Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · 8 February 2024
Childhood, adolescence and early adulthood
[NB This is a partially cleaned-up transcription of a talk. It is likely to contain errors. If you find any, or there is some doubt, refer to the video of the original talk or contact the author. ]
Welcome to another Friends of Wandsworth Common Heritage Talk. Those of you who have read our book, The Wandsworth Common Story, will know there are quite a lot of cultural figures associated with the area — but in Edward Thomas, we probably have the figure most closely associated with the Common itself. It was a big part of his childhood and adolescence, and we're going to hear all about that from Philip tonight.
Many years ago I was invited to join a 50th anniversary walk around Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire — 50 miles over two days. I was much slower than the heartier walkers, and as I was plodding along I came across a very handsome sign. It said "Adlestrop" — I had no idea how to say it or what it was, but it was obviously something to do with a railway station and the railway had clearly long gone. As I was wondering about it, I heard the person behind me say to someone else: "Yes, I remember Adlestrop." And the other person replied: "Yes, I remember Adlestrop." I had no idea what they were talking about — this was twenty-odd years ago — and ever since I've thought I'd like to know more.
Adlestrop, it turns out, is a poem. By Edward Thomas.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop — The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop — only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
I thought: that's a good poem. So it sounded like a war poet — and there he is on a memorial created in 1985, on the 11th of November, Armistice Day, alongside Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves (the only one still alive), Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and others. Most of these had died in the First World War or shortly afterwards.
Edward Thomas's closest friendship was with the American poet Robert Frost. The poem Frost is chiefly famous for — "The Road Not Taken" — arose because he was out walking near Adlestrop with Thomas, and Thomas was agonising over the map: shall we go that way, or shall we go this way? And that gave rise to the poem. Frost, by this time already an established poet, persuaded Thomas that he should stop writing his criticism, essays and novels, and write poetry instead. Thomas did — but he had only a year and a half to do it in, because, spoiler alert, he died in the First World War. But that is the end of the story, not the beginning.
One further connection before we get to the heart of things. When the memorial was unveiled, Ted Hughes said that Edward Thomas was "the father of us all" — meaning his kind of poet and poetry — "but he's also the link between Thomas Hardy and me." And it turned out that Thomas Hardy had lived around here, in Tooting, from 1878 to 1881. Edward Thomas was born in 1878. For the last year or two they overlapped. This is the corner of Brodrick Road and Trinity Road. The lineage is Thomas Hardy — Edward Thomas — Ted Hughes, and all three passed through Wandsworth. Rather extraordinary.
Edward Thomas was born on the 3rd of March 1878, just outside Battersea, in Upplands Road, Lambeth. His parents had recently come to London — they only had a room in the house, but there's a (unofficial, unauthorised) blue plaque there today: "Edward Thomas, poet and essayist, born here 1878, killed in action 1917."
At the age of two, the family — Edward and his younger brother — moved to Trafalgar Villas, which is 49 Wakehurst Road. His father, Philip Henry Thomas, was a Civil Service clerk who had moved from South Wales to Swindon to London and rose very quickly within the service. If you go down Wakehurst Road from the Common, with the old hospital — now the Bolingbroke Academy — on the right-hand side, that is the road. Edward writes entertainingly about how local children thought the doctor's garage at the end belonged to his family, which would have placed them "a cut above." It wasn't theirs — as you can see — but people thought it was, and they were renting the whole house.
This was a rapidly developing area. Northcote Road had only recently been made into a road — before that, a river ran through there. If you walk along Northcote Road today and keep your ears open you can still hear the Falcon Brook rushing underneath. The oldest of these streets was Chatham Road, which had lots and lots of pubs. And already by this time there was Belleville School, a Board school, where Edward was to go.
Edward Thomas would have recognized Sherlock Holmes's famous description of this landscape, given as Holmes and Watson come in by train from Woking over Clapham Junction:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this. Look at those big isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea. The Board Schools, Lestrade. Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future. Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future."
One of those beacons was Belleville School, which Edward attended from 1883. It had opened in 1876. All London board schools had characteristic, individually customised spires or turrets so that everybody knew it was their school. They had enormous windows — the architects who designed most of these buildings believed passionately in light, both as a practical necessity and as a metaphor, and they were very much anti-Gothic in their aesthetic, closer to Holland and to Italy.
Much of what we know about his early years comes from a small book published long after his death — he died in 1917, but it wasn't published until 1938. It's called The Childhood of Edward Thomas: a little experimental autobiography he wrote while being treated for depression by a psychoanalyst, who suggested he write about his childhood to see if he could get to the roots of his unhappiness. He didn't intend to publish it. It is the weirdest and most wonderful book — I have read it over and over and every time I find something new in it. I strongly recommend it.
Here is how he writes about his street:
"Our street, like three or four others parallel to it, was in two halves, running straight up the opposite sides of a slight valley, along the bottom of which ran the principal street of mixed shops and private houses" — which is clearly Northcote Road — "our house was low down."
And about school:
"When I think of school I smell carbolic soap. I see the caretaker by the wall of one room ringing the bell. I deposit my weekly fourpence on the master's desk — it wasn't free; education wasn't free at that time. I go round as a privilege filling the scores of inkpots from a tin with a long thin spout. I join in the one-verse hymn before and after lessons. I see large light bare rooms with a map or two and boys in long parallel desks facing a master — for we were soon separated from the girls."
The separation of boys and girls occurred at the age of eight; for the first three years, with all teachers being women, they were taught together. He goes on:
"We repeated aloud: Whitney-on-the-Windrush manufactures blankets, Whitney-on-the-Windrush manufactures blankets. We learned the names of the tributaries of the Thames, forever and ever. What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coastlines with red and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herring-bone fashion. I never tired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland — the line of the Hebrides. I think I actually loved them."
It is worth noting that he would later instruct his fellow soldiers in map-reading.
Then we come to the passage about the Common proper. There is something very D.H. Lawrence about the intensity with which Thomas describes childhood encounters — and he and Helen Thomas actually knew Lawrence. He writes:
"Here I knew boys and girls in several of the streets parallel to ours or crossing it. One or more of them was with me when I found myself somehow on the forbidden side of a black fence which divided the back gardens of one street from a meadow — there were trees and cows in the meadow, and a small pond — and with one of these friends, a girl, I went home once, and in her back garden I first saw dark crimson dahlias, and smelt the bitter crushed stalks in plucking them."
And then:
"There were some boys and more girls whom I desired and sometimes struggled to sit next to, and at least two whom I avoided. One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old house at the top of one of the poorer and older streets — I think this must be Chatham Road — and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of Lizzy. The other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered like a bull.
But now things change. Their faces are invisible to me, all except one. I can say only that some were fat and the eyes narrow, and that some girls had dark hair, others fair. The one that I can see has black curly hair, dark eyes, and cherry lips, and she is smiling. Her name was Totty Armor. We picked sorrel leaves and ate them among the gorse bushes on Wandsworth Common."
Now, you might think — as I did — that Totty Armor is a poet's invention. But she is real. And a sorrel leaf, incidentally, you will never forget: it has a distinctive little cleft, like wings at the base, so that's how you recognise it.
Totty is actually Edith — Edith Olga Armor. She was born in the same year as Thomas, in Dartford, Kent. Her father was a mechanical engineer, aged 35, born in the West Indies — Trinidad — which suddenly made sense of her dark curly hair and Thomas's description of her. The family were living in Gloucester Villas on Wakehurst Road — a very near neighbour. What is remarkable is that one of the family's children was born in St Petersburg: her father had clearly been working as a mechanical engineer in a modernising Russia not long after the Crimean War.
Edith went on to win a gold medal in a national design competition — thousands of entries — for printed muslin, and was awarded the Princess of Wales's Scholarship. Her work appeared in the design publications of the day; it is very much in the Arts and Crafts tradition, not surprising given that just on the other side of Wandsworth Common John Henry Dearle, William Morris's closest associate, was doing comparable work at exactly the same time. The only colour work by Edith I have been able to find is in the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, which tells its own story. Sadly, she died in her early thirties around 1920. I would like to know more, but the trail goes cold.
Edward Thomas's almost exact contemporary Arthur Rackham — in my view the greatest fantasy illustrator Britain has ever produced — lived on the other side of Wandsworth Common, on St Ann's Hill. His house was hit by a V1 bomb. I've illustrated the next passage with Rackham images because they suit it perfectly. This is Edward on a Christmas morning:
"I woke up and felt a long, lean, smooth, straight, cold thing with straps at my bedside. No sniggering please. It had a handle, and pulling that with one hand I brought out what I discovered to be a sword, while in the other hand was a scabbard. The daylight came upon me still unsheathing and sheathing the sword, trying hard for the hundredth time to put it back the wrong way.
As soon as I could, I fastened the belt around my waist so that the sword hung on the right instead of the left side and went out alone. The streets were empty. I was proud, though without spectators. Once or twice the weapon caught between my legs. I marched up the street, crossed the road separating it from the Common — we're talking Bolingbroke Grove — turned to the left between the elm trees of Bolingbroke Grove, having the road upon my left, the Common upon my right.
At the top of one of the streets parallel to ours, but at that time divided from it by that big private meadow with the pond and elm trees, I stopped and looked down — for there lived Mabel Looms, a school fellow whom I adored. She had had a Christmas card from me that morning. The street was empty. I walked backwards and forwards along the Grove past the top of the street, waiting — sufficiently proud not to be overcome by long long disappointment. How many times since have I waited thus for somebody, with a dog's patience.
And there began to be others in the street. At last Mabel came up towards the Common in the company of some elders, without a sign. I continued walking backwards and forwards. They turned to their left at the top, away from our street. I turned in the opposite direction, homeward, pleased with my swinging sword and believing that the passers-by admired it too. At home they knew where I'd been.
My attachment to Mabel lasted for several years, and more than once after it had been broken I attempted to renew it. She was a perfect, loving friend. I thought her beautiful. Her hair was light brown, her face round rather than long."
And later, when he leaves the school: "Mabel and I had forsaken one another. If we met, we smiled without words, without stopping."
The family then moved to Shelgate Road, and later closer to Clapham Common — which has its own blue plaque. Philip makes no secret of his irritation that the plaque is up there and not down at the Wandsworth end, where he thinks all the best writing is.
Back to the Common. He writes of the railway cutting:
"A railway ran across the Common in a deep, bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley, and somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth, now overgrown with grass and gorse, heaped up at my side of the cutting — that's the Battersea side — from which they had been taken, were hills to us, who wore steep yellow paths by running up and down them."
Those mounds are still there — we call them the Hills. They have reduced in height over the years as trees have grown up around them, but they are there.
And on Robinson Crusoe and the Long Pond:
"The gravelly shore of the Long Pond on Wandsworth Common was confused in my mind with the sea sand where Robinson Crusoe saw the cannibal's footprints."
The Long Pond — which we now know as the main pond — was very different then. There was no island at that time: the southern lobe existed but it was long and thin, and it wasn't until that part was cut through that the island was created. It was called the Long Pond because it was, in fact, long and narrow.
He describes the Common at length:
"The Common offered many temptations. We could use it for irregular games, aimless ramblings. It was an uneven piece of never-cultivated gravel land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with the rainfall, had been hollowed out — perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places. Hawthorn and gorse clustered tall and dense in great and in little thickets.
It seemed small, but for us it was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps. We wandered about it with or without our hoops" — boys pushed iron hoops, girls pushed wooden ones — "for any kind of hiding and hunting games the thickets were excellent."
Then there is the dark side:
"Bigger boys would torture the frogs by cuffing, skinning or crushing them alive. The sharp penknives sank through the skin and the soft bone into the wood of the seat — which was the operating table — the seat and the earth under and about it would be strewn with fragments, pale bellies slit up, and complete frogs seeming to be munching their own insides. My horror lacked pity and turned into a kind of half-shrinking, half-gloating curiosity."
It is, as Philip notes, an extraordinary piece of anthropology — a detailed study of what children were like in the 1880s and 1890s.
"I fished for sticklebacks and gudgeon in the Long Pond on the far side of the railway, which owed its name of 'Boughs' to a pack of roughs — the Battersea boys, the poor ill-dressed boys who used to swarm to it from Battersea on Saturdays and bank holidays. I fished with a worm either tied on a cotton line or impaled on a bent pin, and put my stickleback or my rare lovely spotted gudgeon in a glass jam jar.
Once at least I did as I'd seen others do, hauling a heavy fruit basket out into the pond and dragging it in full of weed and mud and the little bloodworms that breed in mud, and sticklebacks — even a red-throated one — but never a gudgeon. The gudgeon was so attractive, partly for its looks and its comparative size. I sometimes willingly paid a penny for one and let it be believed that I'd caught it. Even when dead it was hard to part with, so smooth and pure was it. I liked even its smell. He had never dreamt of eating it.
There were carp too in this pond and in the roundish Box Pond — that's the pond above the end of his road — that lay halfway between the foot of our street and the railway. By the longer pond I once saw a carp, many times as big as a gudgeon, in the possession of a rough; he tore its head off to make it fit his jar."
For Thomas, the ponds on Wandsworth Common were almost sacred. He hated religion, hated church, hated Sundays — but nature, and in particular the ponds, held a spiritual significance for him all his life.
A footnote about those carp: they are still there. Students from a local college fish the long pond. There is apparently a barricade under the bridge between the two ponds — the fishing pond is on the far side of the railway, and this side is not supposed to have any fish in it, because carp are bottom feeders and churn up the mud, preventing plants from growing and preventing other creatures from thriving. However, a great many carp are caught and removed secretly at night — and are now, with their descendants, in a specialist carp lake in Kent. Philip had this on good authority from an angler.
One further thought about the board schools: the reason there were so many of them in this part of South London was because young couples were moving into the area, having lots of children, and those children had to go to school. The population growth was visible on the Common itself — thousands of children on a Sunday, in their Sunday best, with mortar boards and sailor suits and top hats. It was an extraordinary scene.
Edward used to go to a Unitarian Christian Church on East Hill — now knocked down to make way for an underpass — which attracted hundreds of worshippers. The minister, a man called James Ashcroft Noble, thought the young Edward had a lot going for him and suggested he might like to visit one of the congregation's households.
Noble had several children. One was Helen. Edward came to the house to talk to the father; Helen was very excited to meet him. She and her sisters and their friends always called him "the young genius," because at 16 he was already writing nature notes based on Wandsworth Common, Wimbledon Common, Richmond Park and the river, and with Noble's encouragement they were getting published.
Noble was by this time very seriously ill. He moved from the Grove — St Ann's Hill — to Nicosia Road, and finally to Patton Road, just on the other side of the Common from Edward. Edward and Helen used to walk back and forth across the Common, and they went on long, long walks together. Helen was a very robust, outdoor person; she had been to Wimbledon High School but hadn't done well, unlike her sisters, and her father thought: I'll pair her up with Edward and they can walk together. Which is what he did. And they had their first passionate kiss on Wandsworth Common — which Helen writes about absolutely wonderfully. Read her autobiography, Under Storm's Wing. It is as good as Thomas's own autobiography, and quite extraordinary.
Somehow or other Helen became pregnant — Edward was still at university. They eventually married just before their first child, Mervyn, was born, amid great arguments within the family. She moved to Atheldene Road, off Garrett Lane, at a time when 25,000 horses a year were being slaughtered just a hundred yards away. Garrett Lane was a smelly, unpleasant place. Helen writes brilliantly about the area: these were new houses, but it was built to be a slum within a few years. Almost nobody stayed — you could live in a house for a fortnight without paying any rent and then do a runner.
Shortly afterwards, James Ashcroft Noble died. He is buried in Magdalen Road Cemetery. His memorial stone reads:
"This stone is placed here by his comrades in letters, who admired him for his abilities and literary achievements, honoured him for his heroic devotion to duty under exceptional difficulties, and loved him for the warmth of his sympathies and the kindness of his heart."
The Thomas family — father and sons — moved to a house on the corner of Rusham Road and Sistova Road. Helen and Edward moved to Nightingale Parade on Nightingale Lane — upstairs somewhere; Philip is still trying to find exactly where.
This is the period when the great photographs were taken — at Dorrett and Martin's studio on Bellevue Road. A remarkable three-generation photograph shows the very upright Philip Henry Thomas senior, Mervyn — who always looks sulky, and is a boy despite how he appears — and Edward himself, looking away as always, with his mother. He adored his mother, and it clearly shows. And there are two surviving photographs of Helen at this period, from the same studio: two of the most striking portraits in any of Philip's collection.
Robert Frost encouraged Edward to turn from prose to poetry around 1912. The Adlestrop journey — which Helen was part of, though you would not guess it from the poem — was to visit Frost near Ledbury in Herefordshire. Thomas had only eighteen months to two years of writing poetry, producing 130 to 140 poems. Although he is known as a war poet, almost none of his poems are war poems in the conventional sense. They evoke an England and a Britain worth fighting for, but he was deeply depressed about the transformation of the world. He enlisted shortly after reading Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" — Frost always maintained the poem was a joke, aimed at Thomas's habit of agonising over which path to take on their walks together, and was mortified that nobody has ever taken it as a joke. Certainly Edward Thomas did not take it as a joke.
Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. He was 39 years old.
Helen survived him by many decades. After his death she had a nervous breakdown; she had three children and a very difficult time financially. She was working at Bedales School as a kindergarten teacher — which meant free tuition for her children — and it was there she became acquainted with Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who later created the adventure playground on Wandsworth Common. Helen was eventually encouraged by her daughter to write all of her experiences in great detail. The first volume appeared in the late 1920s, and the two volumes were later packaged together with some of her letters as Under Storm's Wing. Parts of it are quite remarkable — steamy, even. It is an extended love story, and it is wonderful.
The Childhood of Edward Thomas — Edward Thomas (published posthumously, 1938)
Under Storm's Wing — Helen Thomas (two volumes of autobiography plus letters)
The 1881 census listed Westminster as being in Middlesex — was Westminster a separate county?
One of the problems with censuses is that they use different definitions of area. I've never seen "City of Westminster" used as a census administrative designation the way "City of London" might be used. Censuses in this period could be inconsistent in how they described the county affiliation of inner London areas.
Where exactly did Arthur Rackham live?
I believe it was on St Ann's Hill, or somewhere around there — but his house was hit by a V1 bomb, so it's gone. He must have lived there as a teenager, approximately contemporaneously with Edward Thomas.
An observation about old maps showing the Falcon Brook and waterfalls along what became Northcote Road:
Yes, upstream of Northcote Road it's called the York Sewer — because the Falcon Brook came out beside the Bishop of York's house on the riverbank, which had certain pockets of land in Wandsworth and Battersea. The houses along Bolingbroke Grove had their estates running right down to the Falcon Brook, which was the dividing line. They widened the stream in places to make ornamental pools — there were boathouses, piers, and it must have been very beautiful. Though it was also, simultaneously, an open sewer. Someone in the congregation wrote to the authorities about the open sewer; she lived on Lavender Hill in Elm House, now the site of Battersea Arts Centre.
What became of Helen after Edward's death?
She carried on living, I think in Patton Road, and took lodgers — young men. She didn't like Edward's mother one bit. Depending on your point of view, you can see that a somewhat scatty poet was not a great financial bet — particularly since ironically he was almost exactly like her own late father: a literary man, very sensitive to words, rather homosocial in the sense of loving the company of men and talking about poetry rather than earning a living. Noble had actually published a left-leaning newspaper in the 1890s in London. And Edward later used his memories — from when he was eight or nine — of unemployed men demonstrating on Wandsworth Common and walking along Bolingbroke Grove and down into Northcote Road, to describe the awfulness of the lower middle class reviling poor, starving working people.
When did Robert Frost encourage Thomas to write poetry, and what is the relationship between "The Road Not Taken" and Thomas's decision to enlist?
Frost's encouragement was around 1912. The Adlestrop journey was made not long after. Thomas only had 18 months to two years of writing poetry, during which he produced 130 to 140 poems. As for "The Road Not Taken" — it is often said to have nudged Thomas towards enlisting. Frost was horrified by this interpretation; he said it was meant as a joke, aimed at Thomas's tendency to agonise over which path to take on their walks together. Nobody has ever taken it as a joke. Certainly Edward Thomas did not.
When was the Falcon Brook covered over beneath Northcote Road?
In the 1860s. For a long time afterwards they couldn't get shops or houses established along it. There were running battles with costermongers — barrow boys — who were being displaced from Lavender Hill and effectively moved to Northcote Road. By creating Northcote Road they shifted the street market out of the way of Lavender Hill, and an echo of that street market survived well into living memory: in the 1950s, Philip used to shop there with his mother, buying potatoes — you were spoilt for choice between whites and King Edwards, and that was it.
How many people had heard of Edward Thomas before tonight?
Perhaps a third of the audience. Now you all know an awful lot about him. Go and read The Childhood of Edward Thomas and Helen's Under Storm's Wing. You will not be disappointed.
I knew we wouldn't get everything in that Philip would have liked to give us, but he has thoroughly whetted our appetites. Thank you for turning out on such a wet and dark night, and please do thank Philip again.
Claude writes:
Here's your formatted HTML file. A few things I've done slightly differently for this one:
The poem — "Adlestrop" is given its own special block with a distinct poem style, which felt right given the whole talk begins with and returns to it. The text is set with preserved line breaks so it reads as a proper poem on the page.
The long quotations from The Childhood of Edward Thomas — these are the heart of the talk, and I've kept them as full block quotes rather than paraphrasing, since the prose is so distinctive and worth reading in full. The passages about Totty Armor, Mabel Looms, the frog-torturing boys, and the gudgeon in the jam jar are all there in Thomas's own words. A reading list at the end — since Philip is so insistent that everyone go and read both autobiographies, it seemed worth giving them their own clearly formatted signpost.
This talk has a particularly lovely shape: it starts with a chance encounter with a railway sign in Gloucestershire, works its way back to the streets around Wandsworth Common, and ends with the love story of Edward and Helen — all threaded through with the most extraordinary childhood writing.
Philip's instinct that everything connects to Wandsworth Common is rather borne out by the Thomas Hardy–Edward Thomas–Ted Hughes lineage alone.