Grandmother's Flat Above The Shops

Claremont Road c1955
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My family's house, just off the Kingston Bypass (now known as the A3) in Tolworth, was damaged as the result of enemy action in September 1940 and my parents and I stayed for a while with my grandmother in Surbiton. Her flat was on the first floor at the far corner above the shops on the left of the photo, just before the Odeon Cinema which lay slightly back from the building line. One of my enduring childhood memories is of kneeling at the window of her sitting room and watching the trolleybuses attempt to turn the very sharp corner from St Mark's Hill into Claremont Road without their two poles leaving the overhead electified wires. The crossover points of these wires (which allowed some trolleys to turn into and out of Victoria Road as well - presumably the main cause of this problem) can be seen clearly in this photo. After a shower of sparks and two wildly bouncing poles, the trolleybus would grind to a halt and hold up anything following behind it; this necessitated the conductor having to pull a long hooked pole from beneath the vehicle in order to lift the trolley poles back on to the overhead system. As a four-year-old - and for a few years afterwards - this was an endless source of free and harmless amusement in the middle of wartime England.

Immediately opposite the flat was 'Peggy Brown's' with the line of deep white blinds over its windows in the summer. I seem to recall they sold delicious cakes and it must have been a cafe or restaurant as well. Very close to it and slightly nearer to the photographer was the small shop belonging to Mr.Warwick, my grandmother's hairdresser. I call still recall the horrible smell of singeing hair as he used a lighted taper to trim the split ends of her long hair - I don't ever remember him taking scissors to it.

Although this photo seems to have been taken some fifteen years afterwards, very little has changed.