Living In Chelsea After The War

A Memory of Chelsea.

Hi all.
We first moved to Chelsea in 1945 and took up residence at 58, Elm Park Gardens. I first attended Park Walk School then went on to the Cooks Ground School in Old Church Street (later changed to Kingsley School). I did a paper round every morning 7 days a week from Bloomfield's paper shop in Gloucester Road, Kensington, and helped the local milkman from Bunces Dairy in Old Church Street in Chelsea every Saturday morning, then I would queue up outside the Co-op in the Kings Road (World's End) with the children's pram, shopping list and ration book in hand, waiting my turn to move up and purchase the week's groceries with the money I earned from my paper round, which was a pound a week (giving my mother 15 shillings of it), a lot of money in those days. My mother had seven of us to feed in those days and every penny counted.
During the summer holidays I would learn to swim in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, visit the Kensington Musiums, go to Choir Practice at St Andrew's Church in Park Walk every Friday evening, then rush home to listen to 'Dick Barton - Special Agent' which was always on the radio at 6.45 pm Mon To Fri.
There were many film stars living around about where we lived, there was Dennis Price, Constance Cummings, Richard Touber, John Mills, Richard Attenbough (near Sloane Square), Joan Greenwood, and many more.
I often took trips on the 'river buses' and often reached Greenwich at times. Occasionally I was offered a trip helping the removal man with his horse and cart, one trip I took was from Chelsea to Bow, with a pile of furniture stacked high on the cart, with me sitting next to the driver and the horse in front. The only problem was that the cart had steel rims around the wheels, and as one can imagine driving over all those cobbled stones from Chelsea to Bow I couldn't walk for about two days afterwards. On Saturday mornings it was either the Gaumont Cinema on the Kings Road where it cost us sixpence to get in, then we would watch Kit Carson, Don Winslow and many more films, sing the 'Gaumont song' entitled 'We come along on a Saturday morning, greeting everybody with a smile', then we would sometimes go to the Forum Cinema on the Fulham Road. We also went to the Chelsea Palace every Tuesday to see a Famous Star, on one such occasion I won a massive food hamper with the Spotlight, and had to go on stage to receive the gift and kiss Tessie O'Shea I remember, those were the good old days.