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  My father was born in London, many, many miles from Milverton and three years earlier than his current passport indicated. No wonder we had not found the registration of his birth back in 1984 — different name, different county, different date of birth.

  He came from a family of Londoners — the Emersons. The Emersons hailed from Lambeth, a borough that stretched in a long thin line from the Thames to the Surrey hills. The slice of Lambeth wedged between the River Thames and Kennington Park was their particular patch. Today, Lambeth is one of 13 local authorities that make up inner London. It is 7 miles from the northern boundary (the Thames) to its southern boundary and 2½ miles from east to west. With over a quarter of a million residents, it has the highest population density of any London borough.

  Until the middle of the 18th century, the north of the borough was marshland crossed by a few roads raised against floods. The south was dominated by woods and commons with a few villages and settlements, notably at Clapham and Streatham on the old Roman roads to the south coast. Industry was concentrated in the north along the riverside. Lambeth was traditionally famous for glassmaking, pottery and boat building.

  When Westminster Bridge was opened in 1750, it marked the beginning of major development in Lambeth. Two new bridges, Blackfriars and Vauxhall, soon followed. The next catalyst for development was the coming of the railways in the mid-19th century. New major thoroughfares such as Westminster Bridge Road, Kennington Road and Camberwell New Road generated ribbon development of houses and shops. Some of these terraces can still be seen today, despite the area sustaining major damage during World War II.

  On the south bank of the Thames, on the northern-most tip of Lambeth, stands historic Lambeth Palace, official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury since the 15th century. Adjacent is the parish church of St Mary-at-Lambeth. The Church of St Mary, because of its proximity to the London residence of the Primate, has a unique interest among the parish churches of the London area. The church is now the Museum of Garden History. The churchyard contains the tomb of the famous botanist, gardener and plant collector John Tradescant, his equally famous son who lived and worked close by, and Vice Admiral William Bligh, 4th Governor of New South Wales, and his wife.

  It was here, at St Mary’s, Lambeth on 13 June 1881, that Thomas William Emerson, bachelor, son of Thomas Emerson of Tyers Street, married Frances Sarah Rumens, spinster, daughter of Charles Rumens of 32 Brunel Street — my paternal grandparents. At the time of their marriage, my grandfather’s occupation was listed as ‘slater’ as was his father before him.

  Lambeth was not a well-to-do part of London. The 1891 Census, the first Census in Britain to report on how well people are housed, tells us that in Lambeth overcrowding was endemic and very few families’ houses had access to internal plumbing. Whether the young couple lived in rented rooms or owned their own home is not known. But it seems very likely that they were one of the many thousands of working families in the district who rented a few rooms in a larger house.

  By 1905, Thomas and Frances (always known as Fanny) Emerson had moved several times within the Borough, had had thirteen children (of whom seven had survived infancy) and were living at 24 Neville Street, Vauxhall. Neither Neville Street, nor the houses lining it, are there now. It was a short street running parallel to Tyers Street and crossing Tyers Terrace and within easy walking distance of St Peter’s School on what is now the A202 or Kennington Lane.

  Thomas was no longer working as a slater. Looking through past Census records, he is shown as a slater or a slater journeyman, but by the time of my father’s birth in 1905, his occupation is general labourer. In 1937, his death certificate shows his last occupation before retirement as rubber cutter.

  My father was born Leonard Emerson in Vauxhall, in the District of Lambeth, in the County of London on 20 April 1905. He was born at home, the fourteenth child of Thomas and Fanny and one of only eight children to reach adulthood. Len was the last child born to 42-year-old Fanny. My grandfather, Thomas Emerson, registered the birth of his youngest child some six weeks after the birth.

  We have virtually no knowledge of Len’s infancy. The first information we have is from the 1911 Census of England and Wales. It shows that the Emerson family had moved. They now lived at 145 Tyers Street, Vauxhall. There were nine people in the home as some of the older children had left and Thomas’s younger brother George has moved in. Thomas is 52, Fanny 48. Thomas is listed as working as a factory hand.

  Children living at home were Maud, aged 25, working as a labeller in a jam factory; Ernest 22, an office porter; Grace 14, a confectionary hand; Helen 13; Horace 9; and Leonard, my father, 5. The three younger children are at school. Uncle George is listed as being 43 and a druggist warehouseman. Asking cousins about Uncle George, we found that druggist was a polite way of saying he sold ‘patent’ medicines from the back of a cart. They told us he claimed his cough and cold syrups could ward off everything from the common cold to the plague.

  The Census records also tell us they had five rooms at 145 Tyers Street, although this would not include a landing or lobby, a scullery or, presumably, a shared lavatory out the back. With nine Emersons living there, it must have been a tight squeeze.

  Bertram Charles, Thomas and Fanny’s oldest surviving son, is also in the 1911 Census records — he and his wife Edith and their four-year-old son Bertram (known as Bertie) lived nearby in a three-room flat at 40 Heyford Avenue, Kennington. We know that Bertie and Len were good friends and went to school together. Bertie’s father Bertram Charles is listed as being an electrical linesman.

  Len’s mother Fanny was formerly a Rumens. The Rumens were considered by family folklore to be originally Huguenots. If so, they probably fled to England from Europe to escape religious persecution in the 18th century. Fanny’s father, Charlie Rumens, was apprenticed to a baker when in his teens, but then became a glass cutter and later still, a house painter. Fanny’s uncle, John Batten, migrated to Australia in 1859 and ended up in Victoria. However, we have not been able to establish any link between this Batten family and the kindly couple I was to call Aunt and Uncle Batten when I was a child living in Melbourne.

  The only picture I have of my grandfather Thomas was taken in his later years. It is blurred and yellowed, though greatly cherished by me. The photo shows both him and his wife Fanny and was taken in a garden with the two figures set against trees and shrubs.

  Thomas is sitting with his hands crossed on his lap and Fanny stands behind him, face slightly averted. He is smiling directly at the camera but my grandmother is less sure that she wants to be photographed. Grandfather has an almost impish grin on his face, but maybe it was just a trick of the camera. His crossed hands are strong with long elegant fingers. I recognise those hands — they are exactly like my father’s hands.

  It is a very informal shot as both Thomas and Fanny are in their at-home clothes; she in a crossover pinafore, and he in shirtsleeves, no collar and open waistcoat. He looks comfortable and quite happy to be photographed in casual attire. Despite his thinning and receding hair, strong nose and bushy moustache, Thomas looks as though he would have been a handsome man in his youth. As well as the twinkle in his eye, he has a distinct dimple on his chin.

  Thomas lived to the ripe old age of 79, not a bad innings for a man of his times and status. By all accounts, he was a quiet man who lived rather in the shadow of his much more vocal and upwardly mobile wife. He died in November 1937 while living at Brixton Road and is buried at Lambeth Cemetery, Tooting. In 1993 we visited the cemetery, but could not find a headstone.

  Looking at the same photo, Fanny’s face is harder to read. Maybe being caught in such an informal pose with sleeves rolled up and hair in disarray is not how she would have preferred to have been captured for posterity. I have another picture of her which is far more formal and, I suspect, more her style. It is a posed portrait of a substantial woman, taken sometime in her middle years. She is elegantly dressed, her silver hair smoothed back in a
discreet bun. She is standing with one hand hooked through a long rope of pearls, the other holding an embroidered purse. I am told the pearls and purse were sent to her by my father, when he was living in Malaya, and the portrait was taken especially to send to her beloved son to demonstrate how much she valued his gifts. A rather formal smile plays around Fanny’s mouth and rather deep-set eyes.

  Fanny died at the age of 83, in January 1946. She spent her last few years alone at Brixton Road, attended by various daughters and sons who visited regularly. She is also buried in Lambeth Cemetery, now known as Tooting Cemetery. We could not find a headstone for her either.

  I see from the two old photos that I have inherited not the kindest of their collective features as I have Thomas’s strong nose and dimple and Fanny’s rather deep-set eyes.

  Families in those days were large. Len’s family was no exception. There were 14 children including two sets of twins. The eldest, Ernest Thomas, was born ‘early’, that is, seven months after Thomas and Fanny’s marriage. He died in early childhood. Then came Bertram Charles (known as Bert), Maud Elizabeth, Ernest John (Jack), twins George and Harold (who both died before their 1st birthdays), Henry (Nen), Albert Edward (died in childhood), Grace, Helen (Nell, whose un-named twin died at birth), Horace Edward (died at eight months due to bronchial pneumonia resulting from measles), Horace (Lol) and finally Leonard (Len) my father.

  With a spread of 23 years between the births of the first and last children, it is understandable that the older siblings had already left home and started families of their own by the time Len was of school age. Helen, who was 11 years older than Len, was his favourite sister. On his visits ‘home’ from Malaya, he liked to visit Helen who lived in Taunton with her husband Fred Dibble. Daphne, Helen’s daughter, remembers Len’s visits when she was a very young child. I have a delightful photo of Len as a young man holding a very pretty little child, Daphne, when she is about three years old.

  Later in this story, we will come back to the seventh child, Henry, who was always called Nen by the family. He had a very adventurous and interesting life and, although we did not know it for many years, he lived with his family only a few kilometres from us in our early days in Canberra.

  All the cousins I have spoken to were either not born or very small children during the early years of Len’s life, so reliable information has not been easy to come by. I know that when Len was a young child, the family was living in Neville Street and then moved a few streets away to Tyers Street. When the family was living at Tyers Street, Len attended St Peter’s School on nearby Kennington Lane.

  Len left school, like most of his peers, when he had completed primary at age 14. His first business venture was collecting and selling eggs from the family’s hens. Eileen, another cousin, told me that Len used to keep a journal in which he meticulously entered all his sales. After he left school, he went to work for his brother-in-law, Ernest Redding. The Reddings lived in Holland Grove, a street not far from Brixton Road. This is the very same Redding who, some years later, signed the Dunlop Plantations Contract as Len’s Guarantor. We now realise that the other name on the contract was, of course, his older brother Horace, who was closest in age to Len and close in affection.

  What little I do know of those days comes mainly from conversations with and letters from Eileen, the eldest daughter of Maud. Maud was particularly close to her mother. Sometime after Maud’s marriage to Ernest Redding, they moved to the house in Holland Grove close by her parents and Maud would visit them almost daily. Eileen inherited the job of ‘Custodian of the Past’ from her mother Maud. It was Maud who, on her frequent visits to her mother, heard and then passed down to Eileen the family ‘gossip’ of who in the family was doing what and who was not speaking to whom at any given time.

  For many years, Maud lived close by ‘Nanny’, her mother, when the family was living in Brixton Road. At this time Thomas and Fanny and Thomas’s brother George (considered a good-natured rogue by the rest of the family) and the three younger children, Nell, Lol and Len, were all living above an electrical business run jointly by brothers Bert and Nen. The rest of Len’s siblings had married by this time and had homes of their own.

  The two brothers leased the whole of 81 Brixton Road. It was a roomy three-storey semi-detached building. They started the electrical business shortly after Nen’s discharge from the army in 1919. They were joined some time later by their brother Jack, although Nen withdrew when he decided to return to Australia early in 1922. From successive issues of Kelly’s London Post Office Directory, the business of Emerson Brothers, Electricians, continued at that address well into the 1940s.

  When we went looking on our visit to London in 1993, the street had changed dramatically since the Emersons lived and worked there. Many of the old houses, including 81, had been demolished to make way for new, more modern shops. Brixton Road is now part of the A23, a busy inner-city road, cosmopolitan in its population mix. Just up the road from where the Emerson Brothers Electrical shop once stood, past Coldharbour Lane, one of Brixton Road’s pre-war buildings still stands and, under an impressive array of eight terracotta chimney pots, is a huge ancient painted sign for Bovril. I wonder if, on a chilly winter morning, Len would see that sign and dream of a cup of steaming hot Bovril to keep the cold at bay.

  Their shop on Brixton Road was at street level, with living quarters above. One of the jobs the Emerson brothers had was to install wiring for the new electric street lighting that was taking over from the gas lamps being slowly phased out on London streets. They also installed electrical wiring in the more affluent homes in the area. In 1913, London was in full swing upgrading the lighting system. It was noted in the papers of the time that ‘… most of London will flare up every night with centrally hung lamps of 2,000 candle power’. The shop also sold electrical goods and took in batteries to be charged overnight.

  From what I’ve heard Fanny was the focal point of the family, especially in the family’s later years. She was a strong-willed woman who encouraged her children, particularly her youngest, to make the most of themselves. She apparently had a hard side too. When Doris, Len’s first wife, visited her mother-in-law to try to learn something about her absent husband who had left the country straight after their marriage to ‘further his career’, Fanny was less than kind to her. It was, I think, a case of letting Doris know that she thought her son had been ‘tricked’ into an unsuitable marriage. It seems clear that Fanny thought the quietly spoken Doris was not the wife she had hoped for for her youngest son.

  With her strong ideas and determined personality, Fanny would have made a formidable matriarch. Family gossip tells us that Fanny considered she had married below her perceived social status. Through the hard times and the good, she continued to maintain a sense of gentility in the home and in later years hung on to her beliefs, her way of life and her fine bone china while the world changed around her.

  Growing up as the youngest of a large family must have been both reassuring and frustrating for Len. Reassuring because you were always the ‘baby’ of the family and everybody’s pet, and frustrating because no matter what you did your siblings would have done it before you. From what my English cousins have told me, Len could do no wrong in Fanny’s eyes. She encouraged him to make the most of his natural assets — his good looks, quick wit and natural intelligence. He was both metaphorically, and literally, her blue-eyed boy. The stories that he told of the happy times he had growing up with loving parents and close siblings could well be true. Just the circumstances and the setting were very different — from blue collar to upper middle class, he massaged his stories to suit his preferred family setting.

  One of his passions as a young man was cricket. Len played with a group of young cricketing enthusiasts at Kennington Oval. Kennington Oval was not far from Brixton Road and he and his friends founded the MCC. A play on words, the initials stood for Mark Cricket Club, named after the Church of St Mark close by the oval.

  Len was a grea
t favourite with the young ladies who came to watch the games. Pat tells me Doris thought he had the most wonderful deep blue eyes, long elegant legs and a whimsical charm. From a portrait I have, taken when he was in his early twenties, I can well believe it!

  Len would spend a lot of time playing cricket over the summer months and socialising with the other members of the team. Interestingly, one of the members of this close knit group of friends was a young man called Bill Elliot. It was through one of his closest friends at the MCC, Tom Rathbone, that Len met Doris. Doris, the fourth of the Rathbone children, was a few months older than Len and a year older than her brother Tom. Tom introduced his three sisters to his cricketing friends and they became part of a social group that cheered on the players and organised tea and biscuits at the end of the game.

  Doris, the middle of the three Rathbone girls, was quiet and unassuming with soft light brown hair and large gentle eyes. She had a friendly smile and a pleasant, if not remarkable, face. Pat has told me that when Doris met Len all those years ago, she fell madly in love and continued to love him for the rest of her life.

  Doris, together with her sisters and the members of the MCC, would get together after the weekend cricket match to talk and socialise. On long summer evenings there would be plenty of time to chat and dance until it was time to walk the young ladies home before dark. I am sure that the young people had some happy times at the club house on Kennington Oval. Young men and women talking over the game, getting to know one another and probably tasting alcohol for the first time. Doris was madly in love for the first time. Doris and Len were both young and inexperienced in the matters of life. The inevitable happened: Doris became pregnant.