and sub-post office near “The Swan”. He converted the ground floor of the house into “Butler’s Emporium”, and lived on the first floor above it. He served as a Wembley councillor for 40 years, representing Sudbury. In 1920 he campaigned for the Council to buy the last remaining part of the old Sudbury Common for public recreation. When Wembley became a borough in 1937, he served as its first Mayor, and after his death in 1945, the open space he helped to save was named Butler’s Green.

7. Edwin Butler, proudly wearing his regalia as Charter Mayor of Wembley, 1937. (Brent Archives no. 7653)

By 1911, new shops had been built on either side of The Poplars, as part of a parade called Canterbury Place. If you compare the photo of The Poplars above with the one below, taken in 2015, you can still identify the upstairs windows and chimneys of the original farmhouse! This is one of many pairs of images from the “Sudbury – Then and Now” project, which you can still see online, to discover more about the local history of this part of Brent.

8. What was The Poplars, but by 2015 the Sudbury Supermarket, and a hairdressers, with a flat above.

Although the Institute was producing the diphtheria anti-toxin from the 1890s onwards, medicine would be mainly “private” in this country for another 50 years. When Kingsbury (popn. c.800) U.D.C.’s Medical Officer made his report for the last quarter of 1902, there had only been one infectious disease case. A child, Samuel Noad, had died of diphtheria at “Poplars”, a house that was part of a cluster of buildings at Blackbird Farm. Luckily, as ‘every precaution as regards disinfection of all articles and room was taken, … no further case has occurred.’

9. The families of Thomas Noad and his brother, in the garden of "Poplars", Blackbird Farm, c.1898.

By chance, a photograph of the Noad family in the late 1890s was shared with me a few years ago. Although I don’t know the names of everyone shown, Thomas Noad, the farmer, is the man standing in the centre, with his wife, and youngest child Gertrude, in front of him. His younger brother, who lived at “Poplars”, is on Thomas’s left. It may be his wife, sitting with their baby (quite possibly Samuel). Every sudden death from disease has its own tragic story.

When Kingsbury merged with Wembley in 1934, the newly combined Council brought in a scheme for immunising people against diphtheria, free of charge to the patient. There was still no immunisation at this time against measles, chicken-pox or whooping cough, which were all prevalent among children at local schools. Then, in 1941, Britain’s wartime government introduced free immunisation against diphtheria for everyone. 

10. A boy being immunised, and a poster for a diphtheria immunisation programme. (From the internet.)

I was a post-war baby, born after the N.H.S. was set up in 1948. The note of my medical history, that my Mum gave me when I first left home, shows that I had injections against diphtheria, whooping cough and smallpox when I was a baby, with boosters for the first two before I started school in 1954. It also shows that I caught measles and chicken-pox in 1952/53 (after my older sister started school) and mumps in 1955! There were no vaccinations against those then.

After global efforts, co-ordinated by the World Health Organisation, smallpox has been eradicated, with the last reported case in 1977. Similar efforts have reduced diphtheria to just 4,500 reported cases worldwide in 2015, although 2,100 of those were fatal, mainly in children. While we wait for a vaccine that can have the same effect against Covid-19, I hope that this look at vaccines and health, through local history, has given you some food for thought.

This is my last “local history in lockdown” story for a while, but a new series, by a friend from Willesden Local History Society, will begin next weekend. Please join her, to find out which area from the south of the borough you can discover more about!

Philip Grant.

Thank you Philip.  Your lockdown local histories have been very popular and I am sure have led many people to take more of an interest in the area in which they live.  I look forward to publishing many more of your well-researched and informative articles in the future.

Martin Francis

VE Day – why they were celebrating then, and what it tells us now

Philip Grant, of Wembley History Society, reflects on difficult times, past and present.

‘Wembley Goes Gay!’ If you saw that headline now, you would think it was about a Pride march. But that was the headline in a local newspaper exactly 75 years ago, marking the borough’s celebrations for VE Day, the end of the Second World War in Europe.

1. "The Wembley News" title, from a 1944 edition. (From a copy collected by the late Richard Graham)

I had hoped to show the actual headline, which I saw on a microfilm some years ago, but I have been “staying at home” for nearly two months. With our libraries also now closed, and my friends at Brent Archives working from home, they have not been able to access the local newspaper microfilms to retrieve it for me. 

I first thought of writing an article to mark this 75^th anniversary before the Covid-19 emergency. I can’t help seeing some similarities, as well as differences, between the situation now, and what it was like, in the Wembley area in particular, during the Second World War. Will we have a party to celebrate when the coronavirus outbreak is over, as it certainly will be, one day?

2. A street party in Church Lane, Kingsbury, 1945. (From “Brent’s War”, published by Brent Libraries, 1995)

There was good reason to celebrate then. Britain had been at war for nearly six years when the remnants of Hitler’s German regime surrendered in May 1945, but the shadow of the conflict had hung over the country for even longer. In December 1937, the government asked local councils to start making air raid precautions (“ARP”). Early the following year, because of fears that Germany would use poison gas as a weapon against civilians, and not just on battlefields as in the “Great War”, millions of gas masks started to be issued.

Wembley’s choice for its ARP Officer in February 1938 may have surprised some. Jack Eddas, had been appointed as an Entertainments Manager in 1937, a temporary post to organise celebrations for King George VI’s coronation, and the Urban District being elevated to Borough status. The Council had seen how good his organisational skills were, and chose the right man. 

Within a few weeks, he had started recruiting Air Raid Wardens, and setting up a training programme. His planning would see 2,500 wardens in place by the time war was declared. Some were employed full-time, at £3 a week, but 95% of the men and women were volunteers. They were organised into teams, based on eighty warden posts across the borough, fifty of these in specially built blast-proof shelters.

3. Wembley's Warden Post No. 32, c.1939. (Image, possibly IWM Collection, from a 1964 magazine article)

When the photo above was taken, the wardens had yet to be given uniforms, just a helmet and an ARP lapel badge. They had named Post 32 “Bell & Rattle”, after the equipment they were given to signal the all clear to, and threat of, gas attacks. Fortunately, no poison gas bombs were dropped, but air raids on Wembley began, with incendiary bombs, on 27 August 1940.

4. 443-449 Kingsbury Road, after the 25 September 1940 bombing. (Brent Archives online image 8536)

The borough’s first fatalities were suffered a month later. This time the Luftwaffe dropped parachute mines, a 500kg weapon that drifted through the air to kill indiscriminately (like the tiny droplets that carry the coronavirus). On the night of 25 September, Daisy Cowley and her baby son Robert, and Maud Hawkins and her 7-year old daughter Barbara, died in their flats above shops in Kingsbury Road. Minutes later, married couples John and Iris Pool and their neighbours, Bill and Caroline Western, were killed in their homes at District Road, Sudbury.

The King and Queen paid a surprise visit to the rescue services and survivors of the Sudbury blast. King George VI praised the wonderful spirit of the local people. Wembley had to survive many more months of “the Blitz”, until May 1941, although it got off quite lightly compared to some places. Keeping up morale was important, and messages of encouragement from the Mayor were part of the way that was done, then as now.

5. A message from the Mayor of Wembley to ARP workers. (Wembley A.R.P. Magazine, December 1940)

The Civil Defence workers whose efforts the Mayor was commending were more than just ARP Wardens. Other branches of the service included trained Rescue Teams, First Aid and Casualty Ambulance Units. These were based at a variety of locations around the borough, and would be called out from a control centre in the basement of the Town Hall, in Forty Lane. It was manned 24 hours a day by volunteers from the Council’s staff, who responded to emergency reports ‘phoned in by the wardens.

6. "Coat of arms" of one Wembley First Aid Post, and Mobile Unit from another. (Photo from Brent Archives)

The home-made “coat of arms” above was designed by a nurse’s husband, for her First Aid Post at Preston Manor School. The photograph shows the team at First Aid Post No. 5, based at a sports ground in East Lane. The nurse all in white was a Sister from Wembley Hospital, who led the team when she was not on duty there. In the days before the NHS, Wembley had a “voluntary hospital” in Chaplin Road, which opened in 1928. It was funded by charitable donations, a week-long summer Carnival and Fete, and a scheme where over 20,000 local residents paid sixpence a month, for free treatment in the “public wards” if they needed it.

A wartime Auxiliary Fire Service (“AFS”) was organised by Wembley’s professional Fire Brigade, set up in 1935 after forty years of a volunteer brigade. As well as their new fire stations at Harrow Road and Kingsbury Circle (now an ambulance station), it had units based at four garages across the borough. Their busiest night in Wembley was on “Black Friday”, 15/16 November 1940. Around 3,000 incendiary bombs were dropped, resulting in 62 separate call-outs. Many homes and business premises were damaged or burnt out.

7. Newspaper report of three A.F.S. deaths, “Wembley News” 17 January 1941. (Brent Archives microfilms)

As the article above shows, three of Wembley’s AFS volunteers died when a bomb fell beside their vehicle, close to St Paul’s Cathedral, as they were helping to fight fires in the City of London in January 1941. The widespread incendiary bomb attacks meant that, from February, compulsory Fire Guard duties were imposed on all eligible adults. Around 25,000 people, almost a quarter of Wembley’s total population then, had to spend 12 hours a week on fire-watching duties, organised on a rota system by ARP wardens for residential areas.

That was just one of the restrictions on everyday life that people had to put up with during the war. There was also rationing of food and other items. Petrol could only be obtained for essential business use. Travel to some places was restricted. The police were watchful, and shopkeepers, or anyone else who broke the rules, could be fined, or even sent to prison. As we see now, sometimes curbs on basic freedoms during an emergency are necessary.

Between May 1941 and February 1943, there was a lull in the bombing, but the ARP services had to stay vigilant. In February 1944, a pair of semi-detached Council houses at Birchen Close took a direct hit from a high-explosive bomb on a Saturday evening. Eight members of the Whitfield family and seven members of the Metcalfe family were killed. Even though they had lived just across the road from the graveyard at Old St Andrew’s Church, Kingsbury, they were buried at Alperton Cemetery, as was the case for all Wembley’s bombing victims. 

We have seen recently, in the news, the grim scenes of mass graves in New York City. Wembley also had contingency plans, and a site set aside, in case mass burials were needed. Thankfully they were not, so allotment-holders at Birchen Grove needn’t worry when digging!

8. Wembley Borough Council's WW2 Roll of Honour memorial. (Currently in storage at Brent Museum)

ARP Warden Henry Randall was injured by the blast from the Birchen Close bomb in February 1944, and died in hospital two days later. His name is on Wembley Council’s memorial to its staff who died ‘in the service of their country’ during the war, as is that of Horace Townley. He was killed when a bomb hit his ARP Post in Alperton, two weeks later. Albert Brooker, Stanley Conniff and William Knight, the three AFS men who died in 1941, are also honoured. They too had worked for the Council, as well as volunteering to be firefighters in their own time.

9. Photos of V1 Flying Bomb damage, from a recently rediscovered album. (With thanks to Jo Locke)

The final onslaught Wembley’s Civil Defence services had to deal with was V1 Flying Bombs. Fourteen of these “doodlebugs” fell on the borough between June and September 1944, and the first on 19 June was particularly hard to bear. Among the victims at Station Approach, Sudbury, were Cecil and Alice Hyatt, both ARP Wardens. Their son was in the Casualty Ambulance Unit based at Barham Park, and had married a young lady from that team earlier in the war. His wife, Joan, and their 2-year old son Rodney, also died at his parents’ home.

The second photo above shows Wembley Hill School, which was destroyed by a V1 in July. Luckily no pupils or teachers were in the building, but William Harris, on Fire Guard duty, was killed. For the rest of the war its pupils had to be spread around other local schools, meaning class sizes of 50 or more. Copland School was built on the site in the early 1950s.

At the end of 1944, some of the wartime censorship restrictions were lifted, and the full extent of the bombing and casualties was made public. Around 9,000 bombs had been dropped on Wembley, and more than half the homes in the borough had suffered some damage, with 528 being completely destroyed. 149 people had been killed in the air raids, over 400 seriously injured, and a similar number less badly hurt. Sadly, when the final figure for Covid-19 deaths in the area is known, it may be more than the wartime fatalities.

10. VE Day games at Audrey Gardens, Sudbury Court Estate - the potato in the bucket race.

11. VE Day games at Audrey Gardens - catching the train race. (Both photos courtesy of Judith Meredith)

With what local people had endured, it is little wonder that Wembley celebrated VE Day. As well as parties, neighbours came together to organise other simple entertainments, like the games for children shown in the photos above. They could finally relax, have fun, and look forward to a brighter future. The little girl in the race above thought the war ending would mean sweets were no longer rationed, but as now, it would take time for normal life to return.

 

One thing that the Second World War and the current emergency have in common is the number of people ‘doing just that bit extra for their neighbours’, as Wembley’s Mayor put it in his 1940 message. That community effort, as well as the vital efforts of those in the NHS, care services and other key workers, are something to be thankful for, and to build on in future.

12. The Defence Medal, for Second World War service. (Brent Museum, object no. 1977.166f)

How will we remember those efforts? Some people have suggested a medal, and there was one for civilians who had served on the “home front” for at least three years between 1938 and 1945. You can find out more about The Defence Medal, and about Wembley’s ARP services, on the Brent Museum website.

 

Another medal was the MBE, awarded to Jack Eddas in the 1941 New Year Honours. His work in preparing Wembley Council’s ARP services not only helped to save lives in the borough. It showed how an effective organisation should be run, and helped guide and provide training advice to other Councils across Middlesex.

Will there be “Roll of Honour” boards to remember those who have died from Covid-19, while working to look after others during the outbreak? That is something to think about, as we remember VE Day, 75 years ago, and why it was celebrated. Please feel free to share your own views.

Philip Grant.

£80 spot fines for littering in Brent start on Monday

The 12 month experiment in the use of private contractor wardens to issue fixed penalty fines for littering in Brent will start on Monday.  The scheme came under scrutiny when first suggested earlier this year  LINK    LINK

This is the Council's official press release:

 Litter bugs beware, because as of Monday (13 June 2016), uniformed patrol officers will be on hand to issue £80 on-the-spot fines for waste offences in Brent.

Private security firm, Kingdom, have been chosen to run an innovative 12 month pilot to help keep Brent's streets clean and litter-free.

Dedicated patrol officers will be deployed to hot spot areas in the borough with the purpose of issuing Fixed Penalty Notices to anyone caught in the act of committing a waste offence, including littering, paan spitting and not cleaning up after their dogs.

This scheme will support the efforts of our existing Waste Enforcement Team, who work tirelessly to investigate littering and illegally dumped rubbish offences and prosecute offenders.

We have been working closely with Veolia, our waste and recycling contractor, and both residents and Councillors, to identify particular areas for enforcement activity, known for littering and dog fouling.

Cllr Eleanor Southwood, Brent Council's Cabinet Member for the Environment, said:

"The vast majority of residents here in Brent love where they live and take great care of our streets and parks. More and more residents are working with us to keep the borough clean by reporting illegally dumped rubbish via the Cleaner Brent app and organising their own clean up days. So it's really frustrating that there are still a minority of people whose actions are spoiling Brent for the rest of us.

"We're determined to take action against this anti-social behaviour. I hope that the possibility of getting a fine will make people think twice before dropping litter or allowing dogs to foul our pavements.

"We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone in Brent to get rid of their waste legally, to recycle more and take greater care and pride in the local area. This pilot scheme is part of our Love Where you Live campaign and sends a clear message that choosing to drop chewing gum or flicking a cigarette butt instead of disposing of it properly will have very real consequences."

Renu Kaul, Vice-Chairman of Sudbury Town Residents Association (STRA), an organisation committed to keeping Brent's streets clean and green, is full of praise for the initiative and said:

"I am over the moon to learn that Brent Council has appointed patrol officers to enforce action amongst litter offenders. I believe that this will make a dramatic difference in Sudbury and the rest of Brent.

"We need to continue to advocate a zero tolerance policy to littering, dog fouling and paan spitting and I really feel that the presence of enforcement officers will send out a positive message to the community that we need to take responsibility for disposing of litter and recycling properly."